Huawei Mate 10 Pro Review

A powerful phone with an amazing battery life

Huawei Mate 10 Pro Full Specification, Review and Features

Release date: October 2017 | Weight: 178g | Dimensions: 154.2 x 74.5 x 7.9mm | OS: Android 8 | Screen size: 6-inch | Resolution: 1080 x 2160 | CPU: Kirin 970 | RAM: 6GB | Storage: 128GB | Battery: 4,000mAh | Rear camera: 20MP+12MP | Front camera: 8MP

The Huawei Mate 10 Pro is a phone that might not instantly be on your wish list, but the brand has made huge strides of late (just look at where the P20 Pro sits), and the battery life is something that outranks most on this list. If you're feeling that it's time for a change, this is worth checking out.

Screen & Design: 

The first thing you’ll notice about the Mate 10 Pro is that it's adopted the popular reduced-bezel look, made famous by the likes of the Galaxy S8 and LG G6. The Mate 10 Pro takes that likeness a step further by implementing a striking 6-inch 18:9 display, giving the phone a fetching tall and slim look that offers a lot of screen without feeling huge in the hand. 

Surprisingly, the lower-end Mate 10 offers a higher native resolution than the Mate 10 Pro, with a QHD (1440 x 2560) display that delivers impressively sharp images. Though the Mate 10 Pro is saddled with a maximum resolution that’s only slighter higher than FHD (1080 x 2160), its AMOLED display makes up for it with richer colours, deeper blacks and a brighter picture overall. When compared side-by-side, there’s no question that the Pro has the more vibrant display. 

One thing we’re less enthusiastic about however, is the inclusion of content adaptive backlight control (CABC), which automatically dims the brightness of your screen when using certain white background-heavy apps (i.e. Chrome, Facebook, etc). The same “feature” was present on Huawei’s P10 range and unfortunately, the only way to stop it is by rooting your device – something that the vast majority of users are not going to want to do.

Battery: 

A huge 4,000mAh batteries keeps the Mate 10 Pro going for around two days of regular use. When run through PCMark’s intensive battery benchmark, the Mate 10 Pro lasted just shy of 10 hours. Though the previous year’s Mate 9 has it beat by a significant margin (it last 12 hours and 14 minutes in the same benchmark test), the Mate 10 Pro still lasted longer than almost every other Android flagship released in 2017.

In terms of GPU benchmarks, both phones performed admirably, with the Pro achieving a Geekbench 4 single/multi score of 1926/6763.

Camera: 

Thanks to its ongoing partnership with Leica, Huawei has once again delivered a class-leading dual camera setup for its smartphone – even the most novice photographer can achieve professional-looking results. Combining a 12MP colour (RGB) sensor with a 20MP monochrome sensor allows users to take incredible depth-of-field shots and stark black and white photos of incredible detail. 

One of the camera’s most impressive features is how it uses the dedicated NPU (neural processing unit) embedded on Huawei’s new Kirin 970 processor to automatically adjust your camera settings based on what you’re shooting – it can even tell the difference between cats and dogs!

Optical image stabilisation helps to keep your shots steady, and 2x optical zoom allows you punch in slightly closer to your subject without losing image quality. An aperture of f/1.6 allows for terrific low-light photography, though you’ll probably need a tripod (or an incredibly steady hand) to make the most of this feature. 

Mini verdict: 

Choosing between the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro will come down to what you personally value in a handset. Do you value AMOLED over microSD expandable storage? Water resistance over a headphone jack? It’s not an easy decision, but since both phones are great, either choice is a good one.