Huawei P50 Pro Review: Discover the Pros and Cons

As you navigate the world of smartphones, you may have noticed Huawei as a major player in the market. Huawei is well-known for producing high-quality and durable devices, including the popular Huawei P50 Pro smartphone. However, while the P50 Pro is a good smartphone, it does have some drawbacks that cannot be ignored.

In this Huawei P50 Pro review, I’ll dive deep into the Huawei P50 Pro, examining its full specifications, features, performance, and battery life. You’ll find everything you need to know about this remarkable device right here.

So, if you’re thinking about buying a Huawei P50 Pro smartphone, this Huawei P50 Pro review will provide you with all the necessary information you need to make an informed decision.

Huawei P50 Pro review: Unboxing

These are the items that you would get in the box of a brand-new Huawei P50 Pro:

• The phone itself
• One 66-watt power adapter
• USB cable 
• A bundled condom phone case (this depends on where you buy it from)
• Paperwork.

Design – Huawei P50 Pro Review

The design of the Huawei P50 Pro is polished and fashionable. The mobile phone is very light, weighing under 200 grams, making it very portable and easy to carry around. The general look and feel of the Huawei P50 Pro are quite unique and impressive.

The Huawei P50 Pro comes in various colours, the four major colours being Golden Black, Cocoa Gold, Pearl White and Charm Pink.

There are a bunch of new bright colours that were recently added, namely: Galaxy Blue, Yunjin White and Danxia Orange.

Build Quality

Concerning the build quality; the Huawei P50 Pro is in the range of high-quality flagship devices. It has an elegant curvy design made of glass with a metal finish, making it look very elegant and modern and feel sleek when you hold it in your hand.

The most elegant aspect of the design of the Huawei P50 Pro is the camera bump which is divided by two symmetrical circles, making it look like an old cassette tape but classier. The mobile phone is very slim, making it very portable, easy to hold and use on one hand.

Display – Huawei P50 Pro Review

Screen Size

In terms of screen size, the  Huawei P50 Pro comes with a 6.6 inches OLED display that curves gently around the edges.

Refresh Rate

The  Huawei P50 Pro has a very fast refresh rate of 120Hz. This high refresh rate smooths out motions like swiping and scrolling, and it will dial down to 60Hz to save energy when you are not interacting with the screen. There is also a fast 300Hz sampling rate which means the panel is extra responsive, which is nice for activities like gaming.

There is also an option to swap between refresh rates: the ‘dynamic’ gives a balance between the screen’s smoothness and battery with a high refresh rate of 120Hz, and the ‘dynamic’ balances smoothness and battery with a max high refresh rate of 120Hz, the ‘high’ refreshes up to 120Hz for highly smooth visuals and uses more power, and lastly, the ‘standard’ saves power by limiting the refresh rate to 60Hz. You can easily switch between the options depending on what you want to do with the phone.

Brightness 

The panel of the  Huawei P50 Pro is brighter than the previous model, with a maximum brightness of over 600 nits when using the manual brightness slider, which can boost up to 750 nits if you are in auto mode in bright conditions. 

This means that the brightness is great enough for outdoor settings, as the  Huawei P50 Pro gets a boost in brightness when you are in a bright environment to enhance the display.

Input Device

Keyboard 

The keyboard of the  Huawei P50 Pro is the standard Huawei Celia keyboard which is secure and intuitive. The keyboard is compatible with effective voice inputs, smooth handwriting, an emulated mechanical keyboard and 170+ input languages.

Touchpad 

 The touchpad of the  Huawei P50 Pro operates very smoothly.  It is very responsive and still works very well even when water is on the screen. Every action responds very fast, making the overall experience very pleasant.

Sound Quality

Speakers 

In terms of speaker quality, the Huawei P50 Pro comes with great speakers. The mobile device uses a pair of stereo speakers, which is an upgrade over the Huawei P40 Pro’s single speaker setup. The sound is rich, clean and nicely balanced. It is also very loud with pretty good bass as far as phones go.

Microphone 

The  Huawei P50 Pro has two microphones and an IR port at the top of the phone in addition to the speaker outlet. Two microphones make the sound quality of the device very good, and it enables the filtering of background noise. 

Performance 

The  Huawei P50 Pro is a great phone for you if you want a high-grade flagship device that allows you to perform various heavy or light activities and comes at a reasonable price for a phone of its quality. However, it comes with a limitation, which, if you have used a Huawei device, should not be news to you. That limitation is the lack of Google Services. Everything you get with this device is Huawei-made.

Processor 

The  Huawei P50 Pro comes with the snapdragon 88 chipsets that you can get in either 4GB, 8GB or 12GB RAM. This processor is very strong, an upgrade from the kirin 990 5G chipset, which makes it an even better and faster processor. Heavy games and applications run great on this device with no lagging. 

The only downside is that you do not get the 5g modem, so connectivity is limited to 4g networks.

Battery Life – Huawei P50 Pro Review

One of the essential things to consider when purchasing a mobile device is the battery. The battery of the  Huawei P50 Pro is pretty basic, nothing extraordinary. It has a 4360 milliamp-hour battery. 

It supports 66 watts of wired charging and 50-watt wireless charging. The charging speed of the  Huawei P50 Pro is quite impressive. It can charge above 70% in half an hour.

Features 

In this section, I will be talking about some features of the  Huawei P50 Pro. The mobile phone is a high-quality flagship device and has a number of great qualities that make it a good choice.

The  Huawei P50 Pro is ip68 rated against water and dust. Incidents like water dropping, splashing, pouring on your phone, or rain showers, or your phone submerging into the water would not affect the functionality of your device. Even the camera still works well under these conditions. The screen comes with a super hydrophobic nanolayer that distracts water from the screen.

The screen also has support for 10-bit colour and HDR 10 Plus, which makes the colour accuracy on this device excellent.

There is an anima app that allows you to create your own characters, like Apple’s Animoji or Snapchat’s Bitmoji.

To unlock or wake up the Huawei P50 Pro, you can either use the under display optical fingerprint scanner which is quite fast and reliable, or the Face unlocks, which is also safe and secure because of the 3d scan provided by the TOF camera. The facial recognition system also works in the dark.

The Google services are replaced by Huawei’s very own ecosystem. Instead of the Google Play Store, you would get Huawei’s app gallery. There is also a ‘Petal Search’ application that you can use to search for apps that are not present in Huawei’s app gallery. Other Google services like Google Maps and Google Assistant are replaced with Petal Maps and Huawei’s Celia, respectively.

There is also a feature that allows you to add many pictures to your home screen so that each time you unlock your phone, a different picture appears, which is pretty cool.

Specifications 

The Camera

Rear Camera

The rear camera of the Huawei P50 Pro is made up of a 50mp main camera with OS, a 40mp monochrome camera, a 13mp ultrawide camera and a 64mp telephoto camera with 3.5x optical zoom and OIS.

During the day, the main camera takes outstanding 12.5mp photos. The images look natural and balanced with true-to-no life colours, abundant details and just the right amount of sharpening. The contrast is excellent, and the dynamic range is impressive. It is also the primary portrait shooter. The separation is proficient, and the subjects are detailed and sharp.

The monochrome camera also captures photos at 12.5mp to keep things consistent. Its black and white photos are stunning, with magnificent detail and amazing contrast.

The Ultrawide camera is quite capable during the day too. The photos come out sharp and detailed enough, and just like the main camera, the contrast and colours are excellent, with a great dynamic range. It has autofocus which is not always on point, resulting in the occasional soft photo. A trick to this is tapping the ‘viewfinder’ before shooting to prevent this. The autofocus also allows you to take close-up micro shots.

The telephoto camera provides 3.5x optical zoom, and the 16mp photos come out exceptional. There is great detail, and the foliage looks great with balance sharpening. The contrast is excellent, the colours are accurate, and there is no visible noise. The dynamic range is superb too. There is a 7x zoom created by cropping the image from the centre of the original 64mp image. This provides the same great quality as the lower zoom level, except they aren’t quite as sharp.

When it comes to low-light photos, the Huawei P50 Pro is just as impressive. Many phones rely on a night mode to produce good nighttime shots, but Huawei has integrated such processing into its regular auto mode. This allows photos taken in low light to come out excellent. There is still a night mode, but the effects are pretty minimal. It only helps with colour reproduction.

Front camera

The Huawei P50 Pro has a 13mp front camera which has autofocus and a wide field of view in the native wide-angle mode. The photos come out sharp and detailed. Videos are taken at up to 4k at 30 frames per second.

Portability 

In terms of portability, the Huawei P50 Pro is on the light side, weighing 195 g (6.88 oz). It is very slim and easy to carry on one hand.

Serviceability 

Most parts of the Huawei P50 Pro can be replaced or upgraded, making it a very serviceable device.

Connectivity

The Huawei P50 connectivity include: 

Software 

The Huawei P50 Pro uses Huawei’s emotion UI 12, which is actually based on Android 11. The overall layout would be familiar to Android users.

Pros 

• Excellent camera
• Nice waterproof build
• High refresh rate
• Stereo speakers
• High-end chipset
• Fast charging

Cons 

• Lack of Google Services
• No 5g connectivity
• You cannot make use of the HDR screen due to lack of support by Netflix, Prime Video or YouTube

Buying Guide – Huawei P50 Pro

The Huawei P50 Pro is a high-end flagship device with a very capable processor and a high refresh rate. The mobile device can handle any type of workload that these kinds of devices are used for without slowing down or lagging, thanks to the snapdragon 88 chipsets. It is also IP68 rated against water and dust. If you need extra storage, you would have to purchase the Huawei micro SD card.

How much is the Huawei P50 Pro?

The Huawei P50 Pro retails for about $980 on Amazon. Prices differ depending on where you are buying yours from.

Huawei P50 Pro available series

The Huawei P50 Pro is available in either 4GB, 8GB or 12GB RAM.

Is the Huawei P50 Pro worth buying?

The Huawei P50 Pro is a good phone for day-to-day activities like streaming videos, playing mobile games and surfing the internet. As far as watching videos go, you would get the standard video quality as the phone is stuck at wide vine I3, which is not exactly the best way of showing off its stunning HD + OLED screen. Although since the mobile phone has a high resolution, it provides crisp images and bright, vivid colours, so it is perfect for watching animations.

The Huawei P50 Pro also has a Gaming Assistant that provides a wide range of gaming tools. An example is the ‘uninterrupted gaming’ feature which helps prevent any notification from trickling through when you do not want to be disturbed. You can also ‘lock the brightness’, and take a screenshot. There is also a ‘performance mode’ when things get properly serious in your game.

Gaming on this device gives flawless performance without the frame rate stumbling. The graphics also look great thanks to the high screen resolution and capable GPU.

Related Posts: Is The Huawei P50 Pro Worth It?

3 Alternatives to the Huawei P50 Pro

1. Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra:  The Samsung Galaxy S21 ultra is a great alternative to the Huawei P50 Pro. It has the Qualcomm Snapdragon 875 processor, which provides for excellent performance,  a 6.9 inches HD display, excellent cameras for life photos and a bigger battery at 5000mAh.
2. Honor Magic4 Pro: This is another capable device with a 6.81 inches display at 1312 x 2848 pixels screen resolution. It has a 64MP main camera and uses the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor paired with either 8GB or 12GB RAM. The battery is a 4600 mAh battery which is just a bit bigger than the Huawei P50 Pro battery.
3. Xiaomi Mi 11: This phone uses a snapdragon 888 processor, just like the Huawei P50 Pro. It has a 6.81 inches screen display at a 120Hz refresh rate. The camera is 108mp, and the battery is 4600mAh.

Conclusion 

In conclusion, the Huawei P50 Pro is a capable phone for waterproof flagship devices with amazing features and high build quality. If you are looking to purchase a good quality device that is fast and has an amazing camera, paired with a strong processor that is good for things like heavy gaming, and you can live without Google Services, then you should consider the Huawei P50 Pro.

FAQ – Huawei P50 Pro Review

Q: Does the Huawei P50 Pro have 5g connectivity?

A: No, the Huawei P50 Pro does not have 5g connectivity. Its connectivity is limited to 4g networks.

Q: What processor does the Huawei P50 Pro use?

A: the Huawei P50 Pro uses the snapdragon 88 chipset

Q: Is the refresh rate of the Huawei P50 Pro high?

A: the Huawei P50 Pro has a high refresh rate of 120hz

Q: Does the Huawei P50 Pro use the Google Play Store?

A: The Huawei P50 Pro does not support Google Services, so it does not use Google Play Store; instead, it uses Huawei’s app gallery.

Q: Is the Huawei P50 Pro waterproof?

A: The Huawei P50 Pro is IP68 rated against water and dust, making it a waterproof flagship device.

Image Gallery – Huawei P50 Pro Review

References:

About Huawei.