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00:00Hey what's up, MKBHD here. You know what sucks? Not being able to recommend a phone, no matter
00:09how good it is. See, every time Huawei drops a new phone, I feel like the conversation
00:14we all have is the same thing over and over, which is, it's a great piece of hardware,
00:20and they made these advances, and here's some new features, but if you live outside of China,
00:25you probably shouldn't get it. And even if you do, the experience is so gutted that
00:31it's just not worth it. And so what do you know, believe it or not, they just dropped
00:34the Mate 40 Pro, and to me, this phone, this is the ultimate expression of like, no matter
00:40how good their new phone is, it's impossible to recommend. Which sucks, because this phone
00:45has some really technically impressive stuff. You can see this new color slash finish here
00:50on the back of this one, they call it Mystic Silver, and it has this sheen to it that reflects
00:55pretty much every color of the rainbow, depending on what angle you hold it, which is technically
01:00impressive. And then around the front, you see the huge display, a roughly 2K, 6.76 inch
01:06OLED display with a 90 hertz refresh rate, fingerprint reader underneath the glass, of
01:10course, and then they're doing what they did last year with the Mate series, which is curving
01:14that display right over the edges, till it like, melts into the side of the phone. Now,
01:20y'all know how I feel about actually using curved displays, they create unnecessary
01:23accidental touches, they can be frustrating, they cost more, and they're more fragile,
01:29but Huawei's sticking with it, basically because they look so dramatic. Like, this one's again,
01:33curved so much that they had to move the power and volume buttons further back on the phone,
01:38and sometimes even the content on the display, or the keyboard itself that you're typing
01:42on, is like, melted off of the side. Inconvenient, but technically impressive. Then around the
01:49back, there's even more. You can see the camera bump, they're calling this a space
01:52ring design, inspired by the first photo of a black hole, which might be a bit of
01:59a stretch, but it's definitely a unique design for the four cameras that they've put up in
02:02this phone, and because it's in the middle, actually it has the unique benefit of not
02:06rocking as much as most other phones that put the camera bump in the corner. And the
02:11cameras include a 50 megapixel massive primary sensor, 1 over 1.28 inches, that's nearly
02:19RX100 1 inch sensor size, so very technically impressive. Then there's a 5x periscope telephoto
02:25lens, there's a macro camera, and there's a 100 degree ultra-wide camera. Even the speakers
02:31on this phone go the extra mile. So, typically on a flagship phone, you'll see like the speaker
02:35grill at the bottom, and then maybe an earpiece stereo speaker at the top. With Mate 40 Pro,
02:41they're giving you stereo speakers with a real second speaker from a grill at the top,
02:46in the earpiece. And so the stereo effect is better, and just in general, these speakers
02:50get really loud, and they're some of the loudest I've heard in a smartphone, and they actually
02:54sound good. So that is technically very impressive. Oh, and while we're talking about what's inside,
03:00this phone also has a 4400 milliamp hour battery, pretty solid flagship size cell, and it supports
03:05up to 66 watt charging, which is insanely fast. You might remember I just looked at
03:11the OnePlus 8T with its 65 watt fast charging, so I guess they literally one-upped that,
03:17but that whole thing went 0 to 100 in under 40 minutes, which is crazy. And then on top
03:21of that, it can do 50 watt wireless charging, which is incredible. Now to get that, you'll
03:27need like the exact right wireless charger that's compatible, probably built by Huawei,
03:32and the setup has to be just right, but the fact that it's able to achieve that at all
03:36is technically impressive. Then to top off everything, inside this phone is powered
03:41by their new Kirin 9000 chip, which is actually a five nanometer chipset. And so this and
03:48Apple's A14 Bionic and the new iPhones are the first five nanometer chipsets shipping
03:53in any smartphones this year. So that's of course a bleeding edge, and all those extra
03:57transistors translates generally into performance and efficiency improvements. Now this isn't
04:03the review, so I haven't tested battery life and it almost makes me wonder why they didn't
04:07just go all out and drop 120 Hertz display in this phone, if the five nanometer chipset
04:13is so impressive and so efficient, but nevertheless, it's on that bleeding edge. It gives you stuff
04:18like Fusion HDR video with a real-time processing of every frame and just great overall performance
04:24throwing around apps in multitasking and throughout this whole UI. And then last bell slash whistle,
04:30there is a pretty big pillbox cutout in the top corner of the display, which I was a little
04:36worried about at first, because anytime I see that, I'm like, all right, what did they put
04:39up next to the selfie camera? Like you have this whole huge immersive display with razor
04:43thin bezels and you did a pillbox cutout, but inside this one, you get a standard selfie
04:48camera and another hundred degree ultra wide. So not some like pointless monochrome or depth
04:55sensor or anything like that. It's actually a significantly wider selfie camera. I haven't
05:00seen that since the Pixel 3 XL, but I thought it was great back then. And I still think
05:05it's great now. Technically, actually, you know what? That one's not that technically
05:10impressive. They are still kind of far apart. It's just smart. It's just smart. So Huawei's
05:15Mate series each year feels like it's consistently built to just show off the best that they
05:19can technically achieve. And they have the P series at the beginning of the year, which
05:23is typically more photography focused and they make a bunch of other phones, but it's
05:27just another phone they make that is very technically impressive. So the story lately
05:32has been, if this is such a good phone, then what are they doing to build up their own
05:38experiences to catch up to what they're missing with the lack of Google support? What are
05:42they actually building? And you can see it's running EMUI 11 here. Not my favorite UI as
05:47I've talked about, but it doesn't mean there aren't any nice features. There are multitasking
05:51features and quick launchers and customization and plenty of stuff like that. But it's the
05:56app situation that's still a sticking point. Huawei's app gallery continues to grow, which
06:01is great, but it's still missing some pretty fundamental pieces that I would say most people
06:06would find needed daily on their phone, Instagram, YouTube. Some of my favorite productivity apps
06:12aren't here. All of the Google apps, of course. And sometimes they'll actually just list them
06:17in the app gallery, but as literally web apps. So with a link you can see for good measure,
06:23it's just launching it in the browser. Now, first thing Huawei would say to that is they're
06:26actually making pretty significant improvements to their first party apps. So they're alternatives
06:31to stuff we're used to. So they have their own shopping app. They have their own browser.
06:35They have their own mapping and navigation apps. And so that's pretty technically impressive
06:41too. But to that, I would also add my take, which is I've always recommended don't buy
06:45a piece of tech based on the promise of future software updates. Buy it because it's good
06:52now and you'd be great with it now if it never got updated. And this app store, this
06:57app gallery and all these services being built, they are really great that they're putting
07:01in the work and the effort for them, but they're not done yet. They're not finished being built
07:06yet. So they'll continue to make incredible phones like this, but I'll have to continue
07:10waiting until it's achieved that replacement level. So while Huawei has gotten so good
07:16at making technically impressive hardware, the end of the video is still the same, which
07:22is like, Oh, I wish I could recommend it. Like imagine, take the logo off this phone,
07:27take the Huawei out of this phone and imagine this phone from someone else, the Samsung's,
07:33the Apple's of the world. This would be right up against the bleeding edge of the stuff
07:36that they make. 5 nanometer chip, super crazy wireless and wired charging tech. All this,
07:43this camera tech in here, it's, it's really good, but I'm not recommending it. But all
07:48that being said, I'm still happy to see the effort because don't think the other companies
07:53aren't noticing this stuff. Either way, that's been it. Thanks for watching. A lot more coming
07:59soon in Techtober. Stay tuned. Catch you guys later. Peace.