A month with the Huawei Mate 40 Pro

Performance, smoothness

The Kirin 9000 chipset in the Huawei Mate 40 Pro is a true monster and actually the first to launch of the new generation of 5nm SoCs that we'll see a lot more of in the Android world next year when phones arrive on the market with the Snapdragon 888 and Exynos 2100 inside.

As you'd expect from a top of the line chipset, this means the Kirin 9000 flies no matter what you throw at it. It's seriously impressive how we've seen zero lags, stutters, or hangs in our month with the Mate 40 Pro.

Not just that, but when it comes to smoothness, it's at least on par with the smoothest phones we've ever had for long-term reviews. But it also feels, subjectively as always, that it just about edges out and takes the crown. This is a phone that will never let you down when it comes to either performance or how smooth it feels in operation, regardless of what you do with it.

You might object to this section being this short, but there's really nothing else to say here - performance and smoothness are both as close to perfect as we've ever seen, so far at least. We're looking forward to another device taking away this crown from the Mate 40 Pro, but that hasn't happened yet.

Battery life, charging

Battery life on the Mate 40 Pro has been incredibly good, day in and day out. We would call it "outstanding" or "the best we've ever seen compared to long-term reviews", but we can't do that because we just can't be sure. And that's because of the very annoying way in which EMUI 11 shows battery stats. The only screen on time number you get is calculated per calendar day, and not since the last full charge.

So based on this metric we could always dare to achieve more than 8 hours of screen on time in a day off the charger, and we're sure we could have also hit 9 or more hours easily. But we can't compare this further with the phones we've had for long-term reviews because it would sort of be like comparing apples to oranges. Still, you're unlikely to have any issues going through one full day of use with the Mate 40 Pro unless your use case is incredibly demanding.

Battery life samples

Ours wasn't, at least not from a connectivity perspective. We spend around 12-17 hours with the phone off the charger, with mostly Wi-Fi connectivity, an hour or so of 5G, Bluetooth always on (with an hour or so of music streaming and an hour or two of calls), and location always on (with around half an hour of GPS navigation).

Charging takes about 45 minutes from zero to full on the bundled 66W adapter, and that's something to appreciate too. Only Xiaomi's Mi 10 Ultra and a few Oppo and OnePlus devices can do it faster. If you ever forgot to charge during the night, rest assured that you can quickly top up while you're getting ready in the morning and you'll still have enough juice to last you until you return home. Wireless charging with a Huawei accessory should be very fast too, but we didn't have one of those around to test. Still, wireless charging is very useful to have, and you can reverse wireless charge things as well.