Say hello to our new Mate

Huawei’s latest flagship devices, the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro, has landed in the Philippines and they’re bringing a different perspective on how flagship smartphones should be.

The difference between the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro, aside from the RAM/storage combo, are mostly aesthetic.

The Mate 10’s design language is consistent with that of its predecessor, the Mate 9. However, there are quite a lot of improvements under the hood. The Mate 10 has a very forward-looking design up front, keeping its bezels slim, even despite the fact that it still retains a physical home button at the front.

The Mate 10 is only has IP53 Rating (splash resistant) unlike the Mate 10 Pro that has an IP67 rating for water-resistance.

The Huawei Mate 10 comes with a 5.9-inch IPS LCD panel with a 2K resolution or 2560 x 1440 pixels. That’s about 499ppi in pixel density, giving it sharp and crisp look. The resolution is actually set to full HD by default so you still actually need to set it to Quad HD manually, or even lower to down to just HD (720p). This approach helps in conserving battery life depending on your usage needs.

The Mate 10 retains the older 16:9 aspect ratio and not the 18:9 that most flagships carry, including the Mate 10 Pro. Despite that, Huawei still managed to increase the screen-to-body ratio to about 81.6. It’s also protected by Gorilla Glass 3 both at the front and back.

The Mate10 also supports HDR 10 which means it will benefit from the video enhancements from the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

The Mate 10 has a single speaker grille at the bottom end that produces very good audio. Sound quality is top notch with deep bass, volume is very loud but does not distort even if you set to max. This is one of the nicest speakers we’ve tested in a smartphone this year.

The Mate10 Pro uses a 4th-generation Leica optics. There are still two cameras at the back — one is a 12-megapixel RGB sensor with an f/1.6 aperture and optical image stabilization and the second one is a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor the same f/1.6 aperture and image stabilization.

The same dual camera setup uses the combined images of the two cameras to produce one single, high-quality image of the subject.

The wide f/1.6 aperture opening allows the camera to shoot very well in low-light environments and reduces blur by coupling it with the image stabilization. Photos taken with the Mate10 Pro are sharp and accurate with lots of detail, colors are vibrant with natural saturation.

Video recording can go up to 4K at 30fps or full HD in either 30fps or 60fps. There’s also support for slow-motion at FHD and time-lapse.

The front camera has an 8-megapixel sensor with an f/2.0 aperture, just good enough for selfies. The camera app also includes beautification level that you can set to your own preference.

Huawei managed to get Android 8.0 Oreo in the Mate 10 right out of the box. This puts the Mate 10 at an advantage over most other flagships this year. They also added their custom flavor with EMUI 8.0 for a simple and clean look.

The 64GB storage is enough but if you want more, you can just add via a microSD card for up to 256GB.

Powering the Mate 10 is the HiSilicon Kirin 970 running at a top speed of 2.36GHz. This is coupled with a Mali G72MP12 GPU and an i7 co-processor, making the device one of the best performing Android smartphones this year.

The Kirin 970 is a powerful processor that can slug it out with even the more popular chips like the Snapdragon 835 or the Exynos 8895.

In our weeks of using the device, the device performed very, very well. We’ve never experienced anything that remotely comes close to lags or sluggishness in the two weeks we’ve had it. The UI is buttery smooth and responsive, apps and games load pretty fast and the phone practically chows down everything we throw at it while keeping a steady, cool operating temperature.

The Mate 10 uses a hybrid dual nanoSIM setup with the second SIM able to support a microSD card as well. Both SIM slots are also 4G LTE capable. They’re also the first LTE Cat. 18 modem that supports 6 carrier bandwidth aggregation to achieve 1.2Gbps downloads speeds.

One native feature of the Mate 10 series that we saw was the ability to directly hook up the device to a monitor or TV via a USB Type-C cable. The Mate 10 has native DisplayPort 1.2 support so you don’t need any dock in order to sync it to an external display like a TV or large monitor. The built-in IR Blaster is something we really loved especially when you have tons of appliances at home.

The phone comes with a  huge 4,000mAh Li-Ion battery with SuperCharge capability. On heavy use, the Mate 10 lasts us well the entire day. With light to moderate use, the phone managed to last two full days before it asks to be re-charged.

The Mate 10 also features its own SuperCharge technology which only takes an hour and 30 minutes to fully charge the 4,000mAh Li-Ion battery.

With a suggested retail price of only  P32,990, the Huawei Mate 10 is one of the most affordable flagship smartphones in the market today.

Taking all things into consideration, the Huawei Mate 10 offers a more complete set of features at a price point not many brands can match. It’s beautiful, powerful and a great alternative if you’re considering to upgrade to the latest flagship smartphone.