And Huawei’s new phone comes with a 10x optical zoom.
Hey, good morning! You look fabulous.
I spent the last few days talking with Huawei, listening to Huawei and (briefly) playing with its new flagship P40 Pro phone. If you’ve been following the company’s progress over recent years, you’ll know it really hit its groove making aggressively high-specced smartphones with incredible cameras and imaging tricks. But hopes of becoming the de facto Android phone maker (and kicking Samsung aside) were crushed when the US government took aim at Huawei, and Google had to stop providing Android services (as you know ’em) for Huawei devices.
The P40 is its first P series phone since that bombshell, and it doesn’t have the Google Play app store, Chrome or Google Maps. Making things worse, Huawei’s app store is still severely lacking, despite huge teams of software engineers and an outreach program to the biggest app developers both globally and in specific countries.
So, what do I think of the P40? It feels like a Galaxy phone, to be honest, all curves and sloping sides. It comes with a 5X optical zoom, backed by a huge imaging sensor that would be more at home in a compact camera than a phone. The specs are to die for, but the reality of using it is a dull one. I’ll be carrying around the P40 for a little longer — even if there’s really not many places to go at this moment in time. Hey, at least Nintendo is ensuring there’s no shortage of games for me to play.