Huawei used to produce some of the best Android smartphones around. But then, in 2019, a U.S. trade ban crippled the company’s ability to stay competitive globally, primarily because the company could not ship even the most basic Google services, such as Play Store or Maps, with its Android phones.
This, sadly, is the story of Huawei’s new flagship, the Huawei Mate 40 Pro. The phone looks good, it’s very powerful, and it has the specs to send most flagships home crying. But it doesn’t run Google apps, and it can’t even access the best marketplace for Android apps, the Google Play Store. Yes, the company’s trying to alleviate that with its own Huawei App Gallery, but it’s just not the same.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, we can talk about the Mate 40 Pro and its bigger brother, the Mate 40 Pro+, both of which seem like great phones (again, if you disregard the Google issue).
Both phones have Huawei’s new Kirin 9000 5G chip, a 13-megapixel selfie camera coupled with a 3D depth-sending camera, a 6.76-inch, 90Hz OLED display, 256GB of storage, and a 4,400mAh battery.
Huawei Mate 40 Pro+ ups the ante with two additional rear cameras, for a total of 5.
Image: Huawei
The main differences are the RAM — 8GB vs 12GB — and the cameras. The Mate 40 Pro has a powerful triple rear camera with a 50-megapixel main sensor, a 20-megapixel ultra-wide sensor, and a 12-megapixel telephoto camera that goes up to 3x optical zoom, 10x hybrid zoom, and 50x digital zoom. The Mate 40 Pro+ has an additional 8-megapixel SuperZoom camera that can do 10x optical zoom, allowing the phone to go up to 20x hybrid zoom and 50x digital zoom. The Pro+ variant also has a 3D depth-sensing camera on the back.
Vloggers will love this.
Image: huawei
The phones also boast a number of unique features, such as advanced smart gestures allowing for hands-free control of the phone, or the ability to wake the phone up just by looking a it. A super-cool feature is a case that comes with a ring light for those perfect selfies, with the ring light being charged by the phone itself.
Despite their technical prowess, the new Huawei flagships will have a hard time capturing the hearts of users outside of China. Those users are very much used to Google apps, as well as the massive variety of apps available on the App Store, and without those, the powerful specs won’t mean very much.
There’s more bad news. The Huawei Mate 40 Pro costs £1,099.99 ($1,440), which is, frankly, a crazy price given most flagship Androids and the most powerful new iPhone are cheaper. The phone will be available for pre-order on Nov. 3 in the UK, and will arrive to stores on Nov. 13.
There’s no word on the Plus+ price but we’ll update this post when we get it.