The Huawei Mate 10 Pro, in my opinion, is the best looking Huawei phone yet.
This titanium gray color with a reflective band highlighting the dual camera units looks
pretty sweet.
Huawei brought me to CES this year to live stream the launch of the Mate 10 Pro over
on my Facebook and show the world the outside of their phone.
Now it's time to show off the insides of the Mate 10 Pro here on YouTube.
Let's get started.
[Intro]
The exterior of the phone is rather exquisite, but as we know, true beauty lies on the inside
and it's time to open her up.
Getting inside the Huawei Mate 10 Pro is pretty similar to other water resistant glass backed
phones.
Heat is our best friend, along with a strong suction cup and some pry tools.
My metal pry tool does the initial penetration, and then the paper business card slips underneath
to slice the remaining adhesive while moving around the curve of that 3D glass.
I'm being careful not to put too much pressure or stress on the glass.
I don't want to damage anything.
As the waterproofing cools down, it'll harden back up and grip the glass even tighter, so
I'll keep warming it up until the adhesive is cut all the way around the outside of the
glass.
The fingerprint scanner is still attached to the back glass panel and still plugged
into the phone.
There is some super thin foam under that glass to keep some separation between the back panel
and the battery.
Normally at this point I like to unplug the battery, but we still don't have access to
that particular plug.
So I'll remove this upper protective panel that's 8 screws and set that off to the side.
This metal panel has the LED camera flash built in which is kind of cool.
Now that the covering is removed we have access to the battery plug, which I'll unsnap first,
followed by the fingerprint scanner ribbon – both unsnapping like little Lego's.
I'll set that rear glass panel off to the side.
I might be able to make this clear in a future video, but those aluminum protective plates
would still be blocking most of the internal circuits from view, so we'll have to see what
happens.
I'll unsnap the large charging port ribbon and make my way down to the bottom protective
plate with it's 6 screws.
It was nice of Huawei to use the standard Philips head screws inside their phone and
not go invent some proprietary screws of their own.
The metal protective plate pops off nicely, along with both the white antenna wires, and
the loud speaker Lego-style connector.
Once those are all off, the whole charging port contraption can be removed from the phone
exposing some pretty cool things.
We have the circular vibration motor and a rubber band around the USB-C charging port.
That rubber helps keep liquids from ingressing through the port into the sensitive electronics.
One cool thing that Huawei mentioned during their live stream was that the Huawei Mate
10 Pro can have 58% of it's 4000 milliamp battery super charge in just 30 minutes, which
means that the Mate 10 Pro charges 50% faster than the iPhone X, and that gets a thumbs
up from me.
There are watertight screens over the microphone holes in this phone.
And if we pop out the loud speaker, we find another watertight screen over the larger
hole.
The Huawei Mate 10 Pro is IP67 water resistant.
Now the battery itself is a massive 4000 milliamp hour capacity, blowing the iPhone X and larger
Note 8 out of the water.
There are no magical pull tabs under the battery though, and this is one of the hardest batteries
I've had to remove in a long time, which is kind of unfortunate since the battery does
need to be removed in order to replace a cracked screen which I'll explain in a second.
Bending or puncturing that battery would be pretty dangerous.
Magical pull tabs would have made a good addition to the construction.
This long display ribbon cable is for the screen, so I'm taking special care not to
damage this during the battery removal.
The next cool thing to look at are the large aperture dual f/1.6 cameras.
To get access to these, the motherboard needs to come out of the aluminum frame.
I'll unclip those extra wire cables.
I'll unsnap the front facing camera and then lift the whole motherboard from the phone.
The frame is pretty cool and you can still see the mill markings from the machine that
carved this frame from a single block of aluminum.
If Huawei is watching this, I want to come film that aluminum carving machine as soon
as possible.
The motherboard has that SIM card tray housing and two splotches of thermal paste to help
transfer the heat from the chip set to the frame of the phone.
Aluminum, while not quite as good as copper, still ranks pretty high with thermal conductivity
when compared with other metals.
A lot of computer heat sinks are made from aluminum.
And Huawei is multitasking the aluminum frame of their phone to cool their processors.
The dual cameras are built into one housing.
The bottom lens is a 12 megapixel optically stabilized color lens, while the top is a
20 megapixel monochrome sensor.
Both have an f/1.6 aperture.
Now for a screen replacement like we've seen on other phones, this screen is glued into
the frame and will most likely not survive if I try to remove it.
A new screen would just feed the new cable through the frame and sit right back in the
old spot.
Pretty straightforward.
Hopefully it all works when I put it back together.
We'll find out quick enough.
I'll tuck the motherboard back into the aluminum frame, and clip the front facing camera down
along with the volume ribbon, center screen ribbon cable, and the two white wire cables
off to the side.
Then I'll jump down to the bottom loud speaker, charging port, and take special care to feed
that loud speaker connection in between the charging port ribbon legs so it plugs in nicely.
The two little white wire cables get plugged in, and the metal protective plate gets screwed
in over top with the 6 Phillips head screws for that bottom panel.
Before the top metal plate can go on, I'll connect the charging port ribbon and the fingerprint
scanning ribbon.
The last thing I want to plug in is the battery.
The metal plate can go down over top with it's 8 Phillips head screws, and the back
glass panel will probably need new double sided tape to hold it in place.
Replacement backs usually come with this preinstalled.
I'll try and leave some links down in the video description.
I'm pretty excited for this phone.
It seems like it has a solid build, a good price, and pretty impressive specs.
It'll be interesting to see how this handles the durability test when I get my hands on
a retail box.
And huge thanks to Huawei for letting me show that the inside of their phone looks just
as good as the outside.
Hit that subscribe button if you haven't already.
And thanks a ton for watching.
I'll see you around.