Gadgetory

this is the huawei mate n pro now if you've been on YouTube much in the past few months you've probably seen this phone before or maybe you read some suspicious user reviews but despite always best efforts nobody in the US has been able to buy this phone until just this month when it went on sale unlocked in a handful of places like Amazon or Best Buy now there's a whole backstory about while we trying to break into the US market with this particular phone and how it's been completely unable to get any carrier support despite coming awfully close now that might be due to some factors that are outside of Wally's control such as a distrust of the company by the US government but it got me wondering is the main 10 profile anyone should buy even if Huawei had been able to get it on AT&T or Verizon or any other US carrier would anyone have bought it anyways in terms of hardware the 799 dollar may 10 Pro has almost everything you'd expect from a flagship phone in late 2017 or early 2018 it has a metal and glass body with great build quality and tight tolerances it's water-resistant it has a tall aspect ratio screen minimal bezels it has stereo speakers and of course a dual rear camera system inside of the phone is while weighs own top-of-the-line processor six gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of storage there's a huge 4000 milliamp hour battery that can keep it going all day and then some it even has an IR blaster so you can use it to control your TV or other electronics and like many other high-end phones it doesn't have a headphone jack but while we does provide both these earPod knockoff headphones and a USB c2 3.5 millimeter adapter in the box it also doesn't have wireless charging despite the fact that it has a glass back but those are fairly minor complaints if there's a hardware feature you want the me 10 pro probably has it and for the most part the hardware works really well maintain pros as fast as any recent Android flagship the hardware is nice to hold and like I said before it has terrific battery life it doesn't have any obvious annoyance it's like a poorly placed fingerprint sensor or extra button for voice assistant you'll never use or a notch that covers up part of the top of the screen the 6-inch display is a lower-resolution many of its peers at only 1080p but I haven't really had an issue with that it's OLED so as deep blacks and vibrant colors and as excellent viewing angles and it gets bright enough outdoors for sunny days I really like to meet 10 Pro speakers which automatically switch from mono to stereo when you turn the phone from portrait to landscape and while I wouldn't say that the like of branded rear cameras as good as say like a pixel 2 or an iPhone 10 it's certainly a capable shooter with fast focus and performance good detail and pleasing if maybe a little bit saturated colors the app has a ton of features and options including manual controls various portrait and fake blurring modes and automatic scene functions that attempt to optimize the camera for whatever your subject happens to be my favorite mode is a monochrome option which only uses data from one of the main 10 prosense errs produce some of the nicest black-and-white images you can get from a smartphone but as good as this hardware is Huawei software never lives up to the hardware's potential now the may 10 Pro does run Android 8.0 Oreo but it has Huawei's emui interface on top of it and this is about as far from a clean version of android as you can get the best way I can describe it is it's a poorly made knockoff of iOS Huawei has customized almost everything about Android and often it's not in a good way for example you can't expand notifications in the lockscreen like you can do with every other Android phone so deleting an email or marking it to do complete can't be done without unlocking the phone the settings menu and the share sheet have been lifted right out of iOS and most of the apps for sharing are hidden by default for some inexplicable reason sure you can change some of those things by downloading a different launch or messaging app or whatever but you can't change things like the quick settings menu that doesn't match the rest of the notification shade or that awful share sheet on top of that there's frustrating bugs even when I did download another launcher and attempted to use that the make 10 would frequently reset the default to Huawei zone launcher this just isn't the kind of software experience I expect on an $800 phone especially when there are already so many better options available it's bad enough for me to say that nobody should buy the may 10 Pro especially not at this price you can get all of the hardware performance with none of the software headaches from any number of other Android phones available unlocked or through carriers then I think about what would have happened had Huawei been able to launch this phone with AT&T and how worse everything would have been with a carrier's bloatware loaded on top of it it just makes me feel like this wouldn't have made much of a difference for huawei it's hard to see anyone buying this phone as it is right now carrier support or not I think that Huawei has done a lot right with the main 10 pros hardware and if it wasn't so expensive I could perhaps excuse some of its software issues but this is a premium priced phone and you should get a premium experience with it which unfortunately the mate 10 Pro doesn't provide how it's been completely unable to get any carrier support despite coming awfully close trying to do work here in Eli [Laughter]