Huawei Mate 10 Pro Preview – The giant has slimmed down
According to Huawei, users of Mate phones want a long battery life, top performance, a top camera and a large screen in a relatively small housing. We would almost say: ‘who wouldn’t?’ Well, except for that big screen maybe. That was something that set the Mate series apart, but you really had a large smartphone in your pocket. This was mainly because the device with a 16:9 screen ratio was quite wide.
2017 is the year of smartphones with a longer screen and smaller bezels, which means that many devices are relatively compact, or screens relatively large if you like. The result may be that there is less difference between the ‘large’ and the ‘particularly large’ smartphones. The difference in screen size between the Huawei P10 Plus and the Mate 9 is 0.4 inches. The Mate 10 Pro is only marginally larger than the P10 Plus and still has a 0.5 inch larger screen, although the screen area has increased less than the 0.5 inch extra due to the 18:9 screen ratio.
We were in London for the presentation of the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, where we could hold the device for a while before the release. It was noticed that the device is a lot nicer in the hand than the Mate 9 and that is due to its slimmer housing. Of course it’s still reaching if you need to do something at the top of the screen, as is to be expected with this 6-inch screen, but personally we could get by with this phone, where we really think the Mate 9 is too huge.
| Device | Mate 10 Pro | Degree 9 | LG V30 |
| Height | 154.2mm | 156.9mm | 151.7mm |
| Width | 74.5mm | 78.9mm | 75.4mm |
| Thickness | 7.9mm | 7.9mm | 7.3mm |
| Weight | 178g | 190g | 158g |
| Relative screen size | 80.9% | 77.5% | 81.2% |
Based on our personal experience, the Mate 10 Pro’s size could make it interesting for a slightly larger audience than the Mate 9, at least in this respect. If you’re not a fan of huge phones and never thought the advantage of a larger screen outweighed it, devices with a 6″ screen have nevertheless become an option. The housing of the LG V30, for example, is still a bit smaller, despite the similar screen size.
The back of the Mate 10 Pro is made of glass and you can easily see fingerprints on it. At the height of the double camera, a stripe runs across the device that reflects the light slightly differently than the rest of the back. That is a subtle and original detail that we can appreciate. The fingerprint scanner is in a logical place and seems to work well and quickly at first glance. The back is rounded towards the sides, which contributes to the nice handfeel of the device.
At the front, it is noticeable that the screen is not or hardly rounded, where, for example, a Galaxy S8 has a curved screen. On the one hand, that looks a bit less futuristic, but many will also like it, for example because you accidentally touch the screen from the side less often. We find the high-contrast OLED screen between the fairly small bezels. That screen is different from the likes of the Mate 9 and P10 series, and our first impression is positive. It has support for HDR and a color gamut of 112 percent of the NTSC standard. The resolution is 2160×1080 pixels, bringing the pixel density to 402ppi. It’s not a hugely high resolution, although it will be enough for most people, but the battery life will benefit.
The battery life is probably fine, since the device has a battery capacity of no less than 4,000mAh. In comparison, the LG V30 has an equally large screen with a higher resolution and a battery of only 3,300mAh.
There is room for two SIM cards in the SIM card drawer and they can both talk to 4G networks. That is worth mentioning, because it often happens that only the SIM card in the first slot has access to 4G. This only applies to the version that you buy separately. The copies that you buy with a mobile subscription, in principle, only have room for one SIM card.
The Mate 10 Pro is waterproof to the ip67 standard, meaning it’s dustproof and ‘submersible’. This means that it survives at a depth of one meter for thirty minutes.
neural processing unit
Huawei’s own Kirin 970-soc is in the Mate 10 Pro. The CPU on it is an octa-core processor. It has four Cortex A73 cores running at a maximum of 2.36GHz, and four energy-efficient A53 cores running at 1.8GHz. The special thing about the soc according to Huawei is the neural processing unit . This separate processor is exclusively concerned with the processing of artificial intelligence processes.
Although we cannot of course test it during a hands-on session, in theory this can benefit the battery life and, according to Huawei, that is the most important function of this npu. The processor does not have to deal with these tasks and the npu is specially designed for it. According to Huawei, these tasks mainly include image recognition, energy-efficient augmented reality and accurate language understanding.
The specifications of the Mate 10 Pro are also on the high side, since there is no less than 128GB of storage memory and 6GB of RAM in the device as standard. During the event in London we were able to play with the device for a while. In doing so, it could hold many apps in memory and felt very fast.
Dual camera
As befits a high-end smartphone in 2017, the focus is also very much on the camera. It is a dual camera with a twelve-megapixel color sensor and a twenty-megapixel monochrome sensor. The primary camera has a fairly wide aperture of f/1.6, which helps when shooting in moderate lighting conditions. There were some dark corners at the event, where we took refuge to take some pictures. These certainly did not disappoint at first glance.
It was noticed that photos of neon letters in the dark room turned out a lot better, without lens flare, than with the iPhone 7 Plus someone happened to have with them. Of course that does not say everything, because to really pass judgment on it we have to compare many more situations, but it is a good first impression. Below you can see two other photos that we took with the device at the event and that we were able to transfer. If we go pixel peeping, we do see a somewhat aggressive noise reduction in the photo with the ballerina, resulting in a loss of detail in, for example, the girl’s face. However, the colors are quite accurate in both shots and the camera holds its own quite well in our opinion, although we don’t expect it to be the best smartphone camera of the year.
The camera is equipped with hybrid autofocus, which works with contrast detection, phase detection and laser autofocus. There’s also a ‘2x’ zoom button, which Huwei says is lossless zoom. We will find out in the review, but it should work because the second sensor has twenty megapixels, so that these extra pixels can be used for zooming in, resulting in a twelve-megapixel photo. We noticed that when zooming, a lot of noise was created in the moderate lighting conditions in which we found ourselves at times.
Finally
The Huawei Mate 10 Pro costs 800 euros and that is still somewhat modest compared to most competitors. For example, the Pixel XL with 128GB costs no less than 1049 euros and the LG V30 will also be more expensive, while the standard version ‘only’ has 64GB of storage. If you are satisfied with that amount of storage memory, the Samsung Galaxy S8+ might be an interesting alternative, because it has become a bit cheaper in the meantime. The Mate 10 Pro does have a few drawbacks compared to other top devices. For example, it has no stereo speakers and no 3.5mm output and it is still on bluetooth version 4.2. In most other areas, however, the Mate 10 Pro is a promising smartphone in our opinion, which we will hopefully soon be able to put next to some other top devices to see how it holds up.