(soothing music)
- This is a HUAWEI Mate 10 Pro
and if you've been on YouTube much in the past few months,
you've probably seen this phone before.
Or, maybe you read some suspicious user reviews.
But despite HUAWEI's best efforts,
nobody in the US has been able to buy this phone
until just this month, when it went on sale unlocked
in a handful of places, like Amazon or Best Buy.
Now there's a whole backstory about HUAWEI trying
to break into the US market with this particular phone,
and how it's been completely unable to get any
carrier's support, despite coming awfully close.
Now that might be due to some factors
that are outside of HUAWEI's control,
such as a distrust of the company by the US government.
But it got me wondering, is the
Mate 10 pro a phone anyone should buy?
Even if HUAWEI had been able to get it on AT&T
or Verizon or any other US carrier,
would anyone have bought it anyways?
In terms of hardware, the $799 Mate 10 Pro has
almost everything you'd expect from a
flagship phone in late 2017 or early 2018.
It has a metal and glass body, with great
build quality and tight tolerances.
It's water-resistant, it has a
tall aspect ratio screen with minimal bezels.
It has stereo speakers and, of course,
a dual rear camera system.
Inside of the phone is HUAWEI's own
top of the line processors, six gigabytes of RAM
and 128 gigabytes of storage.
There's a huge 4,000 milliamp hour battery
that can keep it going all day and then some.
It even has an IR blaster, so you can
use it to control your TV or other electronics.
And like many other high end phones,
it doesn't have a headphone jack,
but HUAWEI does provide both these ear pod
knockoff headphones and a USBC to
3.5 millimeter adaptor in the box.
It also doesn't have wireless charging
despite the fact that it has a glass back.
But those are fairly minor complaints,
if there's a hardware feature you want,
the Mate 10 Pro probably has it,
and for the most part, the hardware works really well.
The Mate 10 Pro is as fast as any recent
Android flagship, the hardware's nice to hold and,
like I said before, it has terrific battery life.
It doesn't have any obvious annoyances,
like a poorly place fingerprint sensor
or extra button for voice assisting you'll never use,
or a notch that covers up part of the top of the screen.
(soothing music)
The six inch display is a lower resolution
than many of it's peers at only 1080p,
but I haven't really had an issue with that.
It's OLED, so it has deep blacks and vibrant colors
and has excellent viewing angles
and it gets bright enough outdoors for sunny days.
I really like the Mate 10 Pro's speakers,
which automatically switch from mono to stereo
when you turn the phone from portrait to landscape,
and while I wouldn't say that the
Leica-branded rear camera's as good as say,
like, a Pixel 2, or an iPhone X,
it's certainly a capable shooter with
fast focus and performance, good detail and
pleasing, if maybe a little bit saturated colors.
The app has a ton of features and options,
including manual controls, various portrait
and fake blurring modes and automatic scene functions
that attempt to optimize the camera
for whatever your subject happens to be.
My favorite mode is a monochrome option,
which only uses data from one of
the Mate 10 Pro's camera sensors,
produce some of the nicest black and white images
you can get from a smart phone.
But as good as this hardware is, HUAWEI's software
never lives up to the hardware's potential.
Now the Mate 10 Pro does run Android 8.0 Oreo,
but it has HUAWEI's EMUI interface on top of it,
and this is about as far from a
clean version of Android as you can get.
The best way I can describe it is,
it's a poorly made knockoff of iOS.
HUAWEI has customized almost everything about Android
and often it's not in a good way.
For example, you can't expand notifications
on the lock screen like you can do
with every other Android phone,
so deleting an email or marking a to-do complete
can't be done without unlocking the phone.
The Settings menu and the share sheet
have been lifted right out of iOS,
and most of the apps for sharing are hidden
by default for some inexplicable reason.
Sure, you can change some of those things
by downloading a different launcher or
messaging app or whatever, but you can't
change things like the quick settings menu
that doesn't match the rest of the
notification shade, or that awful share sheet.
On top of that, there's frustrating bugs.
Even when I did download another launcher
and attempted to use that, the
Mate 10 would frequently reset
the default to HUAWEI's own launcher.
This just isn't the kind of software experience
I expect on an $800 phone, especially when there
are already so many better options available.
It's bad enough for me to say that nobody should
buy the Mate 10 Pro, especially not at this price.
You can get all of the hardware performance
with none of the software headaches
from any number of other Android phones
available unlocked or through carriers.
Then I think about what would've happened had
HUAWEI been able to launch this phone with AT&T,
and how worse everything would've been with a
carrier's bloatware loaded on top of it.
It just makes me feel like this wouldn't have
made much of a difference for HUAWEI.
It's hard to see anyone buying this phone
as it is right now, carrier support or not.
I think that HUAWEI has done a lot right
with the Mate 10 Pro's hardware,
and if it wasn't so expensive,
I could perhaps excuse some of it's software issues.
But this is a premium priced phone,
and you should get a premium experience with it,
which unfortunately the Mate 10 Pro doesn't provide.
And how it's been completely unable to get any
carrier support, despite coming awfully close.
- [Male] You guys are spies!
- Trying to do work here, Eli.
(laughing)