Huawei Mate 50 Pro Review

The Huawei Mate 50 Pro has an awesome set of cameras, good audio system and a daring design. But it’s a 4G cellphone that prices as a lot as the highest iPhones and Samsungs, and it has entry to only a few of the apps and video games that may make full use of its {hardware}.

Pros

Great water resistanceTriple digital camera array is nice and plenty of enjoyable to useEye-catching design

Cons

Severe thermal throttling of efficiencyNo 5G cell internetToo costlyDoes not have Google appsRubbish app retailer

Availability

UKRRP: £1199
USAunavailable
EuropeRRP: €1299
Canadaunavailable
Australiaunavailable

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoCThis cellphone has one of the vital {powerful} cell processors, but it surely’s the 4G model, so bear that in thoughts earlier than shopping for.

Variable aperture digital cameraThe Mate 50 Pro is only one of a handful of telephones made up to now with variable aperture, letting you alter how a lot gentle will get into the sensor.

IP68 water resistanceHighly water resistant and dustproof, the Mate 50 Pro matches the perfect flagship telephones round when it comes to ruggedisation.

Introduction

The Mate 50 Pro is Huawei’s flagship Android cellphone for late 2022 and past. It prices a fortune and, like basic fashions on this sequence, goals to indicate off the perfect in cellphone tech. 

In some areas it does. The Mate 50 Pro has a superb set of cameras that, for me, after months of reviewing lower-end and midrange fashions, serves as a reminder of how enjoyable it’s to stroll round with a very good telephoto digital camera in your pocket. 

I can’t image recommending this cellphone to many individuals, although – significantly not at its present excessive value. It’s the identical outdated story: the Mate 50 Pro doesn’t have 5G, Google apps or Google Play entry.

Huawei’s resolution of a poor first-party app retailer and a search engine that scours a bunch of semi-reputable sources for app set up information simply doesn’t lower it at this stage. 

Design and Screen

Curved glass entrance and rear panelsExcellent IP68 water resistancePowerful decrease speaker

The Huawei Mate 50 Pro is an attention grabbing cellphone. It continues the model of the Mate 30 Pro, putting the rear cameras in a large circle – a disc that stands out from the cellphone’s again. 

It’s daring – the form of design which may have appeared a speculative idea render a number of years in the past. The high quality of the construct is usually nice, so long as you might be prepared to place just a little religion in its uncommon elements. 

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The Mate 50 Pro is a sandwich of two curved glass panels, with aluminium in-between. A steel ring sits across the digital camera disc, with high quality detailing alongside its high. Surprisingly sufficient, the highest floor of the disc seems to be some type of plastic, however the digital camera lens safety is, after all, glass. 

Huawei doesn’t use the industry-standard Gorilla Glass within the Mate 50 Pro, although. The orange vegan leather-based model of this cellphone has Kunlun nanocrystal show glass – a brand new formulation made by Huawei that it claims has superior drop resistance. But my silver model? It has unnamed glass by who-knows, which isn’t an awesome search for a cellphone this expensive. 

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But the Mate 50 Pro does have glorious IP68 water and mud resistance. It’s additionally one of many few flagship telephones with expandable reminiscence – yay! But you possibly can solely use considered one of Huawei’s nano-SIM-sized NM playing cards – boo! 

There’s no headphone jack both, and the audio system’ output is uneven. One driver sits on the backside of the cellphone, the opposite by the earpiece on the entrance. This higher driver has a thinner sound, so lower-frequency content material from that channel is definitely performed by the underside speaker. 

The ensuing sound continues to be fairly spectacular, with a richer and smoother tonality than that of the Xiaomi 12T, which I used earlier than the Mate 50 Pro. But the latter’s right-side bias is kind of clear if you watch a music video with the cellphone on its aspect. 

The Huawei Mate 50 Pro has a 6.74-inch display with a decision of 2616 x 1212 pixels. This is simply just a little greater than the 1080p norm of less expensive fashions. It’s properly beneath the 3088 x 1440 of the Galaxy S22 Ultra and barely beneath the 2796 x 1290 pixels of the iPhone 14 Pro Max. 

I don’t assume most individuals ought to care that a lot, nevertheless. I couldn’t see any fuzziness to textual content even when eyeballing the display floor in close-up. 

Indoors, the Mate 50 Pro will head as much as 535 nits of brightness – a bit punchier than most – and in direct daylight, it maxes out at 825 nits. That’s first rate, though no greater than I’ve seen in some midrange telephones not too long ago. 

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The standouts of the Mate 50 Pro display are its color and curve. As with earlier high fashions on this vary, the show panel curves round on the sides to match the curvature of the entrance glass. 

I additionally assume this cellphone’s default color mode is nice. Huawei says it cycles between color requirements to swimsuit the app used – and it actually works. Your images’ color isn’t amped up within the gallery, and residential display icon colors look vibrant. Alternatively, the Vivid mode makes use of extra-saturated color the entire time, which I wouldn’t suggest.

Other elements of the show are precisely what you’d count on from a high-end cellphone. It has a max refresh price of 120Hz for clean scrolling, and it helps HDR video. 

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Performance

Throttles dramatically below pressureVery {powerful} SoCNo entry to Google apps or providers

Huawei is well-known in geeky circles for its HiSilicon processors – as seen within the P50 Pro telephones. However, each the Mate 50 Pro and Mate 50 use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 as a substitute. 

This is a super-powerful processor with incredible peak graphics efficiency. In 3DMark’s Wild Life take a look at, for instance, it scores 10,529 factors – just like the rating of an iPhone 14 Pro Max. That’s large as a result of iPhone chipsets have sailed forward on this space for years now. 

The Mate 50 Pro can’t maintain onto that energy for too lengthy, although. In a stress take a look at, the cellphone’s energy dropped dramatically after 10mins and have become erratic because it tried to steadiness warmth and efficiency. At one level, it had simply 36% of its peak energy. Ouch. 

Qualcomm’s + model of the 8 Gen 1 seen right here was partly designed to cope with the unique model’s warmth issues, through the use of a extra environment friendly structure. But efficiency stability continues to be dangerous, and this model of the chipset is 4G-only. There’s no 5G cell web.

The efficiency dip could possibly be Huawei approaching issues conservatively, nevertheless, as a result of the Mate 50 Pro actually didn’t get all that scorching whereas I performed some Fortnite. 

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That sport runs superbly on this cellphone. Sure, there are occasional body price drops if you flip round, but it surely runs simply in addition to any Android I’ve seen. And all of the graphics choices are unlocked right here, together with the 90fps mode. 

However, I don’t assume the Mate 50 Pro is a superb gaming cellphone, as a result of the library accessible to it’s poor. As has been the case since 2019, Huawei telephones don’t have Google apps. That means no Play Store, no Gmail or Google Maps. 

In their place, you get Huawei’s AppGallery, Petal Maps and so forth – the Huawei stand-ins. At instances, they’re just a little gross in contrast with their Google counterparts. Petal Maps retains shoving a £2 Bolt low cost in my face, placing it proper within the location search bar. 

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AppGallery exhibits a promo advert every time I open up the app. I can abdomen this sort of ad-flinging on an Amazon pill, the place there’s a way the pill’s value is partly subsidised by the quantity you’ll be spending on Amazon-owned content material sooner or later. But this doesn’t fly after paying almost £1200 for the Mate 50 Pro. 

The extra important problem is that AppGallery is unlikely to have all of the apps you need, and there’s no good resolution to this downside. Huawei presents Petal, a search instrument that exhibits you locations aside from AppGallery the place you could find downloadable apps. 

While useful, person protections are restricted right here, and Huawei quietly shrugs off duty with a disclaimer hyperlink that accompanies search outcomes. What you may get from the linked third-party app shops and web sites may be very restricted anyway – you gained’t sometimes discover premium apps and video games there.

Lots of people will purchase a Mate 50 Pro with the plan to put in Google providers on there. But I’m not penning this evaluation for these people. 

The Android expertise with out Google apps stays form of miserable. And even if you do discover a technique to get the apps you want, different points typically emerge. For instance, WhatsApp is out there from the official web site, however you possibly can’t recuperate your backup messages and pictures as a result of they’re saved on Google servers. Precious reminiscences, binned.

Camera

A really enjoyable digital camera to useThree rear shootersStrong zoom abilities

Let’s get again to the great things. The Huawei Mate 50 Pro has an awesome digital camera – one that’s luggage of enjoyable to make use of always. 

While it seems like there are 4 cameras on the again, there are literally three. You get a 50-megapixel main digital camera, a 13-megapixel ultrawide and a 64-megapixel 3.5x periscope zoom.  

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The large new characteristic for this yr is variable aperture. Aperture refers back to the measurement of the opening that permits gentle, and virtually all telephones have a hard and fast gap. The Mate 50 Pro’s predominant lens can open up in 4 phases. You can watch the little blades transfer as you alter the aperture setting. 

It’s neat tech, however I personally don’t discover it as impactful as another elements of this digital camera. When your topic may be very shut, there’s a noticeable change in background blur, but it surely’s nothing like altering the aperture on my FujiFilm APS-C digital camera, the place portraits of individuals 2m away may be given a super-silky, super-pronounced bokeh impact. Here, the crop issue – the small sensor — limits the impact of a wider or narrower aperture quite a bit. 

However, I nonetheless assume taking images with the Mate 50 Pro is a blast. It’s one of the vital greatest cellphone cameras I’ve used all yr, and that is 95% right down to the zoom. It enables you to take much better pics of animals from a distance, and the digital camera itself is of excessive sufficient high quality to have its personal gentle background blur impact when your topic is only some ft away. 

Shot utilizing the zoom; notice the slight lens blur to the background – a neat impact

Shot utilizing the ultrawide digital camera

Shot at 10x, from the identical place because the above picture

Huawei pushes the {hardware} to its excessive restrict by providing a 10x zoom preset, regardless that the digital camera itself is simply a 3.5x zoom. The counterargument is, after all, that it makes use of a super-high-res 64-megapixel sensor. But this sensor is designed for 4-in-1 pixel binning and 16-megapixel images. 

Images at 10x are quite delicate – not fairly a match for these of a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra 5G and its 10x digital camera, and about 60% of my super-zoomed photos had some blur (largely within the topic). But I nonetheless had a good time utilizing this mode. 

The zoom is nice for photographing foxes …

… and squirrels

General picture high quality is nice from the first digital camera. Night images can look unbelievable, whether or not you utilize the Night mode or not – it tends to amp up color a bit and enhance the sharpness of the picture however largely by processing. 

Above-average night time outcomes are attainable with the ultrawide digital camera and when utilizing the three.5x zoom preset, too, though taking a look at them up shut, it seems the Mate 50 Pro switches to the principle digital camera in low gentle – or it could use a mix of the 2 cameras’ output to generate photos. 

Night photograph high quality is superb when utilizing the principle digital camera

Colour is mostly good, with a bent for some tones to look just a little hotter/extra saturated in sure scenes, typically at 1x zoom. 

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Video may be captured at as much as 4K decision, 60fps, and picture high quality is nice at each 4K and 1080p. I seen some in-frame blur on footfalls – even through the day – which suggests the dealing with of taking pictures parameters is just not fairly as foolproof as, for instance, an iPhone 14’s. 

The Mate 50 Pro’s entrance digital camera is powerful too: a 13-megapixel with an unusually forgiving focal aircraft, that means you may get nearer to the cellphone with out your face turning into a blurry mess. 

Battery Life

Good however not class-leading cost paceAbove-average stamina for its capacitySupports quick wi-fi charging

The Huawei Mate 50 Pro doesn’t have industry-leading charging speeds, providing 66W, whereas others from the likes of Xiaomi have 120W or much more. However, the Mate 50 Pro nonetheless fees in 42mins, in contrast with 28mins for the 120W Xiaomi 12T Pro. 

Wireless charging is superb, with 50W max energy when used with the appropriate pad. While I haven’t been capable of take a look at this, Huawei is getting nearer to the dream of reaching close to parity between cabled and wi-fi strategies. The 5W reverse wi-fi charging is readily available too, must you need to cost a pair of earphones that help Qi charging. 

The Mate 50 Pro’s battery capability is 4700mAh – decrease than what you’d sometimes discover in a less expensive cellphone of this measurement, as a result of if you make an costly cellphone, it must be skinny (apparently). 

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I haven’t been capable of take a look at the Mate 50 Pro as I usually would – just because too lots of the apps I take advantage of each day aren’t accessible on this cellphone. However, it does appear to punch no less than barely above its weight for the capability it has, and getting it to final a full day with a stable quantity of cost left over is not any problem. 

Battery drain whereas on standby appears to be glorious too, which is useful for gentle customers. But why would you purchase a cellphone just like the Mate 50 Pro in the event you aren’t going to make use of it extensively?

(*50*) you purchase it?

Camera is vital: The Huawei Mate 50 Pro has an awesome digital camera that produces hanging and energetic-looking images, whereas the spectacular low-light efficiency and periscope zoom allow you to seize pictures different telephones may stumble over.

You need Google and 5G: Lacking 5G and Google Play entry, the Mate 50 Pro feels very restricted for the common Western purchaser, significantly contemplating it prices £1,199. It’s greatest fitted to assured techies who can discover methods round its limitations.

Final Thoughts

The Huawei Mate 50 Pro’s digital camera is numerous enjoyable to make use of, however the cellphone as a complete is difficult to suggest until you’re prepared to sacrifice the advantages of Google help and software program

It’s costly, it doesn’t have 5G cell web and dramatic efficiency throttling means you possibly can solely recognize its full energy for brief intervals at a time.

However, the foremost problem is the one that also impacts all Huawei telephones: you don’t have any entry to Google apps or the Google Play app retailer. Huawei’s substitute app retailer is poor, and it tries to fill in the remainder by directing you to app installer information scattered over the web – a possible safety nightmare. 

At £1199, the Mate 50 Pro is pricier than the extra versatile Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra whereas costing the identical because the iPhone 14 Pro Max (though the model with 256GB storage prices extra). Do I believe you need to decide the Mate 50 Pro as a substitute? No. 

How we take a look at

We take a look at each cell phone we evaluation totally. We use {industry} customary checks to match options correctly and we use the cellphone as our predominant system over the evaluation interval. We’ll at all times inform you what we discover and we by no means, ever, settle for cash to evaluation a product.

Used a predominant cellphone for the evaluation interval

Taken a whole bunch of images in varied situations

FAQs

Does the Huawei Mate 50 Pro have Google apps? No, there’s no help for Google apps and providers right here. Does the Huawei Mate 50 Pro have the Google Play app retailer? There’s no Google Play entry, solely Huawei’s AppGallery, which has a way more restricted choice of apps. Is the Huawei Mate 50 Pro 5G? This is a 4G-only cellphone.

Trusted Reviews take a look at information

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Geekbench 5 single core

Geekbench 5 multi core

Max brightness

Time from 0-100% cost

3D Mark – Wild Life

3D Mark – Wild Life Stress Test

Huawei Mate 50 Pro

925

4013

825 nits

42 min

10529

34.9

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UK RRP

USA RRP

EU RRP

CA RRP

AUD RRP

Manufacturer

Screen Size

Storage Capacity

Rear Camera

Front Camera

Video Recording

IP ranking

Battery

Wirless charging

Fast Charging

Size (Dimensions)

Weight

Operating System

Release Date

First Reviewed Date

Resolution

HDR

Refresh Rate

Ports

Chipset

RAM

Stated Power

Huawei Mate 50 Pro

£1199

Unavailable

€1299

Unavailable

Unavailable

Huawei

6.74 inches

256GB

50/64/13MP

13MP

Yes

IP68

4700 mAh

Yes

Yes

75.5 x 8.5 x 162.1 INCHES

205 G

EMUI (Android kernel)

2021

23/11/2022

2616 x 1212

Yes

120 Hz

USB-C

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 4G

8GB

66 W

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