Huawei P40 Pro: A quality phone that tests your ability to live without Google

Huawei has built up a reputation for itself in the smartphone sector. A partnership with Leica delivered great cameras, and the company worked on delivering great specs and battery life while undercutting the competition on price.

These days, Huawei doesn’t need to rely on price to get people’s attention. The company has a comfortable position in the Irish market, and its flagship smartphones have done well.

This launch, however, is different. This is the first phone that Huawei has launched in Ireland without Google services. Why is this the case? Because of an ongoing dispute between the US and China that has led to the curtailment of business between US and Chinese companies. Google and Huawei fall on opposite sides of that particular dispute, so that means no Google licences for new Huawei phones.

It’s a bit of a gap for those of us who are used to being hooked into the Google ecosystem. The P40 Pro may have a great camera, but you can’t upload those photos automatically to Google Photos. There is no Maps app preinstalled, so your Google-saved favourites have no place here. And it’s not a case of going to the Play Store to get them either, because that is Google’s app store, and – you’ve guessed it – there’s no access to it for the P40 Pro.

So how does the company solve this problem? By creating its own mobile services. That means Huawei Mobile Services instead of Google Mobile Services, and Huawei's music and video services instead of Play music and movies. Huawei also has its own app gallery, and it is encouraging app developers to get on board. There are a few apps popular in Ireland in there already – Snapchat, TikTok, Telegram, the RTÉ Player, Ryanair and Amazon, to name a couple.

There are notable omissions, however. WhatsApp and Facebook aren't in there, but searching for them brings up a link to install a copy of the app via official websites. Most of the other big omissions – Google Maps, Google Drive – can be accessed through the mobile browser.

Powerful zoom

Enough talk about what the P40 Pro doesn’t have. What it does have is what all relatively recent Huawei flagship phones have: a great camera.

There’s a powerful zoom – 5x optical zoom, 10x hybrid zoom and 50x maximum digital zoom – that gets you closer to the action than you thought possible. Photos get a little soft around the edges at the higher zoom capabilities, but they still look good.

It has an RYYB colour filter array too, which will let more light in, and improve the quality of photos. Its effect is particularly noticeable in the night shots; I took a few photos in half light early in the morning and they looked like they were taken in broad daylight, without too much softening of the details.

It’s almost impossible to take a bad photo with this camera, regardless of your level of expertise. You have plenty of preset modes – portrait, aperture, night mode, even an underwater mode – plus a pro mode that lets you fiddle with white balance and exposure settings. An AR lens mimics the Animoji function on iPhones, but is not as effective. The P40 Pro+ has the top-end camera, but realistically most people will be more than happy with the Leica camera on the P40 Pro.

The video camera will shoot in 4K if you can spare the space on the 256GB of built-in storage; if you plan on doing a lot of that though you’ll want to invest in a memory card. The P40 Pro doesn’t use MicroSD, it uses Huawei’s own nano storage card, which is inconvenient. That memory card space can be used for a second sim though, if you need one.

The display is curved – Huawei’s quad curve overflow display, to use the company’s terminology – and is just under 6.6 inches in size. The quality is, as it has been in the past, superb. There isn’t much to criticise about the phone’s performance either, as long as you aren’t trying to run some sideloaded Google apps.

The good

Huawei has built in an excellent camera, although don’t get too hung up on the zoom capabilities. Plus the battery life will last throughout the whole day, even with heavy usage of the camera.

The not-so-good

Can you live without Google? Many people can – and want to – but not everyone is quite ready to cut the cord. Not having Google services has an impact on the apps you can install, unless you are willing to take a chance on some Android software from unofficial download sites.

The rest

The phone has all the usual things you’d expect, including a fingerprint reader so you can skip the passcodes.

The verdict

To Google or not to Google? That will be the decider here.