Overnight Huawei launched their new smartphones, the Mate 40, Mate 40 Pro and the Mate 40 Pro+. For those with far too much money there is also the Porsche Design Mate 40 RS. The new Huawei flagship devices bring their new chipset, improved cameras and some amazingly fast wireless charging.
Gone is the notch that was extremely prominent on the previous Mate models, replaced with a punch hole display that everyone is doing this year. The punch hole is oval on the Pro and the two Pro models as they have two selfie cameras.
The display is once again a curved AMOLED display (Flex OLED) with the Mate 40’s a 6.5-inch 1080P display while the Pro models arrive with a slightly larger, more curved display at 6.76-inches and a 2K resolution. The refresh rate of all three is just 90Hz to save on battery life and all have an in-display fingerprint sensor.
The Cameras
Huawei has excelled with cameras for a long time and once again they have produced the subjectively best smartphone camera on the market. Using a circular camera module Huawei has packed in the high end hardware. That high end hardware has already topped DxOMark ratings at 136 and although we find many of their results strange, it shows that Huawei have once again produced an all around great camera.
The Mate 40 Pro has a 50MP main lens, 20MP ultrawide lens, a 12MP telephoto lens and a 125mm periscopic lens which allows for 5x optical zoom.
The Pro+ is a step up, housing the same 50MP main lens and 20MP ultrawide lens but it’s 12MP telephoto lens is capable of 3x zoom and its 8MP periscopic lens supports 10x optical zoom. there is also a ToF sensor for depth sensing.
The Pro models also arrive with dual front-facing cameras — a 13MP camera lens combined with a 3D depth sensing lens which supports motion gestures and face unlock. The standard Mate 40 arrives with a single 13MP selfie camera.
Huawei have also included their new 5nm chipset, the Kirin 9000. It has a built in 5G modem and carries a claim from Huawei that it is the most powerful 5G chipset in the world.
Related, the battery is 4,200mAh in the Mate 40 with support for 40W wired fast charging while the Mate 40 Pro and Pro+ have a larger battery at 4,400mAh and support 66W wired SuperCharge and a whopping 50W wireless SuperCharge — only through Huawei’s own wireless charger no doubt.
Other specs include NFC, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, stereo speakers, dual SIM support and headphone jack.
We are not sure which channels Huawei will bring this into Australia but we do expect it to arrive at some stage — fingers crossed a change of US government will allow Huawei to go back to using Google services on their devices and be able to be sold almost anywhere. Pricing will most likely be similar to last year — for a premium flagship, expect to pay premium prices.
It may not have originally GMS but it is easy to install them. That’s the beauty of Android.
Yes you can have Google Play on this phone
no google services make this is expensive toy which can make calls and browse web.
Anyone considering buying any Huawei phone should ask themselves first if they could live without Google Services. If the answer is no, then Huawei needs to be scratched from their shopping list.
Nice to see the headphone jack coming back on flagahip phones