Huawei P40 Pro long-term review

Conclusion

The P40 Pro is a unique device in the Android world, because while it goes head-to-head in pricing with the premium competitors from other Android makers as well as Apple, it does lack something we've all grown accustomed to, and, dare we say it, take for granted on any Android phone: yes, we're talking about Google services.

That omission, that has happened by no fault of Huawei's as it's just a victim in a political war, is glaring, there are no two ways about this. The handicap this entails isn't unsurmountable, at least for most things, especially if you can be flexible about using mobile websites for some services, and don't necessarily care about the superior user experience packed into most of Google's apps.

But here's the thing. Even if we may not realize it consciously, more often than not we are used to paying for (added) convenience. And the P40 Pro's software situation definitely removes some convenience from one's life, while not actually giving something back in return - like, for example, a lower price compared to its primary competitors. Had that been the case, then we would've argued that for a lot of people it might be worth it to pay less to get ultra premium features, with the flip side being living with a tad more inconvenience on the software side.

Except the P40 Pro is unashamedly expensive, retailing for €999 even today, which serves it well. It definitely is a top notch smartphone, and has a lot of things going for it. Performance is amazing at all times, smoothness is so far unmatched by any other device we've tested for a long-term review, the camera system is among the best on any device ever, battery life and charging speeds are very good (if not record-breaking), and it has all the premium features you'd expect at this price point.

Sure, the screen resolution might stick out sorely from the spec sheet, but in actual day-to-day use we never thought we'd need more pixels. The same goes for its refresh rate, which is "just" 90Hz compared to some competitors pushing 120Hz. These may seem like downsides on paper but for us, they weren't in real life, although at this price point we would've expected maximum brightness to be higher. Still, the phone is visible even under direct sunlight, it's just not as visible as others.

Anyway, the point is the P40 Pro offers a premium package for 2020 overall, so in the end it's only hampered by two interconnected things: the lack of Google services, and its price. These are connected in our view because getting similar innards with all the other high-end flagships out there for a lower price would've made the complicated software situation much easier to swallow.

The way things are, though, if you're interested in the P40 Pro, you'd probably be well served to order it from a place with a decent returns policy, to give yourself that extra peace of mind that you can get your cash back if you realize you don't want to complicate your life with three different app stores and some apps simply refusing to work no matter where you get them from.

Of course, you can also scour the internet for tricks to getting Google services up and running on the P40 Pro - these methods all seem to involve installing weird apps from weird places but they do work - for now. Any workaround that works today may not work tomorrow, or it could work with significant downsides - how about having to turn off notifications for all Google apps, for example? And that is why we chose not to delve into such madness, and just give you an account of what it's like to use the P40 Pro the way it was designed to be used, sans Google, with a lot of Huawei services meant to pick up the slack.

If you're a die-hard user of Google stuff, then this phone is probably not for you. However, if you're a die-hard anti-Google person, sick of the company's incessant tracking of everything you do on a 'Google-ified' Android phone, then the P40 Pro might be a godsend, because unlike past 'Google-free' Android handsets, this one has the backing of a major manufacturer, and will not just be forgotten in a few months. It also helps that it provides the best software performance ever, and that its innards are all properly high-end.

There's also the possibility that you're somewhere in the middle, not the type of person that wants to live a Google-free life, but also not a fan so involved in the Google universe that you can't picture life without the official YouTube or Gmail apps. In this case, we recommend you try the P40 Pro for yourself (backed up by a good returns policy, as we said), and figure out what your tolerance to UX friction is. You might realize it's not that much of a hassle to find your most used apps working on this phone after all, and that everything it delivers is worth the initial learning curve.

If we were to judge it by pretending that the Google software situation mess isn't a thing, the P40 Pro would definitely be among the best phones of the year so far. However, in reality we can't just ignore that, so we're going to qualify that remark: it is hands down one of the best phones of the year so far, if you can live with the added complications around the software.