Huawei Mate 40 Pro Singapore Review

huawei mate 40 pro

The Huawei Mate 40 Pro was released in December 2020 in Singapore. It’s a flagship that a lot of people have been waiting for especially because of its predecessor’s popularity, the Huawei Mate 30. 

Before we get to the specifics, here’s what the Huawei Mate 40 Pro costs in Singapore. 

The Huawei Mate 40 Pro costs about S$1,548. It’s a flagship that is the mid-ranger in the Huawei Mate 40 series.

Purely from the specs, the Mate 40 is expected to have a powerful chipset and a great camera with overall performance. Here’s the breakdown.

To summarize.

The Huawei Mate 40 Pro has an impeccable design with the uniquely positioned cameras. In terms of what’s under the hood, the Huawei Mate 40 Pro is right up there with the Kirin 9000 Chipset which is almost as powerful as Apple’s A14 Bionic Chipset. The OS is Android 10 with EMUI which is one of the best UI’s out there.

In terms of what’s not good, the access to apps and Google’s services is a big impediment for Huawei. These services are essential and it requires side-loading of the apps to have a good App experience.

The cameras on the other hand are impeccable with great clarity, colour, sharpness, making it one of the best, although it doesn’t have the OIS feature in the camera. 

The battery is a big downside for the Mate 40 Pro, as it’s below par compared to its peers and also under performs when it comes to battery life when compared to its predecessor. 

Huawei Mate 40 Pro Design & Display 

The Mate 40 Pro is a looker without a doubt. It’s got the best looking camera setup in terms of a design called the Space Ring. It’s a circular design that houses the camera. The center of the Space Ring has the Leica logo. The camera portion is raised and you’ll need a case to protect it.

It’s got a gradient finish on the Silver model and the Black coloured model has a glass like finish. The design is exquisite. 

The display has curved edges which makes the display look bigger. The Mate 40 Pro brings back the physical volume control buttons which weren’t available in the Mate 30 Pro. This is a much needed design change. But for those who love the sliding gesture feature, it’s still available.

Talking about the display. The Mate 40 Pro has a large 6.76-inch OLED, FHD+ with a 90Hz refresh rate. 120 Hz can be expected for a phone of this caliber. But it still makes amends with the 240 Hz touch sampling rate.

The sharpness of the display can be attributed to the 456 PPI. In terms of colours, clarity and richness, the Mate 40 Pro doesn’t lack. It’s a great display.

There are provisions for a loudspeaker at the bottom that isn’t up to standard. 

huawei mate 40 pro

Under the Hood

Huawei’s phones have always had the best version of Android’s OS’, but they have been hit by the Google support in recent years. Having said that, it runs on Android 10 with the EMUI 11 layer on top.

How Huawei is handling the lack of Google Playstore access is through its very own App Gallery and something called the Petal Search that looks for the updated APK’s of apps that are hosted on this third party server. There are security concerns, but it is a work around. 

There are still issues with Google services such as Youtube, Gmail, Google Driver and other apps. This is a serious problem for power users and its puts users off. But this is not in Huawei’s hands.

Side-loading apps has become a popular way to add apps to Huawei phones and this is not something we recommend for most users.

Let’s talk about the Kirin 9000. The Kirin 9000 is the latest 5G chipset from Huawei’s stables. In terms of performance compared to the Snapdragon 865. It has 25% higher CPU performance and a 50% higher GPU performance.

The Kirin 9000 might seem powerful on paper, but in reality, it’s as powerful as the most powerful chipset in the world and that’s Apple’s A14 Bionic chip.

This is a flagship chipset that makes every aspect of the phone powerful. With an 8GB RAM and 256GB of storage, you can be rest assured that the phone’s performance will be blazing fast.

Huawei Mate 40 Pro Cameras 

Say what you want about Huawei, but their cameras have  set the benchmark time and time again, going by past records. 

So what does the Mate 40 Pro have? 

  • A wide-angle 50 MP Ultra Vision Camera
  • A ultra-wide cine camera with 20 MP
  • A 12 MP telephoto camera 

These are powerful specs for a camera, but does it live up to the billing? 

The cameras don’t have Optical Image Stabilization as the Kirin 990 Processor handles that with its latest Image Signalling Processor tech. 

With this, the image results are much sharper, images are more stable. One thing to note about these cameras is the quality of the colours in the photo.

The richness of the details even with 5X zoom is incredible. The quality of these cameras are on par with the flagship P series from Huawei.

The front selfie camera is a 13 MP Ultra Vision Selfie Camera with a 3D depth sensor. It’s got features like Slow-Mo selfie, Intelligent Field of View and time-Lapse.

Huawei Mate 40 Pro Battery 

The Mate 40 Pro houses a 4400 mAh battery and this is where it gets disappointing because, even though it has a better chipset and specs compared to the Mate 30 Pro, the Mate 40 Pro has much less battery life, by over 100 minutes less.

It doesn’t compare to any of the top competition like the Apple iPhone 12 Pro which has a far better battery.

Conclusion

The Mate 40 Pro is a good decent flagship with glaring flaws which doesn’t make this the top flagship for the year. There are other frontrunners, which are way better.

Huawei Mate 40 Pro Singapore Price