Gadgetory

spending a couple weeks with Huawei's newest flagship has reinforced our first impressions this just might be the most attractive phone of 2017 over that time though we have more to report on what it's like to actually use the phone the mate name carries a reputation for power user performance does this phone live up to that reputation here's our full huawei mate 10 Pro review Huawei has done an excellent job transitioning to a 2x1 aspect ratio display while maintaining a familiar design language not all companies migrated to glass as gracefully no piece is out of place balancing the camera tech and the fingerprint sensor with terrific symmetry in a band that recalls phones like the Nexus 6p in the Nova I really wished the pixel had felt like this combined with a contrast II and saturated AMOLED screen there's a lot of eye candy for the consumer that display by the way is respectably readable in all but direct sunlight and the resolution is perfectly fine for daily operation 2160 by 1080 is similar to the lower resolution mode samsung employs on galaxies out of the box though I personally prefer disabling the super juicy saturated modes from design to hardware this phone represents a few controversial decisions the shift to a glass back does not come with wireless charging the pro omits a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack which is a real bummer but I'm very happy to see the inclusion of an IR blaster and for a pro device I do appreciate dual SIM card support but would have liked the ability to add more storage with a memory card in daily operation it's difficult to quantify how these hardware choices have affected my use the most obvious is hunting for an underwhelming adapter for my favorite headphones that's annoying it's still a bit too early to tell if the storage will eventually bother me as I generally prefer phones with SD card support but 128 gigabytes of built-in space takes a while to fill up I never did max out the p10 plus even while shooting a lot of 4k video happily we can point to a killer hardware combo of chipset and RAM the Karen 970 is a fantastic brain for this beast it's rare to find a phone this heavily skinned which performs and multitasks is fluidly we all hope for snappy and responsive this phone delivers what's interesting is that the raw power on tap doesn't seem to be substantially different from the cure in 960 it replaces which shouldn't be concerning as the 960 was months ahead of Qualcomm in delivering snapdragon 835 level power a subtle bump to be sure but the die shrink delivers a noticeable improvement to battery life over the mate nine we get the benefit of a big battery capacity and more efficient internals we lack wireless charging but still benefit greatly from Huawei super charger this is one of the fastest phones to top off we've ever reviewed no small feat considering the larger battery capacity the pro easily lasted me the day with plenty of juice to spare and a short stint on a charger delivers a lot of additional runtime we're fairly far removed from stock Android though Huawei is bridging the improvements found in Oreo with their own blend of custom controls I can't say I'm a huge fan of things like knuckle actions but pulling the notification shade from the fingerprint sensor is a fan favorite and the settings menu is a little better organized than on previous Huawei's Huawei has publicly committed to two years of software support with at least one major operating system update considering how well our mate 9 is aged we have some confidence that the May 10 will be well cared for over the average length of time someone might keep their phone one of the bigger talking points for the mate the inclusion of a neural processing unit NPU a custom piece of hardware designed to offload certain tasks on the phone without having to push information up to a cloud server it's responsible for context-aware smart tips like when to activate the blue light filter allocating phone resources to commonly used apps and handling noise reduction when taking calls which sounded just fine to my ears a more visible application on device language translation which works speedy quick with microsoft's translator app there's a lot of potential here which we'll have to revisit as Huawei is promising NPU support for Google's a our core augmented reality and Google's own neural network ap is in addition to eventually supporting Google Translate sometime next year while the karin 970 likely won't become a top priority for developers to code for specifically Huawei does seem to be branching their hardware out to support more accessible standards that NPU also plays a part in how the camera functions as image recognition is baked directly into the photography experience we retained the Leica designed dual sensors 12 and 20 megapixel sensors respectively color and monochrome and when shooting JPEGs data from both are merged for a wonderful contrast II colorful and vibrant photography aesthetic this is a photographic flavor we don't often see from a phone it's difficult to say what the npu might be doing to image processing but the subject acquisition and recognition is near-instant low-light performance is also excellent but some folks might be turned off by grainier output Leica engineers they're not afraid of some noise and there's an obvious effort in low-light shots to preserve image detail over making the smoothest possible plasticky photo they consider this a feature not a bug if you like a little texture in your shots you'll really enjoy what this camera can do when shooting auto Huawei also continues to deliver my favorite version of a portrait mode though this is a little confusing to discuss on the May 10 there's a wide aperture mode which produces a user controlled background blur and the Huawei version of portrait mode adds a beauty filter to the rear camera the mates wide aperture mode over Samsung and Apple's portrait mode using the main camera sensors full field of view it doesn't crop in as severely because it's a larger sensor than a zoom sensor there aren't any restrictions to using this effect at night it's a much closer competitor in that respect to the pixels portrait mode but with better controls on the back end to dial in the amount of blur you want Huawei's video is nicely improved over the mate 9 and P 10 with a subtle but noticeable upgrade to image stabilization it's awesome worth repeating that Huawei was well ahead of the curve for h.265 video compression which means high quality 4k videos are much closer in size to many other phones high quality 1080p videos this was painful for some folks last year but now that Apple is using HEV C compression Google seems much more interested in supporting this codec so kudos to Apple Google photos and YouTube work well and folks who want to edit this codec is finding more support by the day even power directors Android app supports it without having to jump through any hoops I think we can finally stop being afraid of h.265 we still should levy a criticism at the complexity of this camera app though Huawei and LG battling it out for the most complete collection of photo controls on a phone that makes the learning curve on the mate steeper muscle memorizing where all of these settings live but this is one of the most camera-like apps we've ever used and the auto mode should be pleasing enough to most people switching to audio Huawei speakers are welcome in a field opposite so many mono audio solutions the earpiece and bottom speaker worked well together to flesh out audio it's not a true balanced stereo solution sounding a bit more like an HTC but it easily outperforms LG and Samsung the head phone conversation is a bit more confusing though no built-in 3.5 millimeter jack so a dongle is in the Box alongside a pair of USB C headphones the dongle works like moto and HTC's dongles and Huawei is cross compatible with those solutions unfortunately output from this setup is fairly disappointing and this dongle will not work on other USB C or Thunderbolt ports the included earbuds do have their own DAC though and these show up is a proper USB audio device on my laptop and on other phones I'm not the biggest fan of this ear pod style design I wish it sealed the ear better to block noise but happily they do a much better job of universally supporting other computers unlike Apple's lightning connector ear pods so let's wrap this up where's that leave us with the huawei mate 10 Pro I like this phone I like it a lot the mate 9 was a surprise becoming one of my favourite phones of last year and genuinely one of the few phones I regularly used almost every day since its release the May 10 Pro hasn't surprised me as much since my expectations this year were higher but it has satisfied what I care about in a mobile device it's a big powerful phone with great cameras and terrific battery life just now in a prettier if maybe less durable shell what might make some people a little nervous is how this device is being sold on future updates it's being sold on its potential the addition of new services AR core and broader support for neural processing that makes part of our discussion incomplete and how we might recommend this phone as a few pieces start to become longer-term conversations plus 799 euro is no small chunk of change we're still waiting to see pricing and availability info on this phone arriving in the United States all in all this is personally one of my top five favorite phones of 2017 but there are a few gaps people will need to consider for their own use as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more reviews like these and help us out with a share on your favorite social networks for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos bag now some gadget guy on Twitter and Instagram and I will catch you all on the next review