A month with the Huawei Mate 40 Pro

Conclusion

For this feature, we spent a little more than a month with the Mate 40 Pro as our one and only smartphone. That's more than the time we have for a normal review and less than we allocate for a long-term review. Still, over this time, a few things about this device have become obvious.

First off, if the Google apps and services situation wouldn't be the way it is, the Mate 40 Pro would undoubtedly be one of the easiest to recommend smartphones of the year. Don't get us wrong, it still is among the best of 2020, but buying one requires you to live without the comforts that Google's apps and services provide, and this will be a huge downside for a lot of people. Then again, those looking to escape Google's incessant tracking and targeting may feel right at home here, but we have a hunch that the number of the former is much higher than that of people in the latter group.

The Mate 40 Pro has pretty much everything going for it, aside from this and the fact that the main camera doesn't have optical image stabilization. Huawei's software camera magic mostly works around that hardware limitation beautifully and we couldn't see any difference in quality compared to the Huawei P40 Pro which has it.

Otherwise, this is definitely one of the Top 5 (if not Top 3) phones in terms of camera image quality. As usual, your exact preference has more to do with how much you personally enjoy each company's camera science. Still, objectively speaking, the Mate 40 Pro is up there with the best of the competition while beating it squarely when it comes to the ultrawide. Compared to some competitors such as Samsung's periscope-endowed offerings, the Mate 40 Pro also does better when it comes to zoom. So overall, you get a top-notch camera experience,.

With the Mate 40 Pro, you also get one of the smoothest feeling phones this reviewer has ever used, easily on par with the smoothest we had for long-term review, if not slightly better. Performance is outstanding as well, as it should be given the new generation chipset, and perhaps it's unfair to compare the Kirin 9000 to the Snapdragon 865 and Exynos 990. A fairer comparison would be with the upcoming Snapdragon 888 and Exynos 2100. We'll have to wait and see how that pans out, but for now, performance is always on point, with no stutters, lags, or anything like that, no matter what you do. It's just that good.

Everything else about this phone is exactly as premium as it should be given its price point. The screen is fantastic, and the curves do not lead to accidental touches at all (but there is some glare on the sides when viewed head-on, an inescapable consequence of the curvature), and its lower refresh rate than some of its competitors is irrelevant for everything but gaming because in real life it feels as smooth, if not even more than those other phones out there touting 120 Hz.

Battery life is incredibly good too, the design is striking, unique, and instantly recognizable, build quality is excellent. The feel in hand is very different from what you may be used to with glass phones; at least on our review unit it almost felt like it had a metal back. The myriad reflections and colors based on how light hits the rear is a neat added bonus without looking overly tacky.

In the end, what will make or break the Mate 40 Pro for most people is the software, and specifically your personal approach relating to software. Do you trust Huawei enough to keep updating this phone with useful features and security patches way into the future? Do you want to take part in the grand experiment it's been forced by political motives to engage in - creating its own mobile software from scratch to replace Google's? Can you live without Google's first-party apps and services and some third party ones that don't work? Are you content to find alternatives for those, or can you settle for the slightly inferior user experience brought about when going with mobile websites instead of apps? Do you care about voice assistants so little that you'd be okay with Alexa and Celia, while missing out on the Google Assistant?

And finally, one other question not related to software. Is this phone really with €1,000, given all of the above?

We can't answer any of these questions for you, but we hope this feature has given you enough information about the Mate 40 Pro and what it's like to live with for a month non stop so that you can decide for yourself what your very own answers will be.

All we can say is that we're sad it's come to this, and Huawei would have had one of the main flagship contenders of the year, sales-wise, in 2020, if politics would have stayed out of the mobile space. Alas, things are the way they are, and so we need to judge products based on what they are and not what they could have been. The Mate 40 Pro is an excellent smartphone with a few downsides. If you can live with those, including not knowing what exactly the future will bring in a year or two, software-wise, then it's definitely worthy of your attention and hard-earned cash.