Huawei Mate 10 Pro Unlocked Phone 6 6gb/128gb Review

Apple and Google may have automobile learning, merely Huawei has artificial intelligence. The Mate x Pro is the first telephone with a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU), letting it run AI computations with greater efficiency than a CPU or GPU. Processing smarts aside, it also has a sleek glass body, an edge-to-edge display, and solid dual camera sensors, along with all the other premium features you'd expect on a high-end Android phone. At $649.99 information technology's a bit more affordable than the Samsung Milky way S9+, but quite a scrap more plush than Huawei's ain View x and just available online and unlocked, making it a hard sell in the U.s.a. market.

Design, Features, and Display

Glass is making a improvement. Unlike the aluminum Mate 9 , the Mate x Pro ($319.95 at Amazon UK) features an all-drinking glass torso that curves along the dorsum for a comfortable grip. In that location's a distinct reflective stripe that runs horizontally beyond the superlative of the phone where the camera is located. Colour options include midnight blueish, mocha dark-brown, pink gold, and titanium gray. The wait is sleek and attractive, though fingerprints announced easily. A special Porsche Design Mate 10 features a vertical cogitating strip, similar to the racing stripe on car.

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The phone measures 6.1 by ii.9 past 0.3 inches (HWD) and weighs 6.3 ounces, making it a niggling bigger and heavier than the Milky way S9+ (vi.2 by two.ix past 0.3 inches, 6.7 ounces), despite a like overall form factor. Yous'll find most of the standard buttons and ports, with the exception of a headphone jack; you lot have to use the USB-C port with a dongle for wired audio. There's a fingerprint sensor on the back, below the camera and inside like shooting fish in a barrel reach of your alphabetize finger. An IR blaster on the elevation lets y'all command uniform TVs, air conditioners, and other devices with the preloaded app. The phone is IP67 waterproof, so it can handle immersion in five feet of water for upwards to 30 minutes. It stood upward to thorough dunking without issue. Alas, there'southward no microSD card slot.

The glass look continues on the forepart, where the half-dozen-inch AMOLED screen has a tall and narrow 18:nine aspect ratio, similar to most new flagship phones. That makes information technology easy to reach beyond with your thumb. In that location's also a floating brandish dock (basically an on-screen home button), forth with a one-handed mode that shrinks the keyboard to one side of the screen to make information technology more than accessible.

There is one downside to the brandish. The resolution is a relatively low 2,160 by 1,080, which works out to 402 pixels per inch (ppi), making it less sharp than the Quad HD console you lot find on the S9+ (529ppi) and a number of other high-finish phones. Then while y'all go the rich, saturated colors and perfect blacks AMOLED displays are known for, very fine details aren't quite as abrupt equally they appear on other screens. That said, viewing angles are good, and screen brightness reaches an impressive 730 nits, making for solid outdoor visibility .

Network Performance and Connectivity

In that location are two SIM card slots, both capable of providing 4G LTE data with VoLTE on GSM carriers similar AT&T and T-Mobile. The phone is also capable of blazing fast Cat. eighteen speeds (upwardly to 1.2Gbps) with 4x4 MIMO. Of form, those speeds are largely theoretical. We tested the telephone on AT&T in highly congested midtown Manhattan and saw average results of eight.7Mbps down and viii.5Mbps up, which is in line with other phones we've tested on the network recently.

Boosted connectivity protocols include Wi-Fi on the ii.4GHz and 5GHz bands, NFC for mobile payments, and the older Bluetooth 4.2 standard that only allows audio playback for one device at a time.

Phone call quality is first-class. Transmissions come across in clear, natural tones with little to no baloney, and dissonance cancellation effectively blots out background racket. Earpiece book is loud enough to be heard in a noisy environment, and the single lesser-firing speaker is reasonably loud as well.

Processor and Bombardment

The Mate ten Pro is powered past a Kirin 970 processor, the first chipset to take a Neural Processing Unit, (which you'll also notice in the Award View 10). This provides the telephone with AI computational abilities that allow it to practice things like recognize images (more on that later) and perform on-the-fly linguistic communication translation. Using the preloaded Microsoft Translate app, we were able to interpret a sign from Chinese to English without consequence.

The NPU also helps to place usage patterns and offer suggestions to improve your experience. For instance, the phone will pick upwardly on when you're using it for reading, every bit well as the reading environment around you, and suggest that y'all enable eye-care way.

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There'southward also 6GB RAM and 128GB of storage, giving yous plenty of ability for multitasking and gaming. The Mate 10 Pro scored 7,064 on PCMark ii.0'due south work functioning test, which measures a multifariousness of tasks like web browsing and video editing. That's less than the S9+ (7,273), which is powered by a Snapdragon 845 chipset, merely the difference isn't as large as yous'd expect. On GFXBench's graphics examination at that place'southward a greater disparity, with the Pro scoring 20fps in the Car Chase on-screen test, compared with 32fps for the S9+. That said, the Pro is able to handle PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds on high-quality settings with smooth and responsive gameplay.

Bombardment life is bully, with the Pro's 4,000mAh jail cell lasting for nine hours, 59 minutes of streaming total-screen video over LTE at maximum screen effulgence. Huawei'southward proprietary SuperCharge standard should be able to juice y'all upward to 50 per centum in just 30 minutes, and in that location are a number of ability-saving modes that can help preserve battery life when you lot're running low. There'southward no wireless charging back up, all the same.

Camera

The Mate x Pro has a primary 20-megapixel monochrome sensor paired with a 12-megapixel RGB sensor with optical image stabilization (OIS), both with f/1.6 aperture for improved low-calorie-free operation. Using the NPU, the telephone is capable of identifying objects in real fourth dimension and intelligently adjusting the camera settings to take the all-time picture possible. This goes beyond simple automatic mode because the NPU can gene in all aspects of scenery, not just basic ISO adjustments. It'll use different settings for breathtaking shots than it will for a plate of food, for instance. Selfies are AI-powered as well.

Photos taken in good lighting come up beyond sharply defined, with adept color reproduction. The Pro also handles well in low low-cal, focusing quickly and minimizing blur.

In a shootout with the Samsung Milky way Note eight , the Mate 10 Pro compares favorably, matching the Note 8 outdoors in terms of overall clarity, though it does tend to expect oversharpened and less natural, perhaps due to its AI-powered tweaking. Nevertheless, with manual controls you can disable the AI tweaks and have shots according to your ain preference, if yous choose.

When information technology comes to low-light scenes, the Pro once again does a solid chore, with minimal noise, only some finer details become muddy. For case, the balcony of a edifice came across quite a fleck more clearly on the Annotation 8 than the Mate 10 Pro, and the same was true indoors when shooting figurines within the dimly lit setting of PC Labs. Both phones are capable of 2x optical zoom and tin can shoot 4K video at a smooth and stable 30fps.

The Mate x Pro's eight-megapixel forepart-facing photographic camera takes expert photos indoors and out, though you may want to disable the airbrush consequence that's enabled by default to get a more realistic shot (or not).

Software

The Mate 10 Pro runs Android 8.0 Oreo with Huawei'southward EMUI 8.0 software on superlative. It's a adequately heavy UI layer that by default removes the app drawer, placing all your apps beyond the home screen, along with some other visual changes.

Beyond that, you get a number of special features similar the same floating navigation dock. The dock tin be placed anywhere on the screen and functions equally a 2d home push. When you disable the software keys you lot can use unlike swipe gestures for the Back and Contempo buttons. There'due south a Smart Separate Screen mode that uses AI to place the context of what'southward happening. For instance, if you lot're watching a video and you get a telephone phone call or text, the telephone will deliver an unobtrusive notification assuasive you lot to immediately launch into dissever-screen mode so your video isn't interrupted.

Perhaps the virtually interesting productivity feature is the ability to easily connect the phone to a monitor or Idiot box. Using only a USB-C-to-DisplayPort cable (or an adapter), y'all can simply plug the phone into a bigger screen and run Desktop mode, similar to what Samsung DeX does, except no dock is required. The telephone tin also connect to upwardly to two Bluetooth devices at a fourth dimension, letting you hook it upwardly to a keyboard and mouse. Otherwise, its impact screen doubles as a virtual touchpad.

I found the experience to be fairly seamless. The phone booted into desktop mode shortly afterwards plugging in, and despite some pocket-sized latency (which may have been due to the TV), I was able to open up a number of apps and windows including the photograph gallery, notes, and web browser without any issue. It's also possible to proceed using your phone while Desktop mode is running, letting you lot privately receive texts or telephone calls without information technology showing up on the big screen.

There are a few preloaded apps, with Amazon, Booking.com, Prime number Video, SwiftKey, and Microsoft Translate installed. Fortunately, you have plenty of storage, with 114GB out of 128GB available.

Conclusions

At $650 the Huawei Mate 10 Pro is more affordable than flagships similar the Galaxy Note eight and S9+ while coming close in some aspects of performance. Unfortunately, the pricing is awkward for the US unlocked marketplace, wedged between more affordable midrange phones like the Motorola Moto X4 and G5 Plus, which tin work with any US carrier, and Huawei'south own Honor View ten, which has the same Kirin 970 processor and AI features for a lower price. There's too the rumored OnePlus half-dozen to consider, which could cost effectually the same as the Mate 10 Pro while offering the very latest hardware.