First look at Huawei P40 Pro - the new cameraphone champion

This year started off hard for Huawei, with US sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic hitting smartphone sales together. As luck would have it, right now the company has released the flagships P40 and P40 Pro, in the development of which a lot of money has been invested. Are they good enough to turn the tide? We have already personally met the older model and we think that it deserves the attention of consumers. But first things first.

Design

Describing the appearance of new smartphones is a thankless task: they all look the same. Nevertheless, the Huawei P40 Pro has several differences from other models.

The first thing you notice: the case is quite thick, especially compared to OPPO Reno 3 Pro. The thickness of 9 millimeters is solid by modern standards, while the massive block of cameras protrudes another couple of millimeters. The latter has a reason for this, but more on that later.

Another distinctive feature is the large notch at the top of the screen. It has a 32 megapixel front camera and an infrared depth sensor that is responsible for scanning the face. Thus, we have before us an analogue of Face ID in a new version. In addition to it, there is an optical fingerprint scanner in the screen.

The smartphone is thick, but it does not interfere with everyday use. The corners and edges are smoothed, the glass panels smoothly flow into the metal frame. The massive body fits comfortably in the palm of your hand, although connoisseurs of compactness should look at other models. Also, Huawei P40 Pro is protected from moisture and dust according to the IP68 standard, which means that it can withstand immersion to a depth of up to a meter for 30 minutes.

Screen

In front, we are greeted by a 6.58-inch screen with a non-standard resolution of 2 640 x 1,200 pixels. The matrix is ​​made using OLED technology and supports a refresh rate of 90 Hz. The edges of the screen are slightly curved for the sake of trends. In general, a standard display by flagship standards.

The display quality is excellent, which is to be expected. The colors are moderately saturated, the viewing angles and contrast are maximum. There is support for DCI ‑ P3 color space and HDR10 ‑ high dynamic range content.

With all the advantages of the screen, it still has a significant drawback - a massive cutout at the top. Huawei hasn't tried to make it small and inconspicuous like the latest Samsung and OPPO. On the contrary, engineers seem to be proud of this decision, which is reminiscent of the situation with the "monobrow" in the iPhone X. Whether the cutout will interfere with watching videos and playing games - time will tell.

Sound

For some unknown reason, the Huawei P40 Pro is not equipped with stereo speakers. At the same time, two years ago, the company equipped its flagships P20 Pro and Mate 20 with stereo sound. After using experience Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra the only speaker on the bottom is not impressive at all.

There is also no 3.5 mm audio jack, although this is no longer surprising. A USB Type-C headset was included in the kit, in case you didn't get wireless headphones.

Cameras

It's time to talk about why the Huawei P40 Pro will be bought. There are plenty of devices on the market with similar designs, screen quality, and more advanced musical capabilities. But no one has a similar camera system.

The smartphone received an exclusive image sensor in the main module: its physical size is 1 / 1.28 ″, and the resolution is 50 megapixels. The lens with an aperture of f / 1.9 was developed in collaboration with Leica and is equipped with optical stabilization.

But the main thing here is the Bayer filter with the RYYB scheme: the green photodiodes were replaced with yellow ones. This increased the camera's sensitivity to light and reduced noise at high ISO settings. The same color scheme is used in the 13-megapixel periscope module with 5x optical zoom.

Finally, the wide-angle camera in the Huawei P40 Pro is equipped with a 1 / 1.54 ″ 40MP sensor and phase detection autofocus. We compared the new product with the Galaxy S20 Ultra, and the result is pleasing. We will tell you more about the camera in a full review.

Other features

The hardware platform was the Kirin 990 proprietary chipset equipped with a 5G modem. It is complemented by 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of permanent memory - the latter can be expanded via NM cards (Huawei's own format). Iron may not be the most powerful, but its potential should be enough for all resource-intensive games. There is already a question in software optimization.

The smartphone is running Android 10 without Google services, but with a proprietary shell EMUI 10.1. It is no different from the interface that we have already seen in Huawei P40 Lite. Since then, however, the company's smartphones have learned to make contactless payments through the Wallet application. They use NFC, so the experience is no different from paying with Google Pay, at least in theory. We will tell you how things are in practice in the review.

A 4,200 mAh battery is responsible for powering all components. The capacity is not the largest, but Huawei knows how to optimize energy consumption. So far, the smartphone is holding up perfectly, although it is worth checking how it behaves in games and other resource-intensive tasks. There is also fast wired (40W) and wireless (27W) charging.

Subtotals

The Huawei P40 Pro could have gotten lost among other flagship devices, but the camera system has become its chip. The price of 70 thousand rubles is rather big, and you need to see how the gadget will show itself in the future: suddenly the lack of Google services will become a burden for users. But so far the impressions of the P40 Pro are positive.

Buy

The author thanks Huawei for the device provided for testing. The company had no way to influence the test result.