HUAWEI MATE 50 Pro Review – More than just a Smartphone

Actually the Mate 50 Pro and the rest of the Mate 50 family has been announced in China back around September, at the time when they announced it, there is several variant that is only available in China, however Huawei decided that only Mate 50 and Mate 50 Pro will arrive towards the international markets.

So to start, we received our units slightly few days earlier before the launch dates so that we can experience the camera and the performance of the Huawei Mate 50 Pro, so lets dive into it.

Now there is 2 versions of Mate 50 Pro, one is what we call the normal version and another with the Kunlun Glass protection on the display, the one that we received is the normal Mate 50 Pro.

Who is this for ?

Those who seeks for a phone that is equally powerful for daily game and work, and a plethora of camera modes to play with, especially beyond VLogging and simplistic capture which will work, but this phone offers more with XMAGE imaging which allows high end level mobile phone photography in a single device.

Design

Well, the Mate 50 Pro design has 2 as well, the one particularly we received is the glass version at the back and front, no leathery feel there as that one is exclusive to the Kunlun glass version, however it is still looking elegant with the back touch and feel of it is smooth and does not leave any fingerprint marks to it.

The sides on the phone on the silver color version follows the same color code all around it making it like a seamless one piece of phone in the entirety. While still looking at the back, it is immediately identified with the large camera island with 4 lenses which looks bulky over a big ring with Refined Clous de Paris Pattern surrounding the island. Weighted around 205 grams, it is on par with most of the flagship phone standards, considering it has so many camera module in a single device.

Display & Audio

Most of the flagship smartphones tend to have a high refresh rate display, and the Huawei Mate 50 Pro is no exception. It came with a curved 6.74 inch OLED 1.07B display with 120Hz dynamic refresh rate. Measuring at 2616 × 1212 Pixels, the Huawei Mate 50 Pro is also capable of pushing touch sensitivity up to 300Hz which is great for those who just wanna enjoy games with it, especially FPS and MOBA titles. At night you will get comfortable with its 1440 Hz high frequency PWM dimming that senses and dim down brightness according to the surrounding.

Audio wise, everything is tweaked by Huawei’s on Histen Audio tuning which is reputably there for producing sounds over its earpiece and down firing speakers together creating a surround and stereo experience with the phone. Besides that there is also EQ settings you can play around to suits your needs.

Camera

This is where the interesting parts came in, the Huawei Mate 50 Pro came with camera consists of a 50MP wide PDAF with OIS sensor, a 64MP Periscope telephoto lens and a 13MP ultrawide lens. Since Huawei no longer uses Leica, they self developed XMAGE imaging system which is quite similar to what Leica can do, or slightly better in certain scenario.

Over the rear camera performance, the Huawei Mate 50 Pro does the job well with just automatic mode selection, which the AI will determine the environment and selects the right mode for you. Furthermore the Ultra Aperture XMAGE Camera allows the user to either automatically or manually selects the aperture from F1.4 to F4, which you can take picture to your liking according to the blur and the depth of field. So whether its day or night shots, most of it came out well with good dynamic range and close up shots are quite detailed while the wide angle can shot up to 120 degrees of view.

Selfie side, you will get one of the on par shots with most of the flagship phones found today with a 13MP ultrawide lens with TOF 3D depth sensors that took shots with details or portrait mode with better blur and separation over foreground and background.

Here we also attach a sample rear video recording at 4K 60FPS, of course optionally you can record it at 1080P 60FPS as well, giving it a great fast paced experience over your captured masterpiece.

There are many camera capture mode that are available, from Night, Macro, Time Lapse, Burst Shooting, Light Painting and Panorama ready to be used.

Performance, UI & Benchmarks

Under the hood, the HUAWEI Mate 50 Pro is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 SOC with 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM, 256GB or 512GB of internal storage. If you wish to add more storage, you can by expanding it via Huawei’s NM memory cards and slotted via SIM Card slot 2. Based on the specs alone, these can get you thru the whole day over usual daily activities such as gaming, taking a few pictures, watching a drama, calling, messaging and social media and recharging it back from 20% to 100% roughly took around 1 hours and 45 minutes with the supplied 66W Huawei SuperCharge Charger in the box.

UI is powered by EMUI 13 or HarmonyOS 3.0 with Android 12 as the base OS. Among new features that are available is widget combo, widget staking, Image Privacy Protection, SuperStorage (which will trace duplicate files and also compresses non frequently used apps). Huawei claims that you can save up to 20GB of space with SuperStorage. On top of that you can load Google Apps which you can read it here too.

For those who loved benchmarks, we attached some of the results, which is pretty much expected from a flagship phone, on par with most of the top tier phones you can find today.

Technical Specifications

Verdict & Conclusion

The Huawei Mate 50 Pro is one of the highly packed smartphones that is much focus on the camera first, but does not neglects the further improvement aspects as a smartphone, which emphasizes on the security, better convenience of installing apps via AppGallery and at least some form of third party support for enabling certain Google Apps to be used in this phone, besides that it is almost close to an experience of using a full fledged google certified android phones, that backing up and restoring your favorite applications seems easy too with EMUI 13, hence Huawei does put a lot of effort in caring their consumers.

For more information and purchase of Huawei Mate 50 Series, CLICK HERE to FIND OUT.