Technology

Hands-on: Huawei Mate10 Pro

YOU GOT TECH - Abe Olandres - The Philippine Star

October 22, 2017 | 4:00pm

Just out: The Huawei Mate10 Pro is launched in Germany. The smartphone will be available in November.

MUNICH — Huawei launched its latest batch of flagship smartphones last week. We were there to witness the announcement of the Huawei Mate 10, Mate 10 Pro, and a special edition Mate 10 Porsche Design.

Of the three, we managed to get hold of the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, which we have been using in the last couple of days.

The Mate 10 Pro has a 6-inch OLED display with a full HD+ resolution or 2160x1080 pixels. The OLED display looks gorgeous. Images pop out with very bright with vibrant colors. Also making it look better is the 18:9 aspect ratio and a near-bezel-less front panel.

The look and feel remind us of the LG G6 or the V30 with Gorilla Glass at the front and the back protecting the device. At 178 grams, it comes as a bit hefty, although the dimensions and slightly curved back panel still make it comfortable to hold and operate with one hand.

The all-metal body feels solid on the hands, protected by Gorilla Glass both in the front and back. The front panel is almost all display with barely any space left at the top and bottom bezels, giving it an 81.5% screen-to-body ratio.

The fingerprint sensor is at the back, just below the dual rear cameras, dual LED flash and other sensors. There’s also a subtle design pattern that cuts across the lens module, giving it a bit of flare.

The Mate 10 Pro is one of the first handsets to run on the latest AI chipset from Huawei, the Kirin 970. It is composed of a quad-core ARM Cortex A73 running at 2.36GHz and an ARM Cortex A53 running at 1.8GHz. The main CPU is paired with a dedicated i7 co-processor and a 12-core Mali G72MP12 graphics processor. You also get 6GB of LPDDR4 RAM as a standard offering.

The Kirin 970 is a powerful processor that can slug it out with even the more popular chips like the Snapdragon 835. Our initial benchmark test also confirms this.

The Mate 10 is also the first smartphone from Huawei to have water and dust-resistance. The IP67 rating gives it water resistance for one meter up to 30 minutes.

We’re also glad to see Huawei keep the IR blaster. That’s an instant remote control feature you can use with many home appliances.

Photos don’t lie: One of the most important updates to the Mate 10 Pro are the new dual Leica cameras. A significant improvement of the sensor is the wider f/1.6 aperture and optical image stabilization.

Another native feature of the Mate 10 series that we saw was the ability to directly hook up the device to a monitor or TV via a USB Type-C cable. The Mate 10 has DisplayPort 1.2 support so you don’t need any dock to sync it to an external display.

With the 4,000mAh built-in Li-Ion battery, Huawei claims it can provide 30 percent more battery life compared to the Mate 9 series. So far, the phone manages to last the entire day with enough juice to last the next, although under a stricter battery diet.

Among the most important aspects of this update is the new dual Leica cameras of the Mate 10 Pro. A significant improvement of the sensor is the wider f/1.6 aperture and optical image stabilization.

The Mate 10 Pro’s primary camera is the 12MP RGB sensor, which is supported by a larger 20MP monochrome sensor. The camera produces great low-light and day light shots in the past few days that we’ve been shooting in the city.

The monochrome camera can also take photos on its own in black and white. The results are just as astonishing.

Finally, Huawei managed to get Android 8.0 Oreo in the Mate 10 right out of the box. Huawei also skipped to EMUI 8.0 from the current EMUI 5.1 we’ve had with other Huawei smartphones although we have not noticed anything significantly different at first glance.

The Mate 10 Pro did come with a few shortcomings – first, they took out the headphone jack (although the Mate 10 still has it). That seems to be the trend these days. Fortunately, Huawei is giving out a USB Type-C to 3.5mm adaptor in the retail box for those who may still need it.

Second, the Mate 10 Pro also supports dual SIM with both SIM trays capable of 4G speeds. However, this is not the typical hybrid tray, so there’s actually no microSD expansion. Good thing the device came with 128GB of internal storage so you have lots of room for apps and other media files.

Suffice it to say, there’s a fairly significant upgrade to this year’s Huawei Mate series and between the two, we liked the Mate 10 Pro better. The Mate 10 Porsche Design is just too expensive, we don’t even want to talk about it.

The Huawei Mate 10 will have a suggested retail price of €699 (P42,450) and the Mate 10 Pro at €799 (P48,500). Huawei is expected to release the Mate 10 in the Philippines this November.