One of the fall’s most interesting flagships is the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, which we just unboxed below. It just so happens to be our first contact with a smartphone that has a F/1.6 aperture camera, since the LG V30 has yet to reach us. The device is priced at around $900 and it’s a Leica-totting phablet with an OLED screen and a passion for AI.
We’ve already unboxed the Huawei Mate 10 Lite by the way, so we’re slowly but surely making our way up Mate 10 series. This 6 inch flagship debuted in Munich earlier this fall, as part of a Mate 10 lineup, that includes the Mate 10, Mate 10 Pro, Mate 10 Lite and Mate 10 Porsche Design. Back to the Mate 10 Pro, it lacks an audio jack, which is replaced by an USB Type-C to 3.5 mm adapter bundled in the box.
Also in the box we find a hefty charger, with a generous fast charge, the manual, SIM key, USB Type-C cable and a flexible clear case. Unlike the Mate 8 and Mate 9 before it, this device uses a glass back, not a full metal case. The frame is still aluminum and it’s well built and solid, so you can grip it properly when wielding the device. Available in Titanium Gray, Midnight Blue and Mocha Brown this smartphone measures 7.9 mm in thickness, weighs 178 grams and has glass at both the back and front side, gently curved to the sides and also with narrow bezels.
Actually, this device kinda inaugurates the whole narrow bezel 18:9 approach, to be honest. Its screen offers a Full HD+ resolution, OLED panel and HDR10 support, so Netflixers will rejoice. Inside we find the potent Kirin 970 processor, with its very own NPU meant for AI, as well as 4 or 6 GB of RAM, coupled with 64 GB or 128 GB of storage.
There’s a LTE Category 18 modem inside this smartphone, a premiere it seems and we also find a fingerprint scanner at the back, plus an infrared emitter at the top. The battery is a generous 4000 mAh unit and the camera is a dual one, at the back at least. We’ve got a combo of a 20 megapixel monochrome sensor and a 12 MP color one, with F/1.6 aperture, OIS and dual LED flash.
There’s also PDAF, laser focus and 2X hybrid zoom, plus a nifty AI feature, that recognizes objects around. For selfies we have an 8 megapixel camera and the device runs on Android 8.0 Oreo with EMUI 8.0 on top. Forgot to mention that the body of the Mate 10 Pro is IP67 certified, meaning it can take on water or dust. It seems like a fully featured flagship, a rather grippy and compact one, which we’ll test over the next few days.
You can get the device here.
