Huawei’s latest flagship phones are here… and by here I mean Europe. THe Huawei Mate 10 launches in Europe this month for €699, while the Mate 10 Pro is coming in November for €799. The company says US pricing and availability will be announced later.
Both models feature slim bezels, but they have different display resolutions and aspect ratios and the Pro model has a few bonus features including additional memory and storage and a waterproof design.
The Mate 10 features a 5.9 inch, 2560 x 1440 pixel LCD display, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage plus a microSD card slot. There’s a fingerprint sensor on the front of the phone, located on the relatively small bezel below the display.
The phone has dual rear cameras, with a 12MP color camera and a 20MP monochrome camera and support for optical image stabilization. There’s also an 8MP front-facing camera.
Huawei’s new flagship phone features a 4,000 mAh battery and support for fast charging.
The Mate 10 Pro, meanwhile, is a taller, narrow phone with a 6 inch, 2160 x 1080 pixel OLED display. It has a fingerprint sensor on the back rather than the front, and the phone comes with 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and an SD card slot.
Most of the other specs are the same as those for the Mate 10… but the Pro model features an IP67 water resistance rating.
One feature this model doesn’t have? A 3.5mm headphone jack. But the Mate 10 non-pro does have one.
Huawei will also offer a premium model called the Porsche Design Huawei Mate 10. It’s coming in November for €1395, and aside from some fancy design elements, this high-end model will have 6GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
As expected, the phones are powered by Huawei’s new Kirin 970 chip, which is an octa-core processor with 12-core graphics, support for some fancy camera features, and LTE Cat 18 support for mobile data speeds up to 1.2 Gbps.
The processor also has a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that can be used for computer vision and other artificial intelligence applications.
Huwei partnered with Leica to design the dual cameras used in the phone, and says the camera system includes support for AI-powered bokeh-style depth effects, an “AI-powered digital zoom,” and “real-time scene and object recognition which automatically chooses camera settings based on the object and scene.”
I guess we know what that NPU is for now. It can also be leveraged for third-party apps, starting with a version of Microsoft Translate that offers offline language translation.
The phones support 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.2, and NFC and feature USB Type-C ports with DisplayPort 1.2 functionality that lets you connect the phone to an external display for a a desktop-like experience using what Huawei calls “easy projection.” It’s basically Huawei’s answer to what Samsung is doing with its DeX docking accessory for Galaxy smartphones.
The regular Mate 10’s sharper 16:9 screen makes for an unusually proportioned device, albeit one that’ll probably work well for YouTube and other casual video watching — it feels very wide in the hand, but the combination of a huge, standard aspect ratio screen with slim bezels lends a distinctive heft.
Honestly I like the design of the Mate 10 over the Pro.
It has slightly more bezels, but uses them wisely for the fingerprint reader.
And sticking to the superior 16:9 aspect ratio is a better choice rather than the weird 18:9 of the Pro.
Not to mention the 3.5mm aux port for headphones.
…It’s a bummer that the Pro model gets the IP67 ingress protection and OLED display.
However the worst part about both phones is that they both lack Bluetooth 5.0, and they’re both too large/oversized. They should’ve stuck with a 5.7 inch display for the Mate 10, while the Pro is okay width-wise it is excessively tall/long.
Last thing I want to point out are the colours. Not really a fan of the faded Black, Gold and Pink choices. However, that Copper colour and that Midnight Blue are neat, really digging those choices. I too wonder how they stack up against the LG V30, I don’t think they size up favourably but will hold judgement until the handsets are out in the wild.
Damn, looks like v30 is the only choice left for me since the pro doesn’t have3.5mm