Huawei Mate 10 Pro (Complete Walkthrough) (Video)

Ok guys, as a bit of a throwback to some older videos I used to do that you guys seemed to like. Here’s a complete walkthrough of Huawei’s newest flagship device the Mate 10 Pro.

Quick clarification, a walkthrough is my way of showing you guys every possible feature and give an overall idea of what makes this device unique. So by the end of it, any questions you might have had about how to use the device and what it can do, should be answered.

Check out the Mate 10 Pro in sexy blue for the lowest price I could find here.

Hardware

So, first up, the hardware.

The device is made out of aluminum and glass. Now, it doesn’t have Qi wireless charging–the usual reason for phones lately going with glass backs–instead, it was done for entirely aesthetic reasons. It also comes in 4 colors Midnight Blue, Titanium Gray, Pink Gold, and Mocha Brown which is the one I have here.

We have a volume rocker and the power button on one side, a SIM card/MicroSD card slot on the other, a speaker and USB-C port at the bottom and a rarity nowadays at the top–an IR blaster.

You can use this IR blaster to control TVs and cause delightful havoc at sports bars, by the way. Good times. You can check out my video I did a long time ago about this feature for more info on how it works though as it’s similar.

On the front, we have an 18:9 (2:1) 6″ AMOLED screen with a 2160×1080 resolution that is also capable of HDR10 (aka 10-bit color depth for better Dynamic Range from content that is HDR capable).

 

Above that, we have the 8MP f/2.0 aperture front facing camera.

Around the back, we have a 20MP f/1.6 aperture monochrome camera that captures details in black and white and a 16MP f/1.6 aperture RGB camera that captures in color, both designed by Leica (the popular camera company). The idea being that the device uses both of these together and some clever software to produce images with a lot more data than just one camera would. Along with this though, the device has some really interesting software that uses AI to improve these further, which we’ll get to shortly. Under that, is a fingerprint sensor used to unlock the device.

Powering all of this is Huawei’s latest Kirin 970 with an Octa-core processor, a 12-core GPU, and an NPU (a term you are going to hear more and more I imagine). The NPU is a Neural Processing Unit and is a chip designed to handle machine learning processes better than a CPU or a GPU can. It means that AI related tasks are performed by the NPU at a faster and more efficient rate and it frees up the CPU and GPU to handle their computations and graphics like they were better designed to do.

This is paired with 6GBs of RAM and the choice between a 64GB or 128GB storage model and the whole thing is powered by a 4000mah battery with Huawei’s Fast Charge that can charge the battery to 50% in 30 mins (and keep in mind that’s 2000mah in 30 mins compared to 50% on other devices).

Check out the Mate 10 Pro in sexy blue for the lowest price I could find here.

Software

On the software side, we have EMUI 8.0, Huawei’s latest iteration of their UI overlay on top of Android. And compared to older versions of EMUI, it’s been toned down and cleaned up which I appreciate.

You have your normal home screen and widgets but also have the option to customize things a bit further with themes and transitions for when swiping and we also have access to Google Now Cards at the far left instead of some proprietary newsfeed etc like we’ve seen with some other OEMs. Pulling down from the top of the device gives us our notification shade as normal and some customizable shortcuts like usual with the addition of a screen recorder, Huawei Share that allows you to share easier with other Huawei devices, a screenshot button, an eye comfort mode a la reducing of blue light, and a navigation dock which is an always-overlaid dot on the screen that you can drag around to reposition. The idea being you can remove the Android nav buttons to get more screen real estate and use that instead. You tap it to go back, tap and hold to go home, tap and hold then slide left or right to bring up multitasking tabs.

Swiping down on the home screen, gives you search and suggestions made by the on-device AI, going into settings gives you options to change the home layout grid, turn off the Google feed and app suggestions, choose what apps it can use for searching, disable badge app icons, and a couple other customization options.

They’ve also added a few apps to the device including their own music app, a backup app you can use to backup your data to a computer, internal storage, SD card, or a USB storage; a file browser; a flashlight; health app; customer care app for support with the device; a mirror to use as a mirror; phone clone app to transfer data to or from another Android or iOS device; an audio recording app that has options to optimize for multiple speakers, two speakers or normal frequency recording; a phone management app that you can use to one tap optimize the storage mobile data, battery, virus scanning, and handle blocked contacts; a SIM Toolkit app to handle some tools in the dual LTE capable SIM card slots available on some models; a theme app that allows you to customize the lock screen style, home screen & lock screen wallpapers, and the icons; a weather app, and Microsoft’s custom built for Huawei’s NPU translator app that translates text and voice a lot faster than the non-optimized version thanks to the AI needed for translation.

In settings, we have the normal fare with a few noteworthy additions. We have App Twin mode that allows you to log in with two separate accounts into the same app, handy if you have a business and personal WhatsApp for example, a systemwide dark mode to save power on the AMOLED screen, file safe mode that allows you to section off parts of your storage and encrypt them with a password to be accessed, app lock to fingerprint lock specific apps, and PrivateSpace which allows you to actually create entirely sandboxed versions of the UI with different apps, settings, etc. and can be accessed by using a specific fingerprint.

Another feature worth mentioning that’s unique is the ability to use any USB-C cable that supports DisplayPort, instead of a dock, to use the device in a desktop mode that allows you to use your apps in a windowed format with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard connected.

Camera

And finally, let’s go through the camera really quickly.

The camera app has the ability to do loseless 2x zoom; has a Pro mode for controlling all of the camera settings you’d expect by swiping up on the arrow above the shutter button; a ton of options by sliding over to the right with the standouts being RAW format in pro mode, watermarks, smile detection that will take a photo when someone smiles, object tracking you can use to adjust focus automatically on an object or person, and a quick snapshot mode that allows you to double-press volume down to quickly take a photo or just launch the camera.

 

Swiping the other way, we get the different modes we can use with the more unique ones monochrome for black and white, 3D panorama & normal panorama, light painting (the long exposure modes people use to create those creative light trail photos, and document scanning that can automatically outline a piece of paper and try to make it as close to a scan as possible.

Above the viewfinder we have access to our flash, a wide aperture mode that has the software judge the depth of a subject and allow you to adjust the amount of blur as well as adjust where the focus is after the fact in the photo gallery, a portrait mode that does something similar without the ability to adjust the focus and only works on humans for some reason, a moving picture option that takes a quick couple of seconds of video before and after the shot (similar to Live Photos), and then we can, of course, rotate the camera to the front where we are limited to just flash (from the screen), portrait, Moving Picture mode and a beauty mode for skin smoothing and is super creepy.

 

And there we go. Think that covers everything. Let me know in the comments what you think of this type of video, the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, and if there are any other unique features I might have missed. If you liked this video though, please like it, share it, and/or subscribe all greatly appreciated and thanks for watching.

Check out the Mate 10 Pro in sexy blue for the lowest price I could find here.