Huawei P40 Pro long-term review

Performance, smoothness

The Kirin 990 5G in the P40 Pro is Huawei subsidiary HiSilicon's current flagship chipset, and in day to day use, you can tell. It might not benchmark as high as some competitors, but that has absolutely no impact on how well the P40 Pro performs in actual real life situations. And that's one more reason why it's not the greatest idea to just take synthetic benchmark results as gospel. Sure, they can give you an idea of how one phone compares to another, but living with any high-end phone from 2020 (or even late 2019) shouldn't result in a lesser experience, unless there are some huge issues with optimizations.

We're happy to report that not only does the P40 Pro not have any such issues, but it's actually quite the opposite. Performance is outstanding, the phone is incredibly fast no matter what you throw at it. That's the way it should be, for the asking price, of course, we're just mentioning that there are no kinks here whatsoever.

The P40 Pro is the smoothest smartphone we've ever tested for our long-term review series. This is a subjective assessment as always, because there's no accurate objective way of going about this, but we were definitely impressed. The top of the line chipset works amazingly well in concert with the 90Hz refresh rate of the display to keep things silky smooth all the time. We've had zero stutters, zero lags, zero slowdowns.

In this regard the P40 Pro is a clear step up from some of last year's flagships, including its predecessor, the P30 Pro. While that phone was very smooth when we tested it, the P40 Pro is even more so. It will be a joy to use, day in and day out, that's for sure.

The software seems to be incredibly well optimized too, with the system apps as well as all the built-in apps performing admirably and using the higher refresh rate as they should. That's not always the case for third-party apps, but there's nothing Huawei can do about that, it's down to the developers to smoothen things out on their end.

Call us crazy but we feel like the lack of Google services, especially Google sync services, might actually contribute to this feeling of overall unmitigated smoothness. Perhaps there was some cruft in there that the removal of those services has simply taken care of, or maybe Huawei has been focusing a lot on optimizing its now Google-free software to take advantage of its in-house designed SoC. It is after all the only Android device maker in this position, where it uses its own chipsets and its own software, with the base layer of open source Android, sure, but without another company's services on top of that. Whatever the reason for this level of performance might be, our time with the P40 Pro was excellent from a smoothness perspective.

Battery life

The P40 Pro's 4,200 mAh battery is large, but a lot of its competitors do pack even larger cells. Add in the 5G connectivity which might drain more battery than 4G, and we weren't quite sure what to expect, in terms of battery life, going into this review.

We're happy to report that battery life on the P40 Pro has been very good. The phone always lasted us through an entire day of our usual shenanigans, with the use case involving primarily Wi-Fi connectivity with 30 minutes to an hour of mobile data (on 5G this time), Bluetooth always on with an hour or two of music streaming, location on (with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi scanning on as well), and an hour or two of phone calls. We always got 6+ hours of screen on time with this use, and we even tried to go entire days with Wi-Fi off, connected only to 5G. That will, unsurprisingly, lower the screen on time, but only to about five hours, which we still find perfectly adequate.

Screen on time on 5G and Wi-Fi

So while the P40 Pro wasn't a phone that lasted significantly more than a day for us, we feel like that's the most important threshold - if a device makes it to the end of a 12-16 hour day off the charger, we're satisfied. If your usage is more extreme than ours, perhaps involving a lot of GPS navigation (which we haven't been able to test a lot because of the COVID-19 lockdown situation), then the phone's fast wired and wireless charging speeds will aid in getting a quick top-up every now and then when you feel anxious about making it to the end of the day.

We appreciate the flexibility of having both wired and wireless charging built-in, and they're both incredibly fast, while not record-breaking. That's kind of the theme here - battery life is great, but not the best we've ever seen, and the same goes for charging speeds. A full top-up from zero using the bundled charger takes less than an hour, every single time. Unfortunately, we didn't have Huawei's 27W wireless charger around to test those speeds, but we did try using a Xiaomi 30W wireless charger, and it doesn't seem to work as fast as it should. Meaning - if you want wireless charging that goes over and above the traditional 15W Qi standard, you might be best served by using a charger supplied by the same company that made your phone.

Connectivity

The P40 Pro supports 5G networks, and we haven't had any issues connecting to 5G and using the higher speeds and lower latencies the technology can offer. There's even support for both NSA (non-standalone, dependent on LTE) as well as SA (standalone) 5G networks baked in. Right now most carriers across the world use NSA 5G, but SA is coming, and when that happens, you'll be covered too.

The P40 Pro even has experimental support for VoNR, which is the 5G equivalent of VoLTE, although it might take a long time before carriers launch that functionality. Still, it's there for when it will happen.

5G performance has been adequate, and Bluetooth is also on point. Unlike what happens with some other Android smartphones, we've had zero issues regarding Bluetooth at all. Pairing devices, connecting to them, auto-reconnects, everything worked flawlessly every single time. However, note that there's no aptX support of any kind.

5G, NSA/SA support, VoNR, Bluetooth codecs

AptX is a Qualcomm technology, which may have something to do with why it's missing. You do, on the other hand, get AAC and LDAC codecs aside from the default SBC. Wi-Fi speeds on our Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) network have been among the highest we've ever seen, and there were never any random disconnects or any problems there.