Huawei P40 Pro long-term review

EMUI 10.1

The P40 Pro runs the latest version of Huawei's Android skin turned OS, EMUI 10.1. It's based on the open source Android 10. EMUI used to be one of the more egregious skins out there, but with version 10, and 10.1 which isn't very different design-wise, we feel like it's one of the most polished interpretations of the OS.

The design language is a love it or hate it affair, but it is consistent throughout the UI, and there aren't any needless flourishes. Animations are neat and moving through the UI is a breeze, although there are still a few weird touches here and there, which we'll get to.

The launcher that comes out of the box does support an app drawer, and it's also reasonably customizable.The entirety of EMUI 10.1 is like that, actually. It won't win any awards for offering you the most options ever, but it does have a fair amount, and ignores a whole bunch of gimmicks in the process. We're happy to see the alphabet to the right of the app list in the drawer, letting us quickly jump to all the apps that start with a specific letter with just one tap.

Home screen, app drawer, home screen setting

To the left of your leftmost home screen is a feed that seems like it wants to emulate Google's, and it does a decent job at showing you news as well as giving you quick access to some functions. You can add widgets of sorts here, which show your favorite pictures, contacts, or let you add a note or play music. This feels less useless than OnePlus' Shelf and MIUI's AppVault, so we left it on, although we have to confess not using it a lot throughout our time with the P40 Pro.

The Today screen with its news Feed and settings

One annoying thing about the built-in launcher is that there's no way to set a swipe down from anywhere on the screen to show the notification pane. This is now a staple of most custom Android skins out there, but for some reason Huawei chose not to include it. Instead, that gesture will always take you to a screen that lets you search through your phone - iPhone style. We would have at least preferred a choice between these two features, like some other skins offer.

Search comes up when swiping down

The dark mode is in, but it doesn't get forced onto apps without one of their own. So if you want dark Facebook on the P40 Pro, you'll have to wait for the social network to finally discover the concept of a dark theme, or for Huawei to enable forcing it through a future EMUI update.

The dark mode gives you a black background in a lot of places (especially Settings), and a very dark grey background for notifications and Quick Settings. Overall it's very pleasant to look at, and should help save some power given how the P40 Pro has an OLED screen.

Settings, notifications, Quick Settings

Gesture navigation has finally grown up on Android, and the P40 Pro's implementation is very good, albeit hidden in Settings > System and updates > System navigation. You can still opt for three-button navigation, but we've long given that up in favor of gestures. You can make it so that a swipe across the bottom of the screen switches between apps, and even when this is turned on there is no unsightly pill-shaped bar at the bottom as Google would want. From this point of view maybe it's better that Huawei and Google are going their separate ways?

Anyway, aside from that, there is no dedicated gesture to take you to the previously used app, except there's no need for one, really, as when you swipe up and hold to reveal the app switcher, what will be in focus is actually the previous app you were using, and not the current one. This is an easy solution to solve the conundrum of quickly switching between two apps, and with the swiping across the bottom you get a bit more flexibility than you may have anticipated.

The Recents menu is horizontally scrolling and looks like pretty much every other multitasking menu that isn't in MIUI. It works well, there's really not much to report here.

Navigation settings and Recents menu

Because there's no Google anything on this phone, there's also no Google Assistant, or any assistant, for that matter. Huawei is working on its own, called Celia, and this is already available in some regions, but not ours.

The Huawei Assistant section in Settings is, for now, just a repository of AI buzzword-infused vaguely assistant-y types of things available on the phone, like AI Lens (think Google Lens but with calorie counting), AI Touch (which tells you what something in an image on your device is), AI Tips, and AI Search - which is just the local search function that you can access with a swipe down in the launcher.

Huawei Assistant menu

One of the things that used to be unique about EMUI (although it's now been copied by a lot of its competitors) is Magazine unlock, and yes it's still there. This shows you an assortment of random images on your lock screen. You can pick categories and scroll through them with horizontal swipes before you unlock your device.

Huawei has had an alternative to Google's Digital Wellbeing for quite a while now - it's called Digital balance, and serves the same purpose of giving you stats on how you've been using your phone, as well as allowing you to set usage limits.

Digital balance

RAM management is okay on EMUI 10.1, we haven't had any obvious issues with it reloading apps when it shouldn't, but notifications still don't get through from all apps as easily as they should. This comes down to the aggressive background task management, which works with a whitelist. So you won't have issues with receiving notifications from any of the big messaging apps, for example, but you may run into some snags with others. We have tried everything and couldn't get Skype Preview (the beta version of the app) to show us notifications. At all. Ever. That may, however, be an issue with the app, since it is the beta.

Otherwise, we got our smartwatch working with the P40 Pro after jumping through the usual (for some skins, EMUI included) hoops. That means turning off the automatic management of app launches and turning on Auto-launch, Secondary launch, and Run in background. These options are found in Settings > Apps > Apps > Your app's name here > Power usage details > App launch. You can also turn off the Power consumption alert if you feel like it's overreacting to apps that should, by design, run at all times.

Hoops to jump through for apps that need to autorun

Huawei cloud and apps

We don't usually talk a lot about a phone maker's built-in apps in our long-term reviews, unless one of them really stands out in some way, and that's because we mostly view these as unnecessary duplicates of Google's apps. And yet, since the P40 Pro doesn't have any Google apps, we felt it would be helpful to mention that Huawei has been trying to come up with usable alternatives.

Using these of course means you get sort of dependent on Huawei's own ecosystem, which may not bode well for you if you'll ever move to an Android phone made by another company (or an iPhone). But in this case the manufacturer's own cloud storage and backup solution does make a lot more sense to have than on a phone that can also access Google's.

Huawei's sync solution, tied to your Huawei account, gives you 5GB of free space in the cloud to back up a bunch of stuff for you but only as long as Huawei's own apps are involved.

Huawei Cloud and its features

That said, 5GB isn't a whole lot, but there are a lot of things that can get backed up, which means jumping to another Huawei phone in the future will be quite seamless. That said, restoring apps will most likely only work with apps that are available in AppGallery, so for those which you found elsewhere Phone Clone should help, and for those that it refuses to transfer over you'll need to once again manually install as described on the previous page.

Huawei also bakes in Find My Phone functionality of its own, which is definitely good to have. If you need more than 5GB of storage in its cloud, then you can upgrade to 50GB, 200GB, or 2TB, for a monthly fee. At the moment there's a promo in our region that gives you 50GB for free for one year, but you need to sign up for a yearly subscription, and after the first year ends you'll pay the full amount for the next year. You can cancel anytime, though. We're not mentioning prices of these tiers because they are region dependent. They should be competitive compared to what Google charges. You can also use this space to store random files, just like with Google Drive. In fact, Huawei's is called Huawei Drive, just to make things easier to understand.

The built-in apps themselves are all good, but you are, in some cases, limited by the lack of interconnection with... yes, Google. The built-in Calendar app, for example, will take an Exchange corporate account with no issues, but there's no way for it to plug into Google Calendar. The Notepad app is quite barebones compared to Google Keep. And so on. It's not like the phone ships without any of the basic apps, Huawei has all of those covered, and they work well even if they can be a little barebones at times. But hey, at least we don't get to complain about duplicate apps in this review.

Calendar only has Exchange sync, Notepad is barebones

Updates

The P40 Pro launched running EMUI 10.1 on top of open source Android 10, and those are still the current versions for both. So we can't really tell how the update situation will go. Presumably Huawei will be able to create EMUI 11 based on the open source branch of Android 11, although because it's stopped working with Google that probably means it lost early access to the future build.

This is likely to mean that Huawei will have to wait until Google releases the Android 11 update to its phones, and then posts the source code for that version, before it can start working on its own EMUI 11 update. This could result in a few months' wait for that to reach your P40 Pro, compared to when Pixels will be getting Android 11. However, it's always been "a few months wait" anyway, even when Huawei and Google were working together, so it's hard to foretell anything specific. Perhaps there will be more months of waiting this time around, or maybe Huawei will want to disprove this theory and have people working overtime to deliver a very quick update. We just can't know at the moment.

Current software

When it comes to security updates, the situation definitely could be worse, but it's not great either. Our review unit is still on the April 2020 security patch level, which is just one month old at this point, so nothing too bad. If you don't expect these updates to arrive perfectly in sync with Google's, you'll probably be fine.