so it feels to me that Huawei are climbing back they are making a comeback especially after my
week now of using this fantastic phone the mate 50 Pro now the mate 50 pro has some advancements
in the camera Department which they normally do have we've got a mechanical variable aperture with
this main sensor so 50 megapixels with an F 1.4 very bright very open up to then a more closed F4
so that's brilliant for mobile tech we'll see if it makes a difference in the photo quality but a
bit of a spoiler here I've already done a camera comparison and it goes head to head with the top
flagships when it comes to still performance it's all powered by the Snapdragon 8 plus gen 1 with
a 4G modem no 5G support with it a screen that is 6.74 inches 120 hertz AMOLED and this review unit
that they sent out to me has eight gigabytes of RAM and 200 and 56 gigabytes of ufs 3.1
storage included with the mate 50 Pro you will find a 66 watt charger it also does support 50
watt wireless charging our type A to type c cable tpuk SIM tray tool and of course the phone itself
now the phone does feel really well put together great build quality and finish we've got a curved
glass here which is a type of scratch resistant impact resistant glass they're using their own
brand now so it's not using say gorilla glass 5 or anything like that no their own glass with it
middle frame around the outside you can see the antenna lines over here you can see we've got a
metal power button and our volume up and down with some antenna lines there too now the thickness of
it is 8.5 millimeters and it's been a little bit heavier too with a solid metal frame it's around
205 grams down the bottom we do have a type c Port that supports video out USB 3.1 the SD cards sorry
micro SD cards are not supported in this but we do have support for their Nano memory and it
will take two Nano Sims downward firing speaker there's a speaker in the earpiece and yes we do
have a bit of an ugly Notch here now it does have a time of flight 3D biometric face scanning camera
alongside the ultra wide 13 megapixel camera I'll give you samples of those later on so it's good
that we've got the secure face unlocking but the trade-off is yes a more ugly Notch I personally
would have preferred just a single cut out I think would have looked a little bit better in hand it
does feel really good oh and up the top we do have our secondary mic and even an IR transmitter that
we don't normally see the back of it this is the black color but it's almost like a silver when you
see it in the light because it's very reflective it's an absolute fingerprint magnet so with our
camera array here we do have three cameras so a 13 megapixel Ultra wide 64 megapixel Periscope
camera that has Optical image stabilization up to 3.5 times optical zoom and then the main camera
this one's something special because it has a mechanical aperture in it that you can adjust
variable so from a very bright if 1.4 stop right up to F5 4 and it is this one here it changes when
you can go through into the aperture mode in the camera application to adjust it and in auto mode
it will automatically do that for you this one's the Periscope camera now it does have a microphone
here and it also has laser assist auto focus so this display is very bright it's well over
800 nits you can see it in direct sunlight not a problem with it at all up to 120 hertz now in the
settings we've got your typical options that you would see on most Android phones and huawei's got
a few others in there now screen resolution this is basically like a 1200p display just
over so it's more than full HD resolution it is sharp and I the whole time I've been using it
have forced it onto the high mode here now you can save power and have it on low or set it to Smart
resolution which will be doing that automatically you don't notice too much of a difference but if
you look closely when it's on low you will see that it just doesn't look quite as sharp the
same goes for the refresh rate you can override this or you can just keep it on the auto mode
which is dynamic now sadly there is no 90 Hertz option in here now with previous phones they have
actually given us that option so I do hope with a firmware update we get 90 as I mentioned in a
lot of my videos It's The Sweet Spot between for fluidity and then a bit of battery saving
but the battery's been pretty good on this phone so far which I'll talk about later on you've got
your color modes temperatures they're all there and overall it's a very nice looking screen it's
just on the edges you can see a little bit like right now how it's gone to a blue tint there
shifts out those colors but most people don't look at their phones like that straight on so
it isn't too much of an issue however I would have preferred that this was a flat display
the screen is vibrant if you want it to be blacks are very deep and overall it's definitely Flagship
grade now I want to talk a little bit about the UI and the performance super smooth no
bugs no glitches feels great everything loads up really quick thanks to that ufs 3.1 storage
and of course Snapdragon 8 plus gen 1. now all your favorite apps so WhatsApp Twitter Netflix
Amazon Prime video even Gmail YouTube and those G apps are working thanks to this particular
application right here which I won't mention its name but that's the way you can get around some
of those issues but pedal maps and I've always mentioned this before it does work really well
it's a good substitute for Google Maps and then if you need to find everything you've got pedal
search you have to the app store which is getting a lot better called app gallery from Huawei so
this we're going to find so many of those apps you want and if it doesn't have it then pedal
search will find it on a third-party site you can get it from say like APK mirror or APK pure
and download those apps so you can see that I've got pretty much everything I need in fact there's
nothing I'm lacking here I can even open up Google Maps I can use that it works because
of that application that one here that I just mentioned I don't want to say its name because
I don't want to get it removed or anything and be responsible but it's great I've got all the apps I
need performance is excellent and this of course is running still emui we aren't over moving over
to Harmony OS it seems with not at least this phone's release the mate 50 Pro Global version
now the ROMs performance may be great there is one for me gray area and that is there's a lot of
bloatware now there are these placeholders that when you first boot up your new phone your new
mate 50 Pro you're gonna see this entertainment we've got Snapchat so there's a bit of bloatware
and more and more seems to be creeping in I do hope that Huawei tones back a bit on this because
I think it's unacceptable to have so many things to start with now the good thing is they're not
actually loaded in you can easily go and remove them now if you're wondering about the playback
of Netflix Amazon Prime video all working in full HD this is really good to see because on some
previous models even though we had the wide Vine one cert it just wasn't working it was still in
standard definition but this is Netflix inside it you can see full hd's working it's decoding using
vp9 and a VC high but HDR even though this is an HDR capable screen it doesn't seem to be supported
just yet at least with Netflix or because they don't have it with the cert it doesn't seem
to be listed in there with HDR at least but everything's in full HD that's really good so
Disney plus Amazon Prime video HBO all of those kind of ones all those DRM streaming services
should all be in 1080P which is excellent it's what you want so if you do run antutu Benchmark
on just the standard balanced power mode this is the score you get which when I saw this I went oh
hang on that's not actually Snapdragon 8 plus gen 1 performance so that's more of a battery saving
balanced a true balanced but then when you put it into high performance mode there we go over
a million points that's the kind of scores I was expecting so this version of the Snapdragon 8
plus gen 1 has a 4G modem it doesn't have a 5G capable modem for me that's not an issue
at all because here I live 5G is actually 4G network really it's kind of fake they just
transmit the signal and you're not ever going to get proper 5G speeds internal storage very
quick ufs 3.1 spec and look at those sequential reads and writes and the random writes very quick
reads a little bit lower than I was expecting but in still time launch time of applications
everything is blazing fast on the mate 50 Pro no issues with performance geekbench score here
I'm pretty sure I did run that yes I can see I ran that in the performance mode that's what you
can expect so you could run this on your own phone to compare the performance and see how
much faster the mate 50 is going to be so charge time took me 31 minutes to go from 14 to 99 ignore
this it's not detecting the capacity properly this application with antutu okay it is a 4 700
milliamp hour battery it's not just around almost or below 3000 that's incorrect but the battery
time just onto that soon or I wanted to point out too we do have full support of a camera 2 API okay
so not quite level three and here we go better run time fixed test 200 nits of brightness 120 hertz
was enabled it got me there 9 hours and 13 minutes now you are looking on screen times with this
phone if you keep it in balanced at least seven and a half hours you can make it through a full
day uh with a bit of heavy use I've been really impressed with the standby battery drain overnight
it's only losing about two percent that's really good a lot of other phones will lose seven eight
percent so that's excellent that's not what the always-on display enabled too by the way and
another charge time here so from 16 to 100 percent took just 30 minutes so it's faster charge and you
do have 50 watt wireless charging which does take a roundabout or just under an hour to fully charge
because I do have a separate camera comparison against the pixel 7 Pro the mate 50 Pro here
and the iPhone 14 pro Max I just wanted to talk briefly about it that what I've seen
from the camera video wise it's a little bit of a letdown Huawei have some updates I think that
are required the stabilization just could not match really any other flagships that I've seen
recently since a bit off and the video quality when you pan around you sometimes see quite a
few jutters a bit of jerky motion coming through so this work on that and that area this is both 4K
34k 60 same thing with the front facing camera it sometimes had a bit of noise to it a better
work as needed and the audio bitrate with video is sadly only 96 kilobits per second I'm seeing
this now with a lot of different brands too that just simply aren't updating the audio bitrate from
the default that comes with Android builds still quality this is what I where I'm really impressed
that main camera with yes it's variable mechanical called aperture is a really top end camera and I'm
talking it's got to be at least in the top three compared to say the pixel 7 Pro iPhone
14 pro Max are two other phones that people do regard as being some of the best and I saw that
with low light performance Stills during the day really excellent cameras you're not going to be
disappointed with the still performance at least with the photos that the mate 50 Pro can produce
so if you want to see more on this please do check out the in-depth camera comparison side by side
against the pixel 7 Pro and the iPhone 14 pro Max you'll be surprised how well this mate 50 Pro did
now the audio quality you can expect from calls is like any other Flagship the earpiece
does sound quite rich now it also doubles here as a secondary loudspeaker so we've got stereo
speakers one down the bottom here and I'll give you a sample of them now at 100 they've
got a bit of bass to them so mids and the volume could possibly be a little bit louder
but overall they are good really excellent loudspeakers we have with the mate 50 Pro
gaming performance it's excellent with a Snapdragon 8 plus gen 1 as you'd expect really
good now it will start out on the highest possible settings with Genji and impact at 60 frames per
second but eventually the frame rate does drop off the hotter the phone starts to get the more
you game you start to notice that an occasional little frame depths do appear here and there now
I see this on other Snapdragon 8 plus phones it's just a characteristic of the chipset that it will
eventually get quite hot but it doesn't get to the point like with other brands like xiaomi with the
12T Pro for example or the 12s Ultra they would display a message boot you out of the game and
display your message message saying that their phone is basically overheating doesn't happen
here with Huawei yes it gets hot around the frame it gets up to around about 47 degrees Celsius so
it gets hot to the touch but it is good that it doesn't Crash and Burn like other brands so the
gaming performance is on par with other flagships out there got the eight gigabytes of RAM and it
really does run everything out there really well so to me it seems Huawei are definitely bouncing
back when it comes to their mobile phones I know because of certain restrictions they have focused
their energy really into other areas like to say the PC market wearables and things like that the
mobile division has seen a bit of a slum but clearly to me with this model with some of
the Innovation especially with that main camera and the rest of it the general package they are
coming back they're bouncing back now app gallery I keep mentioning this that it's improving and
I'm clearly seeing it I found all the apps I need either through that or with petal search
in conjunction with that and managed to get everything I need so Twitter you've got Netflix
Amazon Prime video and Full HD WhatsApp is working you can even get Google Maps and YouTube and
others you may need that are part of G apps using the app that I showed you so there's work around
is really for everything and I can happily live and use this phone live with it without having any
issues like oh my favorite app isn't working no it's all there it at least for me personally and
build quality Top Notch great screen yes it's curved I would have preferred flat yes we do
have the notch but we do gain of course that 3D proper 3D there face unlocking with Biometrics
and the timer flight sensor that's next to the 13 megapixel front-facing camera now I wanted to just
talk about it a little bit that it's unlocking really well it seems to just work every single
time now you said I'll compare it to say the face unlock you get with an iPhone it is very
good now the fingerprint reader just to mention it now because I know I haven't shown it in a
clip with the overhead camera that it's a little bit lower the sensor I wish it was a bit higher
there but it's working really well I've had no issues with it it's working 10 out of 10 times
UI performance fast smooth fluid the camera is really good stills out of this so low light the
zoom shots are not bad at all and then that main camera with the variable aperture takes
excellent photos and if you haven't seen my camera comparison versus the pixel 7 Pro and the iPhone
14 pro Max it really he does trade blows and in some instances win out some of those shots
with those top Flagship phones that you can get so you're not going to be disappointed at all
with the Stills the photos that the mate 50 Pro can deliver and hold up it's a decent package
fast charging time it's only about 30 minutes wireless charging 50 Watts it's got video out
it really has pretty much everything there and even the latest Snapdragon 8 plus gen
one with good performance good gaming performance so I really do like to see
them improving here and I am looking forward to Future devices that they do release Huawei