Huawei is slowly but surely becoming a household name here in Pakistan and it will get even more popular if it continues making phones like the Mate 10 Pro.
Huawei Mate 10 Pro key features:
- Body: Dual glass body with metal frame, curved Corning Gorilla Glass, IP67 rating for dust and water resistance
- Screen: 6″ AMOLED screen of 1080p resolution (402ppi); HDR10 support
- Chipset: 10nm Kirin 970 chipset, octa-core processor (Cortex-A73 2.4GHz + A53 1.8GHz), Mali-G72 MP12 GPU
- Memory: 4/6GB RAM, 64/128GB storage
- OS: Android 8.0 Oreo with EMUI 8.0;
- Camera: 12MP color + 20MP monochrome, phase-detection and laser-assisted autofocus, 4K video capture, dual-tone LED flash, Leica branding
- Camera features: F/1.6 lens, OIS, Hybrid Zoom, Variable aperture mode and Portrait mode
- Front Cam: 8MP, f/2.0 lens, Portrait mode
- Battery: 4,000mAh; supports Fast charging
- Security: Rear-mounted fingerprint sensor
- Connectivity: LTE Cat.18, Dual-LTE SIM, IR blaster, Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2 + LE, NFC, USB Type-C
Design:
The Mate 10 Pro is a far cry from the aluminum phones that almost feel like bricks. Instead, it feels like a piece of jewelry, with a large beautiful screen and subtle design choices like the light-coloured strip along the two cameras of the phone and weighs 178 grams with dimensions of 154.2 x 74.5 x 7.9 mm.
The Huawei Mate 10 is more than just a pretty handheld because it also features water and dust resistance (IP 67).
The phone has a volume rocker and power button on the right, single speaker grille on the bottom (the earpiece speaker provides the second speaker for stereo sound), a USB Type-C port, and a pair of pinhole mics and an IR blaster on the top, Dual-SIM card tray on the left.
Display:
The Mate 10 Pro’s body may be compact but the screen measures 6-inches AMOLED with an 18:9 aspect ratio. It’s an OLED panel with a 2,160 x 1,080-pixel resolution and 402 PPI (Pixels per inch) density.
Hardware:
The Mate 10 Pro equipped with 10nm Kirin 970 chipset, octa-core processor (Cortex-A73 2.4GHz + A53 1.8GHz), Mali-G72 MP12 GPU, 4GB or 6GB of RAM, 64GB or 128GB of storage and battery of 4000 mAh (allows to recharge other devices).
Kirin 970 Chipset:
The Kirin 970 chip is manufactured using a high-end 10nm process by Huawei’s in-house HiSilicon division and promises faster performance and great battery-efficiency.
The highlight of the new Kirin 970 isn’t the faster CPU or more powerful GPU, but the brand-new Neural-Network Processor Unit (NPU), which provides hardware acceleration to machine learning tasks. These tasks include image recognition, voice recognition, and natural language processing.
Huawei has already trained the chip by showing it millions of images, voice samples, and text, so now it’s able to recognize new images, voice and data much faster.
Huawei likes to call the whole process artificial intelligence, it does a lot more than what Apple does with their machine learning chip embedded in the latest A11 Bionic chip.
The new Kirin 970 chipset offers an octa-core processor that should be up to 50% more power efficient than the Kirin 960. The CPU still packs the same 4×2.4 GHz Cortex-A73 & 4×1.8 GHz Cortex-A53 cores, but the two clusters can now work simultaneously to deliver 25% faster multi-threaded performance.
The task management niche:
The gadget is also up to date on Android, featuring Android 8.1 (Oreo, skinned with EMUI), unlike Samsung whose latest phone is already four versions behind. The software experience leaves a little more to be desired. The phone tells you when an app is taking more battery, which is great, but you cannot remove that notification from the drop-down menu, meaning that it will stay there until you close the app. You may pause your music till the message disappears. Speaking of notifications, you cannot expand them in the lock screen, a feature that stock Android already has. The beauty of this is that you can change whatever you want on Android. It even gives you the freedom to change anything from your lock screen to your keyboard. It’s a blot that these simple convenience features aren’t available right out of the box.
Equipped with 6 GB of RAM, the Huawei Mate 10 Pro is a VERY fast phone with the capability to handle all tasks like gaming or multitasking very well. Phone calls and reception is also clear, with no distortion at all.
Pocket-Computer:
The Huawei Mate 10 Pro becomes your computer, just with one cable that connects its USB-C port to an HDMI port and plugs into a monitor. This feature is like the Windows Continuum feature, but it feels much smoother. You don’t feel locked out of features, unlike Windows Continuum. The only downside is that the cable does not come inside the box. However, it can be picked up at any cell phone store.
Camera:
The Mate is equipped with two amazing sensors, each with a Leica Summilux-H lens with a maximum aperture of f/1.6 and an effective focal length of 27mm with optical image stabilization. From dual-lens one is a monochrome (black and white) and the other one is a wide angle. The monochrome sensor is used for better colour correction and lowlight footage. The high-resolution setup allows for what Huawei calls a 2x lossless zoom, and PDAF combined with laser and depth sensors enables fast and precise autofocus. The Mate 10 Pro is capable of recording 4K video at 30 fps and the front camera captures images at an 8MP resolution.
The phone has the best low light photography and videography from all the phones on the market
Artificial Intelligence:
Huawei has also introduced a new processing engine for the Mate 10 series, the Kirin 970. This should allow faster, more complex algorithms to be applied. It also enables the camera to recognise ‘2005’ objects per minute (food, animals, beach, snow etc), which is helpful for ensuring that the correct camera settings, processing parameters and adjust the colour profile accordingly. Focusing is achieved through laser, depth, contrast and phase detection.
AI and neural networking are applied to improve the quality of the fake bokeh mode, and object recognition for automatic scene selection also relies on some AI magic. Finally, motion detection is being used to reduce motion blur in low light conditions.
The magic wand:
Smart One of my personal features of the phone is the IR blaster, allowing you to use the device as a universal remote. You can control anything from TVs to ACs to sound systems right from your phone.
Conclusion:
The phone has an amazing battery, excelling speeds and great cameras. Huawei Mate 10 Pro is tailor-made for those who want a phone that’s not just another Samsung but can do everything. But here’s the thing, the Samsung S8+ offers great speed, long-lasting battery life, equally as good cameras, a better screen and comes around the same price of $800, or even less at some places. You cannot go wrong with either of them, you just need to look around to make the correct choice.
Huawei has not only been competitive at creating products but equally aggressive at its own branding (through sponsoring cricket fixtures and fashion galas) and building a network of sales and service agents.
