Huawei P40 Pro+ review

A great display

Huawei P40 Pro+ has the same screen as the P40 Pro - meaning it is both with high resolution and high refresh rate. We're glad to see Huawei finally jumping on the HRR bandwagon.

The Huawei P40 Pro+ packs a 6.58" OLED screen of 1,200 x 2,640 pixels that make for 441ppi and 19.8:9 aspect ratio. The OLED wraps halfway around all sides of the P40 Pro+, meaning it's even curvier than previous Huawei displays. It supports 90Hz refresh rate, not the fastest in the class, but an improvement that will allow for much smoother picture.

The cutout is large, yes, as it houses the selfie camera, the ToF sensor and the IR flood illuminator, and the ambient light sensor. Its elliptical shape helps lower the impact on the eyes, but the left corner of the display remains largely unusable.

We measured a maximum brightness of 455 nits when adjusting the slider manually, which in line with most of the Samsung OLEDs but is lower than what you could get on a Mate 20 Pro and a P30 Pro. With Auto enabled, though, the P40 Pro+ is lighting up to 760 nits - a great boost for the brightest of summer days.

The minimum brightness we captured on the P40 Pro+ screen was mere 1.6 nits - an excellent one.

Now let's talk color accuracy. There are two Display options - Vivid and Normal, each representing a different color space - DCI-P3 and sRGB respectively. Each of these settings offers further color saturation fine tuning if the default one is not your cup of tea.

The default screen mode is Vivid and at its default saturation state the display has an excellent color accuracy to DCI-P3 with an average deltaE of 3.3 and maximum deviation of 4.9. If you switch to Normal (sRGB) mode, you will get a perfect calibration with an average deltaE of 1.3.

The P40 Pro+ display supports HDR10+ and is recognized by apps as HDR-capable. It has Widevine L3 support though, meaning Netflix and Amazon Prime work fine in SD quality but HBO is a No Go (pun intended).

You can run YouTube on the web browser, of course, and you can enjoy the videos in high-resolution. We will talk about a YouTube app alternative in a bit.

Battery life and charging

The Huawei P40 Pro+ packs a 4,200 mAh Li-Po battery - same as P30 Pro and P40 Pro's. It supports Huawei's 40W SuperCharge and the phone is bundled with the said charger. Quite expectedly it does a splendid job - in 30 minutes it will refill 77% of the P40 Pro's empty battery, while a full charge is achieved in about 70 mins.

Huawei P40 Pro+ supports smart battery charging - if you hook the P40 Pro+ for an overnight charge, it will eventually lower the speed and complete the full charge just before sunrise.

The P40 Pro+ is the first smartphone to support 40W wireless charging - it works only with the Huawei SuperCharge Wireless Charging Stand, the one that's bundled with Huawei's 65W adapter.

We are happy to report the P40 Pro+ charges wirelessly as fast as it does with the wired charger. Its flat battery went from 0% to 55% in 30mins on the Charging Stand and reached a full charge in 80 mins (10 mins more than on the wired charger).

The phone does get a bit hot, but the charger is TUV Rheinland-certified for charging safety. The stand has an integrated fan for cooling, but Huawei has adjusted the stand to go to ultra-silent mode from 21:00 to 07:00 - it will charge the phone slower thus it won't be needing the fan.

The P40 Pro+ also supports 27W reverse wireless charging and you can fast-charge another flagship Huawei on the back of your P40 Pro+ (because, why not!). After activating the reverse charging from the battery options, you can charge your smartwatch or wireless earbuds off the phone.

We've completed our battery tests and the results are quite good and in line with the P40 Pro, which has the same screen, chipset, and battery. The phone can last almost 14 hours on web surfing, or more than 17 hours on playing videos. These battery times are identical on 60Hz and 90Hz refresh rates, which suggests Huawei is switching between the refresh rates dynamically to save power.

The 3G talk time isn't spectacular, and nor is the standby performance - and these led to a bit lower than expected, but still great endurance rating of 95 hours.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating above denotes how long a single battery charge will last you if you use the Huawei P40 Pro+ for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. We've established this usage pattern so that our battery results are comparable across devices in the most common day-to-day tasks. The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in the nitty-gritty. You can check out our complete battery test table, where you can see how all of the smartphones we've tested will compare under your own typical use.

Speaker

The Huawei P40 Pro+ has a single loudspeaker firing down from the bottom, and it posted a 'Good' result for loudness in our seven-track music test. It lacks a low-frequency thump, but the mids and highs are well represented. Our tool allows for comparing the sound output to any other phone we've tested so far.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.