HUAWEI P40 Pro Plus review: True innovation in a stunted ecosystem (2023)

This device is no longer widely used.The HUAWEI P40 Pro Plus is now not available from most retailers. was replaced byHUAWEI P50 Pro. If you're looking for an alternative device, check out our list ofbest camera phonesit's atThe best Android phones.

Huawei's P-series devices have always been best-in-class. They offer excellent performance and battery life and, most importantly, some of the most innovative camera systems on the market. The HUAWEI P40 Pro Plus is no different.

In general, the P series gains two models: a standard and a professional. While the standard model brings new features like a new Kirin SoC or a new design, it's the Pro models that bring that.WowFactor. For example last yearHUAWEI P30 Prointroduced the first 5x optical telephoto camera with an innovative prism mechanism. Combined with fantastic performance, wonderful battery life and incredibly good low-light images, the P30 Pro was a huge success.

But this year, HUAWEI has taken a page from Samsung's playbook and opted to release Standard, Premium and Ultra Premium models. The HUAWEI P40 Pro Plus has almost identical design and features to the P40 Pro, but it brings something we've never seen on a phone before: 10x optical zoom.

But at a whopping £400 more than the P40 Pro and without access to Google Play Services, is this feature worth jumping into? That isAqueles do Android AuthorityTested HUAWEI P40 Pro Plus.

About this HUAWEI P40ProPlus review:I used the HUAWEI P40 Pro Plus as my main phone for six days. The device was running EMUI 10.1 based on Android 10 with build number: 10.1.0.112. HUAWEI provided the P40 Pro Plus test deviceandroid authority.

Design and display: refined luxury

The HUAWEI P40 Pro Plus has an almost identical design to theHUAWEI P40 Pro, which means it's beautiful. The screen is curved on the left, right and bottom of the device, but the aluminum frame flows over the phone's corners to protect it from drops. HUAWEI says it designed the screen to mimic water at the breaking point of surface tension, and I think it looks beautiful.

Curving the display at the bottom of the phone was an interesting choice, but for modern smartphones it makes a lot of sense. As gesture navigation became the default navigation method in Android 10, a curved screen makes it easier to swipe up from the bottom to go home and open the app switcher. I think it's a great design.

This display was developed for a modern interface design.

The device is certainly a little thicker than some other flagships, for exampleOnePlus 8 Pro, but it feels heavy and premium, not cumbersome. The ceramic back also curves, so the phone still feels relatively thin despite having a good grip with the flat, thicker rails.

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The power button and volume controls are mounted on the aluminum rails on the right side of the phone. They stick out a little more than the buttons on most smartphones, but I really liked the tactile feel. They are cute and clickable. At the bottom you'll find a USB-C port, SIM card tray and speakers, and at the top you'll find an IR blaster - something I'm glad HUAWEI kept - but no headphone jack.

The P40 Pro Plus' display is a 90Hz OLED with an FHD+ resolution of 2640 x 1200 and it looks pretty good. While it doesn't conform to the new 2020 standard of 120Hz, the 90Hz refresh rate didn't bother me. There is a hole-punch selfie camera in the upper left corner of the screen.

An optical in-display fingerprint reader is hidden under the display. It was fast and accurate during my time with the device. However, considering that the phone offers face unlock with an IR camera, the fingerprint reader may remain unused.

Performance and battery: very fast

As you would expect from the company's new top phone, the HUAWEI P40 Pro Plus' specs are stacked. However, it no longer has RAM and the battery capacity does not match devices like this one.Samsung Galaxy S20 ultra,LG V60orPhones ASUS ROG 2, Specs like 512GB storage, 40W wired and wireless charging, and reverse wireless charging will raise some eyebrows.

After all, a smartphone doesn't need 12GB of RAM to run smoothly. 8GB was more than enough for the P40 Pro Plus, and HUAWEI is pretty aggressive with its RAM management. In our analysisWe found that 6 GB is about the amount of RAMYou want an Android phone to run smoothly, with 8GB being the sweet spot. It hits that metric.

o 7nmKirin 990 SoCperformed very well and is currently HUAWEI's flagship chip. Has performance similar to that of QualcommLöwenmaul 855. The P40 Pro Plus has the 5G version of the 990 that supports sub-6GHz bands.

In the benchmarks we ran as part of our test suite, the P40 Pro Plus performed decently, but lagged behind powered phones.Löwenmaul 855 Plusand especially those who run themLöwenmaul 865. The P40 Pro Plus scored 488,792 on AnTuTu, 3,691 on Geekbench 4 Single, and 11,894 on Geekbench 4 Multi. For comparison, the OnePlus 8 Pro scored 4,195 and 13,142 on Geekbench 4 Single and Multi.

Just because performance is slightly lower in the benchmarks doesn't mean it lacks in everyday use. The combination of the Kirin 990 and 8GB of RAM resulted in very good performance. More importantly, the specs handled the 90Hz screen well and everything looked smooth.

The 512GB storage is good too, and you can expand it further with one of the HUAWEI ownersnano memory cards.

HUAWEI has been using 40W charging sinceMate 20 Pro, and it's still amazing. Considering that some smartphones are still at 25W and 30W out of the box, HUAWEI takes advantage in this regard. However, if you want to charge even faster, you'll need to use a phone like this one.OPPO Find X2 Pro, which can be charged at a rate of 65W. That's fast.

While the P40 Pro can wirelessly charge at a rate of 27W, the P40 Pro Plus goes even further by adding a 40W wireless charging option. that, but charging at that speed is incredible. Only OnePlus and Xiaomi could match that metric with 30W wireless charging.

And if you want to recharge other devices, the P40 Pro offers reverse wireless charging.

As with most of HUAWEI's flagship smartphones, the battery life of the P40 Pro Plus is excellent. The phone lasted almost two days. I turned it off around 9:30am and it didn't die until around 5pm the next day. It provided about seven hours of screen time for me. While not quite as good as the LG V60, the 40W fast charging makes it perfectly passable. If you can manage to last almost two days and charge quickly, that's awesome.

Camera: Really innovative

The P Series has always been HUAWEI's photography-centric flagship, and that's evident here. There are a total of seven cameras on the P40 Pro Plus, each with its own focus. While most of the sensors mirror the P40 Pro's camera array, the P40 Pro Plus has something no other phone can currently offer: 10x optical zoom.

Granted, other phones can reach extreme zoom ranges, with devices like the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra reaching up tozoom digital 100x. But there is a difference. Although many devices, such asXiaomi Mi Note 10Touting things like 5x zoom cameras, many are not true optical zoom. The difference is that optical zoom has no loss of quality, while digital zoom reduces resolution in exchange for a narrower field of view or just artificially adds detail to a digital crop.

HUAWEI is one of the few companies that is consistent in its focal length claims and uses innovative methods to achieve lossless long lenses. The P30 Pro was an achievement in itself: it was one of the first phones to achieve true 5x optical zoom using a prism mechanism that bounced light 90 degrees onto a tilted sensor for additional Z-distance.

The HUAWEI P40 Pro Plus builds on this concept, but reflects light five times to increase the optical focal length to a full-frame equivalent of 240mm. Since the focal length is based on the distance from the optical center of the lens to the sensor, the reflected light creates a longer optical path and therefore a longer focal length. This is the first phone with true 10x optical zoom, and the engine is brilliant.

Images taken at 10x are very good, although definitely a little softer than 1x and 3x images. Whereas the 10x lens has a much smaller apertureF/4.4 the phone has to artificially add more ISO to make the image sharp. Still, the 10x optical zoom is impressive.

The 10x optical zoom is a game changer.

Along with this lens, you have a 3x optical telephoto lens, a standard lens, an ultra wide-angle lens, a time-of-flight sensor, and a selfie camera on the front.

Overall, the P40 Pro Plus produced fantastic images, with colors, contrast and sharpness coming out really well. The only exception would be reds, which tend to have their hue more shifted towards pink and their luminosity burst, especially compared to the Galaxy S20 Ultra. The wide-angle camera also generally had a slightly different color quality than the standard lens, with a slightly more yellow hue and slightly lower contrast.

Up to 20x zoom produced sharp, good-looking images, but just like the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, the 100x zoom mode was extremely blurry and nothing more than a gimmick. Add that to the fact that standing still in that zoom range was really hard and you've got a bit of chaos. In contrast, the Galaxy S20 Ultra had reasonably good stabilization at 100x zoom, but both were equally blurry.

How was her case?HUAWEI P30 ProLow light performance was fantastic on the P40 Pro Plus. Even when shooting in a room with almost no lighting, the P40 Pro plus was only able to capture what was in the scene in its default mode. There's also a special night mode that increases the dynamic range and sharpness of an image.

The selfie camera produced great images with very good colors and sharpness. This camera also has autofocus, which is not common in selfie cameras. And with an IR camera alongside the selfie camera, you can recordportrait selfieslike this. In low-light scenarios, the image was a little softer than I would have liked, but it's still decent. In backlit scenarios, the phone uses semantic targeting to light up faces, which works really well.

In terms of videos, HUAWEI P40 Pro Plus can record 4K videos at up to 60 fps or 1080p videos at 960 fps. You can also shoot 720p video at an insane 7,680 fps.

The 4K 60fps video quality has very good stabilization and you can zoom up to 10x in this mode. Unfortunately this is all digital zoom and makes the video look noisy when you zoom in to 10x. Not sure why they would do that instead of just reading 3x and 10x lenses.

Just like the HUAWEI P40 Pro, the camera app on the P40 Pro Plus is pretty good. It offers a huge amount of features and settings. There's a full Pro mode that gives you access to things like metering modes, ISO, shutter speed, and exposure compensation. There are additional settings for things like light painting, black and white mode, and document scanning.

The app looks like a good mix of simplicity and functionality. I'm a fan.

Software: stunted growth

This is easily the Achilles heel of the P40 Pro Plus. As with the Mate 30 Pro, it's hard to recommend a phone without access to the core apps and services Android users are used to. I was able to partially work around the app limitation by creating web shortcuts from websites on the home screen, but most web user interfaces just don't work well in a mobile browser. It helped me to contain my problems a little.

EMUIit's a bit of an acquired taste, but it's not that bad. By default, it tries really hard to look like iOS, and by default it stacks all your apps on the home screen. If you dig a little deeper into the settings, you'll find an option to use an app drawer, so you can make it work similarly to most Android devices. As my colleague Ryan Thomas noted in hisP40 Pro Test, items like the stock sheet are also eerily similar to iOS.

Unfortunately, customizing your device with a launcher is a bit more difficult on the HUAWEI P40 Pro Plus. There just aren't many available on the AppGallery, although you'll find Apolo Launcher there. Unfortunately, Nova and other popular launchers are nowhere to be found.

HUAWEI P40 Pro Plus review: Specs

value and competition

When compared to these devices, the P40 Pro Plus matches or surpasses them in image quality and build quality, but the lack of access to the App Store and Google's ecosystem is a glaring problem that cannot be ignored. And unless you specifically need the 10x optical zoom camera or the 40W wired and wireless charging, there are plenty of phones that can rival this device for far less power.

Even against its own catalogue, HUAWEI's P40 Pro Plus is a handset like no other. £400 seems like a big premium to pay for the 10x optical telephoto camera, ceramic build and 40W wireless charging.

HUAWEI P40 Pro Plus review: Should you buy it?

As with almost all new HUAWEI phones, the lack of Google Play Services makes it incredibly difficult to recommend. Smartphones are primarily gateways to apps and services. As this access is restricted, the experience of using a HUAWEI device is incredibly frustrating. Even if you don't use Google apps very often, the Google Play Store is the best way to get the most popular apps that you would normally use. Until the AppGallery can match the Google Play Store in options, you're missing out on some of the core experiences most other Android phones offer.

Meanwhile, information about theHUAWEI Mate 40 Prostarted to develop. The phone looks quite capable on its own, but HUAWEI is also making afolding devicethis is very similar to thisSamsung Galaxy Z-Fold 2. A lot has happened between HUAWEI and the US since the original ban, but we're looking forward to seeing what HUAWEI comes up with anyway.

Stay tuned.