Huawei’s rapid-fire event this Thursday brought many new devices, the most interesting of which are, of course, the new Mate flagships. The ANC over-ear headphones, the fancy smartwatch and the other things are interesting as well, don’t get us wrong, but let’s focus on the phones for now.
Starting with the Huawei Mate 40 Pro. This phone will be available in the UK on November 13 and should arrive in most parts of Europe by the end of the year. As for its siblings - they are not coming to the Old Continent yet or perhaps ever, even though Huawei announced their prices in euro.
Speaking of, the Pro will cost €1,200. That’s €100 more than the Mate 30 Pro last year and €200 more than the P40 Pro. Is it worth it? Depends on what you’re buying the phone for.
Comparing the Mate 40 Pro with the P40 Pro, you’ll see that the camera is (mostly) identical. It features the same 50MP sensor (the largest currently on the market, 1/1.28”), the same 12MP periscope lens (5x zoom) and... well, okay, the ultrawide camera was demoted from 40 MP to 20 MP, but actually we found in our review that the new module performs better.
The Mate changes the selfie formula by putting an ultrawide lens in front of a 13MP sensor. This enables group selfies with just one camera, which now has the ability to shoot slow-mo clips at 1080p to boot. That’s another upgrade over the P40 Pro.
Next up is the Kirin 9000 chipset. The P-series already had 5G connectivity, as did some Mate 30 models, so that’s not entirely new. But the new chip blows the Kirin 990 out of the water in terms of performance. It’s the best-performing Android in our database at the moment. It will likely give the A14 a run for its money as well but cross-platform benchmarks are always bound to be unfair one way or the other, so it's hard to tell.
There’s also the faster charging, the 66W wired and 50W wireless support are significantly more powerful than what the P40 Pro and Mate 30 Pro have to offer (40W wired, 27W wireless).
They are not much faster, though. For comparison, the Mate 40 Pro reached 87% charge in 30 minutes, a full charge too 45 minutes. For the P40 Pro, the numbers are 80% in 30 minutes, and 50 minutes to full. The 2019 Mate was a tad slower than that.
The screen on the Mate 40 Pro is larger than before, a 6.76” OLED and the touch sampling rate was boosted to 240 Hz. However, refresh rate remains at 90 Hz, which is pretty basic for a flagship these days (and is matched by the P40 Pro).
Why do we keep comparing the Huawei Mate 40 Pro with the P40 Pro and Mate 30 Pro? Well, because these phones live in a bubble – with no access to Google services, they rely on Huawei’s platform and app store instead.
That platform keeps expanding, just yesterday Huawei added Petal Maps, Huawei Docs and improved Search. So you can definitely live a Google-free life, but will you?
Moving on, the Huawei Mate 40 Pro+ essentially the same phone as the regular Pro, except for the camera. It has a longer periscope lens – the 240 mm focal length offers 10x optical zoom – and there’s a mid-range tele lens for 3x zoom.
The price of the extra flexibility afforded by the new zoom cams (and the 4 extra gigs of RAM) is €200 over the regular Pro. That is if the Pro+ ever launches outside of China, which is not a given (the P40 Pro+ never did).
Then there’s the Porsche Design Mate 40 RS, which is a Pro+ with a sporty exterior straight from the drawing board of the design firm. The price is high, but this is aimed at the “money is no object” crowd so it doesn’t matter.
Finally, we get to the humble Huawei Mate 40. The vanilla model is a mixed bag compared to the Mate 30. The screen is slightly smaller, but refreshes at 90Hz. Also, wireless charging was dropped, that was a feature of the Mate 30. That said, the new model packs more processing power thanks to a slightly cut back version of the new chipset (the GPU core count went from 24 to 22). And it has the new 50MP main camera and 13MP ultrawide selfie cam.
The Mate 40 is priced at €900 though it’s unclear when it will be released or even if it will come to Europe and other markets outside of China at all.
There’s the Huawei Mate 30E Pro 5G too, a version of the Mate 30 Pro with a revised version of the Kirin 990 5G chipset (dubbed 990E). This one is even less likely to leave China, but we’re including it in the poll for completeness’ sake.
Alright, which (if any) Mate 40 model are you interested in owning? The Mate 40 Pro is in this poll too, so we’ll know how it compares to its siblings.
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