Huawei's P50 Pro gets its global release now there is a slight change to the hardware the
chipset's no longer that kirin 9000 but the qualcomm snapdragon triple h
4g so slightly different version to the 5g triple h that i've been reviewing in the channel so with
this model here we get 8 gigabytes of ram and 256 gigabytes of storage it has wired 66 watt charging
and it's usb 3.1 which means video out great to see and wireless 50 watt charging the screen on it
which is 6.6 inches it's an oled up to 120 hertz refresh rate it outputs a billion colors and it
does have an end screen fingerprint reader the camera department well our selfie camera is a 32
megapixel one and then we have a zoom camera which is 3.5 times optical zoom that's 64 megapixels
megapixel main camera 40 megapixel black and white one and the ultra wide is 13 megapixels
inside the box you will find a type a to type c cable a tpu case which is a clear style one and
a it so this is huawei's supercharge it's 66 watts and it will take about 45 minutes to fully charge
the p50 pro now the build quality of this phone very nice you can see with this gold color even
though it looks more like a silver does reflect a lot so it's basically like looking at a mirror
and it is a complete fingerprint magnet they show up so easily with these high gloss surfaces
so curved edges on it in hand the weight of it feels well kind of standard for flagships now
which is 195 grams thickness is 9 sorry 8.5 but then with the camera modules it is then about 9.9
millimeters and it does bring it right up a little bit there so the power button and
then the volume button here on the side those are made out of metal metal frame around the outside
and those buttons do feel really good the build quality excellent now it does also have an ip68
water resistant rating so that means up to 1.5 meters for 30 minutes that it can handle which
is really good so the screen on the front 6.6 inches curvature to it means that the colors
right in the edges do tend to shift out you can see that happening just a little bit i do
find access to that power button with my thumb easy very good however the fingerprint reader
is far too low it should be about here or maybe there but look where it is down low it works well
10 out of 10 times for me it's very accurate optical one and i really had no issues with it
the main thing is the location of it for me just bugs me a little bit that they didn't
move it up a bit more i guess they got something in the way is why they couldn't do that bezels
don't look too bad and we've got a front facing 32 megapixel camera and then our very distinct
looking camera setup on the back here looks a little bit like binoculars something similar there
so the zoom camera which is the module on the left here this one 64 megapixels it has optical image
stability 3.5 times optical zoom and then the main camera that one's 50 megapixels f 1.8 also optical
image stabilized we've got a 13 megapixel ultra wide 40 megapixel black and white camera which is
f 1.6 then along the bottom we have a usb 3.1 type c port here so that does support video out this is
really good to have and great that they're still keeping with this two antenna lines microphone
our sim tray so the sim tray will take two nano sims and it does actually support their
nano memory too which can be up to 256 gigabytes in capacity but you have to give up on course
one of those nano sims loudspeaker which is one of two you can see that the other loudspeakers here
on the top we have secondary microphones there and an ir transmitter you can see another two
antenna lines now i'll display here this one is an oled 6.6 inches and the resolution is 1228 by
2700 now when you go into the settings we get your typical options with a display you've got scaling
eye comfort dark modes there the display size you can change the font size and the color modes and
temperatures too i love that manufacturers include all of this that you can tweak that display to
your own preference there and exactly how you like it now the maximum brightness with this
particular screen very good i'm measuring just over 900 nets so you can see it in direct sunlight
not a problem now the refresh rate 120 hertz you can set it or leave it should i say on dynamic
which is by default so that's swapping between 90 hertz i believe and 120 and down to even 60
or force it on to 60 but for the entirety of this review and my time testing this phone i've set it
to 120 hertz same goes for the resolution as well so under resolution you can set that to
be a lower resolution or smart resolution which is by default but i forced it here on to the maximum
just so the display always looks its sharpest and its best so it's a very nice panel here i do like
what i'm seeing with it the curvature with the glass i'm not a huge fan with that on the edges
but i do see why they do it because it makes swiping for gestures just a little bit easier
and you can see that that app is not working there completely display tester doesn't like hms here it
wants google now speaking of that with the ui i can get on just fine now without google with
huawei so we've got pedal search the app gallery as i've mentioned in my previous huawei reviews
it's getting so much better that literally all the apps that i want and and games now
are there more developers are coming on board so we have pedal search so if you're after something
so if you for example you want youtube you won't have the youtube app okay without google but it
will give you an alternative here you can see it's coming up with youtube and app gallery one that's
been verified as well what that is going to do is just simply open it up in the internet in its web
browser okay so we do have youtube that way you can do the same with gmail there's work around for
everything using the email app you can access your gmail too as well google maps is now pedal maps
all right so that's the alternative apps you've got pedal search is also very good at finding apk
files for the apps you want so you can install them so you can run things like netflix you can
run whatsapp and those kind of general apps that most people will need they are all there now in
app gallery which is really good now performance of the phone i found it to be excellent running
android 11 so it's not on android 12 yet they're not there and the snapdragon triple 8 4g version
performs well with eight gigabytes of ram and the 256 gigabytes of storage so just go into some
of my little benchmarks that i've used here and you'll see that charge time is 44 minutes exactly
from five percent to 100 and if you have a look at the antutu score phrase snapdragon triple eight
i've seen them actually get eight hundred thousand points so it's a little bit lower than i expected
here but still it's reasonably fast chipset it did in that one test though go up almost seven degrees
running that so it's still a hot chip and i'll get on to just how it performs later on battery life
so this was with the screen set to 120 hertz with my fixed battery life benchmark here it will go
for almost 10 hours now realistically you're looking at real world use of about
seven hours okay you're gonna get 120 hertz you set it to 60 you will get a lot more than that
and wildlife also ran that little benchmark there just to compare it to what the newer gen chips are
so the new snapdragon 8 gen 1 can get an average frame rate in this test of over 50 frames per
second the gpu really stepped it up but this gpu the adreno 660 still good in all kind of games
and it's only the snapdragon the newer one that's good for bursts geekbench score so the newer chip
the latest gen eight gen one sorry uh is over a thousand point single core score but we're not
trust me we're not missing out on too much out of the newer devices i've been testing now the
oneplus 10 pro and the xiaomi 12 and the 12 pro those three snapdragon ones they're about the same
when real world use performance is this so here we have the internal storage very fast you can see
great speeds not going to hold up or bottleneck this system at all and it does have a wide level
1 cert which is good so netflix is working in full hd amazon prime video isn't that's standard
definition it hasn't been approved by this device by them they have their own separate white list
it seems so wireless speeds very good what you'd expect out of a flagship peak speeds around almost
getting up towards 900 megabits per second and the average speeds in the area where i test downstairs
still getting very good speeds and i've had no problems with the range of it gps typical qualcomm
chipset here you get the accuracy cap of three meters it gets a lock really quick quickly and it
does see a huge amount of satellites with that one so that's it for the tests the ui the task manager
just want to point out it's very very quick so the whole time i've been using it i've experienced no
bugs no issues no glitches or anything like that it's stable task manager doesn't seem too overly
aggressive killing apps so you can multitask there quite nicely and yes some people they can't live
without google well i can at least i know that i've got all the alternative apps and app gallery
pretty much has everything now that i would need in the phone in there which is good to see
then i do have to point out this and that is bloatware we do have quite a few on first boot
you can see snapchat we've got booking.com there's an another few things and then all of these
you're looking at right here those four folders are placeholders for applications that aren't
downloaded but you still have to go into them and then remove those individual apps so trying to get
us to download all these apps is what they're that's their aim isn't it why they've done that
so i wish that huawei could tone down a little bit on this and you do see
a few ads in app gallery too as well so bloatware is there and just the advertising
in the app store app gallery i wish they could just ease back a little bit on it now then our
audio so we have a downwards firing speaker here and then we've got the one at the top
and a bit of it comes out the earpiece too now these speakers i find sound excellent got a bit
of bass to them as well and the volume is very nice so here's a sample of them at 100 volume
gaming performance with the p50 pro is very good so the snapdragon triple eight is yes last gen
the adreno 660 is still a very good gpu it is a hot chip so gaming with pub g i've managed to
get a few kills not a problem at all and i've experienced no lag you can look down the scope
and no issues i'm running the ultra frame rate option so other games titles out there that do
support 120 hertz they will be playable of course on this phone so what i will do now is game pubg
here for at least an hour and report back on just how hot is the p50 pro going to get
the hottest point on the front of the screen i've just exited out of pubg after now an hour
of gaming so it did get up to i've seen 37 degrees that's the front so flipping it over on the back
you can see clearly where the chipset is that hot patch and it's currently about 35 degrees maximum
or so that i have seen so for a snapdragon triple eight which is a hot chipset huawei's done a good
job of keeping this cool for gaming and moving over to our video performance now so this is the
front facing camera it can shoot 4k 30 and 4k 60. it does have electronic image stabilization so as
i move ahead it is steadied out as you can see it's not shaking and trimming all over the place
and it's good to see it does have this 4k because so many other manufacturers that i commonly review
namely xiaomi don't still do this they've just only got 1080p with their front-facing camera
so here we have our ultra wide camera it's 30 frames per second you just sometimes see a bit
of jutter when you pan around with it now the good thing about this is i can now go into one times
and you see it swaps over to then the main camera here and we're able to zoom even further so once i
get to 3.5 you see it clicks over and goes over now to our zoom camera and i'll zoom into this
sign that's ten times zoom in factories actually eleven about nine at the moment there live video
so this is the main camera so walking here the electronic image stabilization is doing okay
of course in these conditions it doesn't look quite as good as daylight
and i'll swap over now to the ultra wide
there you go so you can simply just pull back and you've got the ultra wide camera you don't
have to stop recording it does swap over to those cameras which is really good to see so i'm going
to use a little bit of zoom now we'll go back to the main lens which is about to swap over to now
you can see that change and then to start to zoom in on the sign here there we go we swapped over to
the other the zoom camera right there that's five times digital zoom low light footage with
the front-facing camera it is using the screen as a flash for video so that's why it looks
so light well i'm stepping right next to some lights right there too that's why i'm lighter
than what it would normally be now if i was to turn off the flash just do that now press it off
there we go that's without using the screen as a flash you can see quite a bit darker now here
now judging from all the photos that i've taken that this p50 pro just like the other
p series phones has excellent cameras and it really does take a very good photo so i like
the zoom camera the 3.5 times we've got the main camera then the ultra wide so quite versatile in
that camera department so it's good that we can shoot with the front camera 4k video and 4k video
of course with the rear cameras and the stability and that optical image stabilization does seem
to be quite good with the main camera and the low light performance very pleased with some of those
shots even the zoom camera did surprise me at 3.5 times normally with the lens aperture it wouldn't
be as detailed and bright as it was when it came out so good processing there on the software side
of things and great to see that there's still with leica with the optics being used here in the p50
pro performance of the phone snapdragon 8 yes it is last gen now and it's only 4g i don't think
too many people are going to be put off by that because do you have 5g in your area or maybe you
are someone that does use 5g you download a lot then well you're going to be missing out on those
5g speeds unfortunately this now i do jump on to 4g plus and i've had no problems with it there
so battery life for 120 hertz screen and an oled isn't actually too bad you can typically see
around about six to seven seven maybe even eight hours of on-screen time but you will normally
have to charge it after a day of heavy use and that's typical so the 66 watt charging quite
fast about 45 minutes then you have the 50 watt charging which takes just over an hour which is
quite quick for wireless charging that's great build quality really good ipx68 so that's great
and the fingerprint reader no problems although as i pointed out i just think the fingerprint reader
location is a little bit too low for my personal liking i think they should have placed it a bit
higher would have been a lot more comfortable i guess they expect people to hold it in one hand
then scan and not try and do it one-handed i guess that's what the design team that's
this wired is there so all up i think this is excellent phone but of course yes it's for someone
that maybe can live without your google apps now hms and then the app gallery definitely improving
i can actually live just fine without google on my phone because most of the apps that i would
use the common general ones and your messenger apps and all that they're there in app gallery
and then pedal search can pick up and find the apk files that you can install and a lot of developers
have changed the way that their games are and some of their other applications so they don't
demand that they have google services which is good so in a way we're getting around that and
we're getting a lot more support from developers coming through too with flowers at gallery
price wise this is where i think yeah okay 1200 euros i do believe it's a bit steep don't get me
wrong it's fantastic hardware really nice but it is a last gen chipset flagship one but it's last
gen and then when i mentioned that well you've got hms with this one so i think it's a bit
of an ask that price tag there so that's my review of huawei's p50 pro their 2022 flagship