A month with the Huawei Mate 40 Pro

Display curves, refresh rate

We'll first talk about the two elephants in the room (so many of those when it comes to the Mate 40 Pro). Yes, this is one of the most curved screens on any smartphone ever. But no, you will never have any issues with accidental touches. Seriously, we don't mean "this is a problem, but not a huge one". We had zero such issues in our month with the phone. Zero. Someone should probably tell Samsung (and people who have only used Samsung phones with curved screens) that this is, in fact, possible, and doesn't break the laws of physics or anything. All we can say here is kudos to Huawei for figuring out the perfect hardware/software blend to make this 100% a non-issue.

And yet. If somehow you find yourself having a different experience, you can "hide edges" for specific apps - this will prevent them from drawing over the edges of the screen. If you set this up, for the apps that have "hidden edges", there simply won't be any UI elements there to accidentally touch.

Turning off edges

The next elephant has to do with refresh rate, and specifically that it's "just" 90 Hz here, and not 120 Hz like in many competing flagship devices. And this is a case of "numbers definitely don't tell the whole story", fortunately or not. Here's the thing. The Mate 40 Pro's 90 Hz is on par, smoothness-wise, with the Oppo Find X2 Pro's 120 Hz (and we'd wager by extension the OnePlus 8 Pro's 120 Hz, but this reviewer hasn't used that phone so take that with a pinch of salt). The Mate 40 Pro's 90 Hz is also smoother in real life than Samsung's 120 Hz - tested on both the S20 Ultra and the Note20 Ultra, but both of those were Exynos powered, so make of that what you wish.

Resolution and refresh rate settings

If you like high refresh rate screens for the perception of smoothness they give out in normal use, you will have absolutely no problem with the Huawei Mate 40 Pro. If, on the other hand, you're into HRR because of HRR gaming, then obviously a 90 Hz screen will never be able to let you play at more than 90 Hz, so there's that to keep in mind.

Display quality

Now that we got all that out of the way, let's also mention that the display on the Mate 40 Pro is stunning. It may have a weird resolution and aspect ratio (in that neither is generally used in the mobile world), but the quality is exactly where it should be for a phone this premium. It's easy to view even on the sunniest of days outside, and it gets dim enough at night so that it doesn't sear your retinas when you want to read something in pitch darkness.

Color mode and temperature settings

As with all recent smartphones, you can adjust the color temperature to your liking, and we liked that there are just two options - Normal and Vivid. Simple. The first one gives you more accurate colors, the second pumps up the saturation if that's what you're after. We like Vivid, so we chose it, but went with the Warm color preset, because both Default and Cool have laughably blueish white points. If the presets somehow don't do the job for you, there's an entire color wheel to play with.

Display features

Auto brightness has been iffy on multiple occasions, a lot of times it doesn't want to react quickly enough to big changes in ambient lighting, so you're either stuck waiting for it to get the memo or manually fiddle with it. Other times, it would lower itself aggressively when there was no need to, we encountered this a lot when reading in a room that only had a dim LED light bulb on - but that bulb was very close to us, hence why the jumping to minimum brightness didn't actually make any sense. We are assuming these things are easily fixable through a future software update, and hope they will be, as they slightly take away from the general experience of using this phone, which has been otherwise outstanding.

The Always On Display is, in EMUI 11, one of the most customizable implementations we've ever seen. There are analog clock designs, digital clock designs, as well as an "artistic" and a "graffitti" category, with many entries to pick from, many options to customize, and if none of the built-in styles work for you, then you can jump into Huawei's theme store to pick up new AODs (as well as themes, of course).

AOD settings

The AOD can be always on or scheduled, but EMUI 11 brings a new third option which is called "Smart". This turns on the AOD only when you tap the screen or when you're looking towards the phone, and while that may sound finicky it works incredibly well and from very varied angles. It doesn't work if you're across the room, or about more than 1m away from the phone with your body, but otherwise it was uncanny how well the phone 'knew' we were glancing at it, instantly popping up the AOD for us, only to then shut it off when we looked another way. We have to confess we played around with this for a while when we first received the Mate 40 Pro.

These smarts extend to a feature that's similar to Samsung's "Smart Stay", allowing the device to keep the screen on for as long as you're looking at it, regardless of what auto turn off setting you may have chosen.

Eye Comfort is Huawei's name for its blue light filter, and all we can say about it is that it works exactly as intended. There's the usual intensity slider, scheduling is possible, and this is also where the DC dimming toggle lies - it's called Flicker reduction and will be a godsend for people who are sensitive to the flickering induced by PWM when the screen isn't very bright.

Eye Comfort

Biometrics

The Mate 40 Pro's in-display fingerprint sensor is one of the best we've ever used. It's very well placed exactly where your thumb comes onto the screen when you normally hold the device, it's incredibly fast and accurate and for all intents and purposes practically on par with the best of the capacitive sensors. Sure, there's still objectively a speed penalty compared to those, but it's so small that you won't be able to tell unless you use both types alternatively in day to day life.

This phone has another trick up its sleeve, though. Its Face Unlock is of the 3D variety, which means it's the most secure Face Unlock you can get in the Android world. Since it doesn't just rely on the front camera for identification, it can also be used in the dark with no issues. It's fast, but not quite as fast as the fastest camera-only implementations out there, although that speed difference is definitely worth the added security you're getting here.

Biometrics settings

The Mate 40 Pro is 2020's most complete flagship from the perspective of secure unlocking options, giving you both a fast and accurate fingerprint sensor, as well as a 3D face unlock solution. You can obviously set up both and use whichever is most convenient. This is especially useful given the ongoing pandemic and mask use, when having just face unlock will make you enter your PIN or passphrase every time you're wearing a mask.