Last year, Huawei lost the battleground in the US-China trade war, and its Mate 30 series failed to access the license of Google's Android services. But time passed on, and Huawei learned to move on. Finally, Huawei is back to the stage with a completely new ecosystem "HMS core," and hence we are excited to experience innovative Huawei P40, P40 Pro, and P40 Pro+. It took us some long to review Huawei P40 flagship smartphones, and for right now, here is our P40 family hands-on.
Main Differences:
Huawei P40 is 6.1-inch in size while P40 Pro and Pro Plus measure 6.58inches in diagonal. The standard P40 has FHD+ while the other two get QHD+ display with a 90Hz refresh rate. Pro and Plus rated at IP68 for dust/water resistance, however the P40 not. Another core difference is storage 128GB for P40, 256GB for P40 Pro, and 512GB for P40 Pro+. There are five, six and seven total cameras respectively for P40, Pro and Plus. Battery ranked at 3800mAh for P40 while 4200mAh for P40 Pro and P40 Pro Plus. Charging capacities are also varying, 22W for P40, 40W for Pro and Plus. Additionally, P40 Pro and Pro+ bring wireless charging support respectively at 27W and 40W, while the P40 not.
Design and Body
All the P40 siblings look identical to each other. We feel charmed toward the Gold version of the P40, Pro, and P40 Pro Plus, yet we can't deny the beauty of different colors – Silver, White and Black. The apparent difference between the standard and pro versions is Display. P40 adopts a Flat screen whereas the P40 Pro and P40 Pro+ flaunt an Edge screen. Camera lenses in numbers are another difference, cheaper the model is, lower the amount of lenses is. The Huawei P40 trio prefers punch-hole selfie design. On the back, there is a rectangular vertical array occupying photography snappers.
As trending, Huawei P40 series introduced with Under-Display Fingerprint Scanner technology, and it unlocks the cell phone within zero (0.2) seconds.
P40 Pro and P40 Pro+ are IP68 rated, and thus they can bear submersions up to 2 meters for 30 minutes. Unluckily, the P40 is not reaching this standard. All the devices made of an Aluminum frame and protected by Alumino-Silicate glass rather than Corning Gorilla Glass.
Display
In terms of size and Display, Huawei P40 sports a 6.1inches display while P40 Pro and Pro+ stretch up to 6.58inches. The former has FHD+ resolution while the P40 Pro and Pro Plus delivers QHD+ stuff. All of them obtain OLED Display and are HDR10+ compliant. The P40 Pro and Plus refreshes at 90GHz frequency whereas P40 not.
Software
Welcome to the HMS or Huawei Mobile Services – yeah, the company finds a solution toward Google Mobile Services after getting failure multiple times in persuading the US government. Huawei finally introduced an entirely new ecosystem, HMS that gives all the services like GMS. HMS Core gives you a private platform for every single task as an alternative to the Android services. The ecosystem contains Account Kit (which is something similar to Gmail for Play Store).
Location Kit is there instead of Google Location, Map Kit is the alternative of Google Maps, and there are similarly many other alternatives including Drive Kit, Game Service, Push Kit, Analytic Kit, In-App purchases, and at last Ads Kit yeah the alternate to the Google Admob. Surprisingly, the entirely new ecosystem Huawei builds on the free Android Open Source Project, and hence there is Android 10 running. Say bye. Bye to the GMS. For aficionados, it would be pleasing to experience HMS though Huawei did not install Harmony OS. It won't be much better but at least something good in the absence of Google Mobile Services, especially for Huawei fans outside who did not want to leave Huawei platform when it comes to P40 or any Mate flagship smartphone.
Camera
(P40 back/front: 3/2, P40 Pro: 4/2, Pro+: 5/2)
One of the most favorite subjects for any consumer – camera, Huawei P40 has five, P40 Pro gets six, and P40 Pro+ obtains seven Leica camera lenses in total. There are dual 32MP and 3D ToF sensors available on the front of standard P40, Pro and Plus models.
Coming to the rear cameras, vanilla P40 used to equip a 50MP f/1.9 wide, 8MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom, and 16MP ultrawide optics. Besides this, the P40 Pro flaunts four photography shooters as such 50MP f/1.9 wide, 12MP periscope with 5x optical zoom, 40MP f/1.8 ultrawide, and 3D Time of Flight camera.
At last, the P40 Pro Plus is configuring its back cameras as follows - 50MP (f/1.9) regular, 8MP periscope with 10x optical and 50x digital zoom, 8MP telephoto, 40MP f/1.8 ultrawide, and a 3D ToF snapper. Each P40 device support OIS, EIS, and 4k video recording at 60fps. Luckily, Huawei flagship mobiles bring HD Super Slow-mo at 7680fps.
Hardware and Memory
Whether it is P40, P40 Pro or Pro+, all of those devices come powered by HiSilicon Kirin 990 5G (7nm+) chipset. There is an eight-core CPU comprising four Cortex-A76 processing units (above 2GHz) and four Cortex-A55 processors (below 2GHz clock frequency). GPU is Mali-G76 MP16 for graphics production and 4k animations. Have a look at benchmarks to evaluate performance.
Kirin 990 of Huawei P40 series benchmarked 776 and 3182 scores respectively for the single and multi-core tests. On the other hand, Qualcomm Snapdragon865 of Samsung S20 family recorded 922 and 3103 scores in the same Geekbench single and multi-core tests. It is a theoretical conclusion, but we can at least assume that Huawei P40 performs slightly better in multitasking, while for every single task, the SD865 powered smartphones are superior.
How many memory variants are there of P40, Pro and Plus? Before answering, we would like to add that Storage is of UFS 3.0, and RAM is of LPDDR5 in every P40 model. The top-tier Huawei P40 Pro Plus debuts with 8GB RAM and beefy 512GB internal room. The P40 Pro arrives in 8GB RAM and 256GB secondary memory. There is P40 with only 128GB storage and up to 8GB of RAM. None of them have any other memory variant, yet you can expand storage via Nano-Memory Card.
Battery and Charge Capacities
You would be happy to find a 4200mAh powerhouse inside the P40 Pro+. It is getting 40W Fast Wired and becomes the world’s first phone with 40W Fast Wireless Charge support. Apart from this, P40 Pro has the same 4200mAh battery - yet fine with 40W Fast Wired and 27W Wireless Charge. However, the regular Huawei P40 disappointed us with a lower 3800mAh cell and 22.5 Fast but no wireless charge.
5G connectivity
Everyone loves to meet 5G speeds, and why not? Enabled with 5G network (SA/NSA) on dual SIMs, the Huawei P40 lineup delivers 2.3Gbps download and 1.25Gbps upload speed