Daniel Rotar

April 24, 2020

The Smart Watch with a 2-Week Battery Life!

Daniel Rotar

April 24, 2020

You might have seen our videos on the brand new Huawei P40 Pro. The Smartphone that currently has the best and most impressive Camera out there. Huawei has reached out once again, sponsoring the above video, and have sent over their brand new Huawei GT 2e Smart Watch. As always, all opinions remain my own, it’s just that it’s highly likely that the video wouldn’t have happened if Huawei didn’t partner with us.

I’m going to tell you some of the features right now, and you have to guess in the comments how much this Smart Watch costs:

A 46mm Case
A 1.39 inch OLED Display
GPS
Sleep Tracking
Automatic Workout Detection
Real-Time HR Monitoring
A 50m Water Resistance
Oxygen Level Meter
Works with any Smartphone out there, no matter what OS you’re running.
Two-Week Battery Life. Not two days, but two full weeks whilst utilising all of the Smart Watches’ features.

Impressed? Well, wait until you hear the rest! Without any further ado, here’s everything you need to know, in terms of the Huawei Watch GT 2e.

Unboxing

First things first, the unboxing experience is pretty straight forward. The GT 2e comes in a very stylish looking black box, inside of which we get the Watch itself, followed by a USB type A to USB type C Charging Cable, the main Smart Watch Charger and a Magnetic Charger. This will automatically attach to the Smart Watch, so there is no need to fiddle around with aligning it or anything like that. We also get the Quick Start Guide and that’s pretty much it.

To get started, you need to download Huawei Health, which you can find on all mobile app stores. You might also need to download Huawei Mobile Services if you have a non-Huawei Smartphone. But once you have those two, it’s pretty straight forward.

When it comes to a Smart Watch, there are six things that I personally care about the most, these are: Design, Customisability, Fitness Features, Battery Life, Special Features & Value. So, how does the Watch GT 2e perform in each of these categories?

Design

Starting off with the design, the GT 2e resembles Huawei’s recently released Watch GT 2. The only difference being that this is more sporty and it is aimed at people who are always on the move, or just younger people in general, as we do get multiple colour options.

You can chop & change the Bands, but I am a big fan of Huawei’s own.

We get Graphite Black, which is the one we have, with a black 316L Stainless Steel Body and a Black Sport Band. Then we have the Lava Red model, followed by the Mint Green and Icy White, both of which come with a Silver 316L Stainless Steel Frame. The Band is now integrated into the Body. So, while you can indeed remove the Band and replace it if you choose to do so, the Band continues the flow of the GT 2e’s design and it does look really nice, especially on my model. It looks as if they were made from the same material.

Also, the GT 2e has an Integrated Glass Display, meaning that the border is actually underneath the glass, so if you run your finger over the face of the Smart Watch, it all feels like one single piece. The Display itself is also laminated, so there’s no visible gap between the Display and the glass. I really do like the way this Smart Watch looks from the front, definitely one of my favourites design wise!

Speaking of the Display, we get a 1.39” AMOLED Display, with a Resolution of 454x454 and a PPI of 326. This Display is razor sharp so you don’t have to worry about seeing any Pixels on it at all. We don’t really have anything on the sides, aside from the two buttons. The top one being used for bringing up the App Menu, while the bottom one can be customised into opening a custom app. By default it is set to opening up the Workouts app, which is what I would recommend most people leave it set to.

Finally, on the back we an array of four Sensors, which are used for measuring your heart-rate and the amount of Oxygen in your blood, which I will get back to when I’m talking about health and fitness.

Overall, it’s a very sleek looking Smart Watch that weighs just 43g, without the strap, so it’s very lightweight and perfect for anyone who’s into sports and wants a lightweight Smart Watch that also looks great on the wrist.

Customisation

How much can you actually customise the GT 2e? Well, you get four models to choose from, which are all 46mm in size. You can indeed change the Bands, as they have a traditional Smart Watch Band mechanism, but I would say the genuine Huawei bands look the best. This is how the Smart Watch was designed, so that the Band continues the design of the Smart Watch. So the customisation with the Bands is pretty limited.

In terms of Watch Faces you get 12 different Watch Faces pre-installed but if you want to get some more, you can just open up the Huawei Health app and from there, you can find literally hundreds of them. These were created either by Huawei or by other members in the community. They’re all absolutely free, so you don’t need to pay for any of these, and there are so many of them that I kept on scrolling and it took me quite some time until I reached the end of the Watch Face list.

I just wish that they were organised in some way because it was quite difficult finding what I was looking for, they were all just… there. But if you care about having a large selection of Watch Faces, you get plenty of them to choose from, with even more to come. With some of these you can indeed change the Widgets and what they show, to something else. However, most of the Watch Faces are fixed and you cannot really change them in any other way.

Fitness Features

Now, moving on to fitness features, this is by far the GT 2e’s strongest point. Aside from the lightweight Body and the sporty look, the GT 2e also has a 50M Water Resistance. If you’re a swimmer, or even a diver, it can easily handle that. You can take a shower or a bath with it, that’s all fine.

On top of this, the GT 2e supports tracking for 100 different types of work-out, including automatic workout detection for outdoor running, outdoor walking, indoor walking, indoor running, elliptical and rowing. You also have a built-in GPS, meaning that if you go out for a run, without your phone, the watch will still be able to accurately track your run and put that on the map for you.

It also comes with a HR Monitor, which supports real-time Heart-Rate Monitoring. The GT 2e can essentially constantly measure your heart-rate, as opposed to measuring it every 10 minutes or so, like most Smart Watches do. It also supports Heart-Rate Monitoring while you’re swimming, which for me is new. I haven’t seen this in any Smart Watch before as the water usually affects the Heart-Rate Monitor, but this doesn’t seem to be an issue for the GT 2e. If your heart-rate is too high or too low for more than ten minutes, you will get a notification to alert you of that.

Moving on, something very unique about this Smart Watch that very few on the market can do, is that the GT 2e can also measure the amount of Oxygen in your blood, as opposed to just your heart-rate. This actually got introduced in an April software update. It allows you to see the percentage of Oxygen in your blood. If this is above 90%, you’re good. If it’s below that, then you either need to take a break from exercising or you might even have a medical condition.

It’s such a great feature to have, as a lack of Oxygen can cause fatigue. So if you’re feeling tired, it might be because the room that you’re in isn’t Oxygenated well enough, and this Smart Watch can make you aware of that. These are excellent fitness tracking capabilities, with the GT 2e.

Battery Life

Like I mentioned before, the fourth important thing for me in a Smart Watch is the Battery Life. Most Smart Watches last for a day, very few last for two days and there are even fewer that can last you for weeks. Even these have to enter this Ultra Power Saving Mode, which disables pretty much everything and only shows you the time on a Display that no longer has a backlight.

Somehow, Huawei managed to get two weeks of Battery Life out of this. This is two full weeks without even enabling the Power Saving Mode, which this Smart Watch doesn’t even have because it just doesn’t need one. How on earth has Huawei achieved two weeks of Battery Life when others can only do a single day? Well, there are a few reasons.

First of all, the GT 2e runs on Huawei’s own Operating System. Second, there are no third party apps supported. Everything that this Smart Watch can do is already built into it. You cannot download any more apps or any more functionality. This means that Huawei does have full control over the software experience. Finally, number three, the GT 2e is powered by Huawei’s own Kirin A1 Processor, which is Huawei’s first wearable Chip featuring Dual Bluetooth 5.1 as well as an Ultra Low Power Management Unit. So, this is why we get a two-week Battery Life. No third party apps and both the software and the hardware is fully made by Huawei.

Special Features

So far, we get a Smart Watch with an insane Battery Life and some of the best fitness capabilities that I have seen on a Smart Watch. It’s just that you have no third party app support and customisation, in terms of the Bands, is pretty limited. So, what special features does it come with?

Firstly, it works with any Mobile OS. You just need to download Huawei’s health app and you’re good to go. Just to make it clear, even if you don’t have any third party apps, you will still get notifications from your apps. It’s just that you can only see them and you cannot respond to them, but you’ll still get them.

The extra-long Battery Life really adds to the Sleep Tracking feature.

Secondly, this is definitely the biggest special feature, we finally get Sleep Tracking thanks to that two-week Battery Life. While you’re sleeping, the GT 2e will measure your heart-rate and breathing in real-time and then provide you with eight sleep quality reports with suggestions on how to improve your sleep quality. This is definitely my favourite feature on it and something that I wasn’t able to experience before with any other Smart Watch that I’ve used.

We also get 24/7 Stress Monitoring, which will provide some advice on how to live a healthier, stress-free life.

We do get some really cool small extra features that definitely do make this an even better Smart Watch. Things such as an Always-On Display, the ability to control your music straight from your Smart Watch, a remote shutter for your Huawei Smartphone’s Camera as well as the ability to locate your phone. A few more apps that the GT 2e has are: a Barometer for measuring the altitude, a compass for finding your direction, a weather app, a breathing app and more.

Value

Finally, how much does the GT 2e cost and what is the overall value that you’re getting from it? Well, the GT 2e is now on sale and it costs £160 in the UK! Now, that’s significantly less than what I was expecting it to cost. It’s almost half the price of other Smart Watches or even more than that in some cases.

While you are not getting as much customisability in terms of Bands, Watch Faces and apps, like you would do with some other Smart Watches, you are indeed getting one of the very best for fitness capabilities out there. It has the ability to measure your heart-rate while you’re swimming, 50M Water Resistance, a real time HR Monitor, an Oxygen & Stress level Meter as well as GPS. Of course, you’re still getting all notifications from your phone, right on your wrist. On top of this, you also get an insane two-week Battery Life with sleep tracking capabilities.

If you’re looking to get one, I’ve left a link in the description of the video. If you use the coupon code AZONEoFTECH, you also get a £20 discount. Offer valid until April 30th 2020.

ZONEofTECH

April 16, 2020

Reviews

Would we switch to the Huawei P40 Pro?

ZONEofTECH

April 16, 2020

Reviews

Huawei not only sent over two Huawei P40 Pro’s, one in Black and the other in the new Silver Frost colour, but they also wanted us to test this for an entire week and give you our thoughts on it.

You’ve probably seen the Unboxing and our First Impressions of the P40 Pro, but now it’s time to dive in a little deeper into what this phone can do. Just a small spoiler, the Huawei P40 Pro has the very best Camera on any Smartphone out right now and getting all of your apps across is surprisingly easily. We were shocked to see that we could pretty much clone an entire Galaxy Fold onto the P40 Pro with ease.

But we’re getting carried away, so here is everything you need to know in terms of the P40 Pro when it comes to the: Design, Display, Camera, Performance, Special Features, Battery Life & Value.

Apps

First things first, something that you’re all probably wondering, and something that we were definitely wondering when we got the P40 Pro, was how do we transfer apps? Google Apps & Services are no longer supported so how are we going to use apps on the P40 Pro? Well, to our surprise, it was actually extremely easy.

When you set up your P40 Pro, you will be get asked to download the Phone Clone tool on your other Smartphone. This tool will basically transfer pretty much every single app from your old phone, onto your P40 Pro. We were quite impressed that we had Instagram, Amazon, Philips Hue, Call of Duty mobile and even Apple Music. On top of this, you do have Huawei’s AppGallery which also has most popular apps, such as Tiktok, Snapchat, Amazon, Microsoft Office, Telegram, Fortnite, Asphalt 9 and more already on it. More apps are also being added every single day.

If there is indeed an app that you weren’t able to transfer and that you couldn’t find on Huawei’s AppGallery, you can always download the individual APK’s from official sources or download Third Party app stores and get them from there.

Design

In terms of the design, there are three models of the Huawei P40. We have the regular P40, which comes with a 6.1” Display and a Triple Lens Camera Module. We then have the P40 Pro, the one that we have, which comes with a 6.58” Display and a Quad Camera Module Array. Finally, we have the P40 Pro+, which will be launching in June, this has the same 6.58” Display but with a Penta Camera Module Array. Probably the best news here is that, no matter which one you buy, you will still get the same Sensor on the Main Camera. This is, at the moment, the biggest Sensor on any Smartphone on the market.

The P40 Pro looks & feels like a premium, high-end device.

When we had a look at the P40 Pro, we have to say, we really do like this design. It’s not too big, not too small, it’s pretty much the perfect size to be able to use it with one hand, without necessarily sacrificing the Display size. We do have a similar design style to what we’ve seen on other Android phones, with a Dual Front-Facing Camera Cutout, but what’s quite unique about the P40 Pro is that it is one of the few Smartphones to implement a Waterfall design. This means that, unlike some Smartphones that just have curved sides, the top and the bottom are also curved.

The Display however, doesn’t go until the end of the glass. Instead, it ends way before it. We would’ve loved to see a Waterfall Display and not just Waterfall Glass, but we guess this would’ve caused some serious accidental touch issues, so we’re not surprised that Huawei hasn’t done it.

Holding that Display in place, is a polished metal frame that matches the colour of your phone. On the bottom we have the SIM Card slot, which also holds Huawei’s proprietary NM Card, which can expand the 256GB Internal Storage by up to another 256GB.

On the right-hand side, we have the power button and the volume button, on the left-hand side we have nothing and finally on the top, we have a Microphone Port as well as an IR Blaster. Smartphones used to have this back in the day but pretty much all of them removed it. It allows you to control your TV, your DVD player and pretty much anything that has an IR Receiver. We’re glad to see that Huawei still has one, as it’s such a great feature to have.

Finally, on the back we have the Quad-Camera Module Array which we’ll be covering in the Camera section. This is one of our favourite backs, on a Smartphone, ever. You probably know that we’re a big fan of Frosted Glass backs on Smartphones, the P40 Pro is no exception. While you can indeed still get it in Black if that’s what you like, the Silver Frost back looks absolutely stunning. It is pretty much fingerprint proof and the colour of the back does slightly change depending on the angle at which the light hits it.

Also, it’s probably worth noting that the P40 Pro, even though it has the biggest Sensor on any Smartphone, the Camera bump isn’t as big or as thick as on other Smartphones, so the table wobble is much less than you would expect.

Display

Moving on to the Display, the P40 Pro comes with a 2640x1200 Resolution Display, with a PPI of 441. This is an OLED Display, with a DCI-P3 Colour Gamut and HDR10, so if you’re into photo editing and grading, this is a perfect Display for that. Not only that, but Huawei also added a 90Hz Refresh Rate, making this display 50% smoother than any other regular 60Hz panel out there.

Camera

Moving on to the Camera, this is by far the P40 Pro’s key selling feature, and probably the main reason that people would want to go for the P40 Pro. So, here are a few reasons why the Camera on this phone just blows everything else out of the water.

Largest Sensor on any Smartphone

This has the largest Sensor or any Smartphone to date. It has a 1/1.28 inch Sensor with 2.44µm size pixels with a 50MP Resolution. The larger the pixels, the more light they can capture and the better the phone is in Low Light.

RYYB Sensor

Rather than the sub-pixels on the Sensor being in the standard RGGB (Red-Green-Green-Blue) sub-pixels, the P40 Pro has a RYYB (Red-Yellow-Yellow-Blue) arrangement. This, according to Huawei, lets 40% more light in, which, combined with the massive Sensor size itself, makes the P40 Pro the best Smartphone Camera in Low Light…ever.

Best in Low Light

The P40 Pro makes something that was barely even visible with the naked eye and turns it into daylight. It pretty much works like magic and you don’t even need to have Night Mode enabled because, thanks to that massive Sensor, the P40 Pro is capable of achieving great shots like the ones we have featured in our video, where the competition struggles severely.

Usually, Smartphones have an ISO of 1600 or 3200 in the most extreme cases, but the P40 Pro has up to 51200 which can be bumped even higher to 409,600.

What was the biggest let down with the S20 Ultra, is the main selling point for the Huawei P40 Pro.

Natural Bokeh

Now some of you might be familiar with how DSLR Cameras can get these very nice Depth of Field shots, where the subject is perfectly in focus and the background is all blurred out. This is caused by both the Lens itself as well as the size of the Sensor. Since the P40 Pro has such a massive Sensor, you can actually get shots with a very impressive Bokeh or Depth of Field, even when you’re not using Portrait Mode at all. This means that the background separation would be perfect, as this is done through hardware, rather than software.

Leica Lenses

Now, like we said, aside from the Sensor itself, the Lens also makes a very big difference and the P40 Pro uses Leica Lenses. Leica being one of the world’s most well-known Camera and Lens manufacturers. They make high-end Lenses for DSLR Cameras and they’ve teamed up with Huawei to make the Lenses used on the P40 Pro’s Camera.

Best 50x Zoom

The P40 Pro comes with a 12MP Periscope Camera Module that gives us 5x Optical Zoom and 50X Digital Zoom. We compared this Zoom against another Smartphone that has 100x Space Zoom and it turns out that Huawei’s 50x Module was significantly better than that other 100x Module. This seems to be the sharpest Zoom on any Smartphone that we’ve used. You can even use Night Mode on the Telephoto Module as well.

Cinematic Ultra-Wide

Then we have one more Module, which is a 40MP Ultra-Wide Angle Module. Huawei’s calling this a Cine Camera, which was specifically designed for video. We have to say, the video looks stunning on this, Stabilisation is great and Low Light performance, even on the Wide Angle Module, is just outstanding. The P40 Pro is also the best Smartphone that we’ve used for Low Light video.

100% Pixels for Autofocusing

Finally, the last thing that makes this Camera so unique is that unlike some of the competition, that use Sensors almost as big as the P40 Pro but have some serious Autofocusing issues, the P40 Pro uses 100% of the pixels on the Sensor for Focusing and because of this, Focusing is pretty much instant, we haven’t had a single issue with Focusing on the P40 Pro.

The P40 Pro really makes a splash when it comes to Slow-Motion.

A few more things that we want to mention when it comes to the Camera, is that we also get a Depth Sensor on the back, for improving Portrait Mode photography and the Front-Facing Camera is really good as well. It’s a 32MP Selfie Camera and the Low Light is outstanding there too.

Slowest Slow-Motion

Then the P40 Pro, also has the best Slow Motion on any Smartphone on the market right now. Usually Smartphones top out at 240FPS Slow Motion, with some being capable of doing 960FPS, but the P40 Pro can actually do 7680fps Slow Motion whilst also being much clearer than the competition.

Best Time-Lapse

The P40 Pro can also do 4K Time-Lapses, whereas other Smartphones are limited to 1080p Time-Lapses. This is pretty much the best Camera that we’ve ever used on a Smartphone. Definitely comment down below if you want to see a blind Camera Comparison against some of the other high-end Smartphones, similar to the ones we’ve done in the past!

Performance

Performance on the P40 Pro has been great. It comes with Huawei’s own Kirin 990 Processor, which is their highest-end model, as well as the Mali G76 GPU, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of Storage.

To be honest, that 90Hz Refresh Rate Display makes everything buttery smooth. We haven’t experienced any lag or any slowdowns whatsoever, performance has been perfect.

Special Features

Aside from all the Camera features, there are a few more features that make the P40 Pro quite a unique device.

For example, not only do we have an in-display Fingerprint Reader, but we also have a true Depth Sensing Camera on the front. Similar to FaceID, we have an advanced face unlock system on the front, making the P40 Pro the only 2020 flagship so far to have both an in-display Fingerprint Reader and the true Depth Sensing Camera on the front.

We also have IP68 Water Resistance, a Haptic Engine for when you’re typing an navigating the phone, full-onscreen Navigational Gestures, WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.1, a Gravity Sensor, that IR Blaster than we mentioned before, a Bone Conduction earpiece because we don’t have any earpiece cut-out on the top, as well as 5G and we even get an Always-On Display, which is one of our favourite features ever, on a Smartphone.

Battery Life

When it comes to the battery itself, the P40 Pro comes with a 4200 mAh Battery and it also supports 40W Fast Charging right out of the box. As well as this, it supports 27W Wireless Charging and Reverse Wireless Charging, which means that you can not only charge other devices from the back of the P40 Pro, but you can also charge other Smartphones as well.

Value

When it comes to Value, the P40 Pro costs £900 in the UK. This is expensive but still more affordable than pretty much all of the competition.

So, if you’re looking for the very best Smartphone Camera out there, this is the one. You will have to go through some hoops and do a bit of tweaking to get all of your stuff working, but the good news is that most apps did indeed work right out of the box. This will only get better once more and more apps start coming to Huawei’s AppGallery.

ZONEofTECH

April 6, 2020

Unboxings

Huawei P40 Pro - First Impressions

ZONEofTECH

April 6, 2020

Unboxings

The Huawei P40 Pro is here and we’ve managed to get some hands-on. In this article, we’ll go through our first impressions and see how it stacks up against some of its’ main competitors in key areas such as Display, Camera, Specifications and Apps. Also, be sure to check out the video we’ve posted on the channel, which also includes our live unboxing of the new Huawei P40 Pro.

Display

The Build Quality and feel is as good as you would expect from a high-end, flagship Smartphone.

When it comes to the Design and the overall size, the P40 Pro seems to be very similar to the Galaxy S10+ from last year. We do, however, get a larger Display on the P40 Pro, which is 6.58”, compared to the 6.4” display that the S10+ had. We really do like the way it feels in the hand, it’s got a very nice weight to it. In terms of Design & Build Quality, it feels very premium and we are very impressed.

When it comes to the Display, this is a 2640x1200 Resolution OLED Display, with DCI-P3 Coverage, HDR10+ Support as well as a 90Hz Refresh Rate. We do have a fairly large Front-Facing Camera Cutout, the reason being that we get a large 32MP Sensor, with an f/2.2 Aperture, and a ToF Sensor.

As with the iPhone X onwards and the Google Pixel 4, the P40 Pro also features an advanced face unlock system. On top of this, we also have an in-display Optical Fingerprint Reader, so the same as on the OnePlus 7T Pro. This makes the Huawei P40 Pro the only 2020 flagship right now that has both an in-display Fingerprint Reader as well as an advanced facial recognition system, on the front. But what makes this phone so unique, is the Camera.

Camera

The P40 Pro comes with a 50MP 1/1.28” Sensor, which is even larger than the 108MP 1/1.33” Sensor that we have on the S20 Ultra. So, at the moment, this is the largest Sensor on any Smartphone. The larger the Sensor, the better it is in low light and also the more natural Bokeh. The module at the top, is a 40MP Ultra-Wide Angle Module, while the module below it, is an 12MP Telephoto Module, very similar to that Periscope Module that we also got in last year’s P30 Pro. We also have 5x Optical Zoom and 50x Digital Zoom. We’ve done a few tests against the S20 Ultra, which in theory should have a much better Telephoto Module, with up to 100x Digital Zoom. However, it turns out that the P40 Pro was actually much sharper at 50x.

The P40 Pro also comes with Leica Optics. In case you don’t know, Leica is one of the most famous manufacturers of Lenses in the world. They make some of the best ones on the market, so it’s pretty amazing to see a partnership between such a well known Camera Gear Manufacturer and a Smartphone Manufacturer.

We don’t have 8K Video on this, but that’s fine because at the moment, 8K recording quality is pretty poor, at least when it comes to Frame-Rate and Dynamic Range. However, we do have 4K at 60FPS as well as autofocus with the Front-Facing Camera. We are extremely excited to be testing out this Camera so, if you guys want to see an in-depth blind Camera comparison, then definitely subscribe and hit the notification bell to be the first to see that video as soon as it comes out.

Specifications

At 40W, this makes the P40 Pro the fastest Wireless Charging Smartphone on the market.

In terms of the Specifications, the P40 Pro comes with the Kirin 990 Processor, which is based on a 7nm+ Process. This is Huawei’s most powerful Processor, as well as 8GB of RAM. We also get 128GB of Storage, as well as Nano Memory Support. This is Huawei’s proprietary microSD card but with this, you can expand the Storage by up to 256GB. Fast charging has also been improved, we now get 40W Fast Wired Charging, as well as 40W Wireless Charging, which makes this the fastest wireless charging on any smartphone out there, at the moment. In fact, there are zero wireless chargers that even have this speed right now. Reverse wireless charging is also here, which is something that Huawei was the first to introduce to the market, with the Mate 20 Pro.

The P40 Pro also features the most insane level of Slow-Motion ever, for a Smartphone. So, just to give you guys an idea, the iPhone 11 Pro Max can do 240FPS Slow Motion, the S20 Ultra can do 480FPS Slow Motion (960FPS is only available on the S20 & S20+, not the S20 Ultra). The P40 Pro can do 7680FPS, which is just ridiculous, take a look for yourselves!

Google Apps

Now, some of you might be wondering how you would get Google apps on this? Is the Google Play store still available? The answer is…kind of. Right out of the box, you do not have any Google apps on this. You can still side-load them if you know what you’re doing, it’s not really that difficult to do really, so you can indeed get them working this way.

Despite recent events, you can still get all of your favourite apps on the Huawei P40 Pro.

But, Huawei has launched their ‘AppGallery’ app, which is their own App Store and it turns out that you can actually find a lot of popular apps on there right now. Microsoft Office, Snapchat, Telegram, TikTok, Asphalt 9 and many more apps that you might be familiar with from the Google Play store are already here, with many more to come.

Additionally, you can have something called ‘PhoneClone’, which transfers all of your data from your current phone, onto the P40. If you’re wondering about apps, PhoneClone will automatically find the PlayStore apps on the Huawei AppGallery and download them from there and, if it cannot find the apps on the Playstore, it would actually copy the app and transfer it directly to the P40 Pro. This is a pretty smart-way to get your apps transferred and it’s such an easy process.

What are your comments & thoughts on the P40 Pro?

ZONEofTECH

November 8, 2019

Reviews

Huawei nova 5T - The £399 Flagship?

ZONEofTECH

November 8, 2019

Reviews

This article is about the Huawei nova 5T, and in case you haven’t heard of this phone it is a £399 smartphone that comes with some truly flagship specs.

We have the Huawei Kirin 980 octa-core processor, which is actually the exact same processor that you can find in the Huawei P30 Pro, arguably the best smartphone that Huawei has even made, as the Mate 30 Pro isn’t out in all regions just yet. Aside from this we have 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. We also get a massive 3750mAh battery with SuperCharge, which is Huawei’s fast charging technology, with which you can charge this up to 50% in just 30 minutes.

We have a massive 6.26 inch display with a resolution of 2340x1080, with some very thin bezels and no notch aside from just the front camera cutout which is an insane 32MP sensor. But the back camera is even more impressive. We have a quad-camera module, with a regular 48MP sensor on the main module, a 16mp wide angle module, a 2MP macro module and then another 2MP module that’s used for portrait mode.

The colours of the nova 5T (Black, Crush Blue, and Midsummer Purple)

It also has a side mounted fingerprint reader, and probably one of the craziest colours that I’ve seen on the back of any phone! It comes in a very vibrant Midsummer Purple, a Crush Blue variant, and finally the classic black colour that we have.

So as you can probably tell, this is a truly unique device! Huawei was kind enough to not only send one over but also sponsor this entire project. So what I did was use the nova 5T for an entire day, took it out, took some photos, and used it as I would when I’m on holiday because that’s when I’m using my phone the most, and see how a £399 phone with flagship specs actually performs!

Before I even set off, I installed all of the apps that I use in a regular basis, so everything; from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Creator Studio, Gmail, Hootsuite for scheduling my social media posts, and I’ll be keeping track of the battery life and performance through-out the entire day.

The first thing that I did was to go around the the city centre area and test out the camera. Unfortunately, it was a rainy day and it was also quite cold, but nonetheless the shots ended up being very impressive, and you’ll see what I mean in just a bit.

So whilst on the tram to the city center, I took a few selfies and the way those have turned out, blew me away.

An example shot from the nova 5T’s front facing camera

This is a 32MP selfie and it’s the sharpest photo with a front facing camera that I have ever seen coming from a phone. All of that is thanks to the massive 32MP sensor, my hair is unbelievably sharp and you can zoom in a considerable amount, without seeing any noticeable pixelation at all, something that is not at all possible with a regular smartphone.

So when seeing these on my computer, I was blown away. But it gets even better. I then took a few regular photos with the regular module on the back and they were pretty good. They had a great exposure, great colour, pretty much a perfect white balance and they were generally good shots, too bad the weather wasn’t on our side.

But you see, this phone actually has four camera modules on the back and I wanted to put every single one of them to the test.

So starting with some zoom photos, thanks to that massive 48MP sensor, we can zoom in up to 10x times digitally. Here’s an example of before and after the 10x zoom.

We then have the two fun lenses. The Wide and the Macro Lens.

The wide-angle is something that we’ve started seeing on pretty much every flagship smartphone today, with a few exceptions, so I’m very glad to see Huawei adding a wide angle lens to a mid-range phone. Now I was expecting the wide angle modules to be just okay since even on high end phones the wide angle module is usually the one that’s noticeable worse than the other two. But take a look at this shot.

This was the shot taken with 2x zoom, I have also put in the same shot taken with regular lens, and the wide angle lens. Not only do we get much much more in the scene but I don’t really see any severe softness that wide angle modules usually have.

We took some more wide angle shots of the Manchester Cathedral and what we did next is that we actually went inside of the cathedral to test out the night mode and see how the lenses perform in a fairly dim environment. I think the results speak for themselves, dont you? The nightmode shot is one of the best night mode shots that I’ve seen on a smartphone. It’s extremely sharp but what’s probably even more impressive is that I actually took this with the wide angle module! Just take a look at the picture below, perfect exposure, perfect sharpness, the colours are very accurate as well so I’m very impressed so far.

A wide angle nightmode shot taken in Manchester Cathedral

Ok, next up I wanted to test out that Macro Module. This is actually something that we don’t really have on many other smartphones out there, so it’s a very new and unique feature and I could get extremely close to a leaf with water on, I was about 4cm or even closer than that, and the leaf was still perfectly in focus.

Back Portrait mode also works surprisingly well and has good background separation, although it does work better outdoors than indoors, since you do need a fair bit of light.

The nova 5T can also shoot 4K video, up to 30fps. The footage itself is pretty sharp and well exposed. So again, good marks for Huawei on this.

So those were the four modules of this phone and I’m very impressed, especially when you consider that this is a £399 phone, less than half of what a flagship smartphone costs and the results were still very impressive.

But there’s actually a very special feature that this phone has. So the main module is actually a 48MP sensor. But you see taking 48MP photos will eat up your storage four times faster than what a regular phone’s 12MP camera would. So what the nova 5T does is that it actually uses just the 12MP area of the sensor to take the photos and then it uses the remaining area of the sensor, to improve the clarity. But if you go into the settings menu, there’s actually a secret 48MP mode that allows you to take full 48MP photos and here’s an example.

A comparison shot between the 12MP Camera and the 48MP secret option

You can probably see that weirdly enough the 48MP shot is a bit softer, and that’s because in the 12MP mode it’s actually doing that sharpening that I was talking about before. But the real difference between the two lies if you zoom in. When digitally zoomed in the 12MP one starts to look pixely, while the 48MP shot is noticeably sharper. If we had had a bright day with lots of sunlight, the results would’ve been even sharper on the 48MP mode since you do need to be in a well light environment, for the very best results.

So after taking all those photos, Connor and I decided to go and get something to eat. We went to this Italian restaurant where we took some more indoor shots. This was another dimly lit area, so I’ve been using night mode for pretty much all the shots. Now, something that I haven’t mentioned yet, is that the nova 5T also has an AI camera. This means that the camera can detect what it actually shoots and it will automatically adjust based on that.

Above are a couple of examples of the AI Camera. Number one is a picture that I took. Picture one is of my pizza, and you can probably see how sharp the pizza is, and how vibrant the nova 5T made the colours of it look.

Picture two is a photo of a water bottle and same story here, you can see how the AI camera made it stand out from the background, even though this was actually not taken with portrait mode but with the regular photo mode instead.

And finally picture three is a selfie that I took in the restaurant, and whilst it is a bit softer than the outdoor one, it’s still very sharp for low light indoor selfies.

Ok, so we did get quite a bunch of shots and what we wanted to do was to find a place to sit down, transfer these shots and do some work. In my case, start scripting the main part of the video and drafting this article. We did go to the Central Library but ended up at a coffee shop after I had transferred all the shots. Speaking of, this was a very easy and quick process, thanks to that USB C port that the Huawei nova 5T has, so I had zero issues getting the shots off of the phone.

Many users guessed the images posted on Twitter and Instagram were from the iPhone 11

I wanted to take a few more indoors shots with night mode enabled to see how they would turn out, and like before we got some very impressive shots, especially the one with the floor lamp where the nova 5T made a fantastic job of separating the shadows from one and another. I even posted some of the images that I’d taken with the nova 5T on Twitter and Instagram as stories. Now I did this to to see how many of you got the name of the phone right and pretty much everyone either said that it was an iPhone 11 Pro or a Pixel 4. So from your own thoughts this clearly measures up to flagship quality photography at its £399 price point!

After I had done my first drafts I started watching Marques’s Pixel 4 review, read some news articles, browsed the web. I haven’t really talked about the display, but it’s great. We haven’t really had a sunny day to fully test it outdoors, but in the overcast weather that we had an indoors, it was very easily viewable.

Now you may be wondering how the battery was doing by this point in the day. Well, it was at 80%, however when I was transferring the photos before, I did have it connected to my laptop and the battery charged from 70% up to 90% during that time, in about 30 minutes or so which was quite impressive.

By this point, since the days are quite short towards the end of the year, it was getting quite dark, so I took a few actual night time shots in some very low light conditions and below are a few of them. They actually have that Pixel style look which I really like! They’re very processed but overall, they’re good, especially when you consider how little this phone costs!

When we finally got back into the office, the battery was at 75%, but do keep in mind that it did charge 20% while transferring the photos, so the real number would be around 50-55% which is pretty good, considering that I took loads of photos with it all day.

I wanted to put it on charge and see how fast it would charge. Now, as I mentioned at start, the nova 5T does support Huawei’s SuperCharge which lets you charge up to 50% in just 30 minutes, but what I want to see here, is how fast it would charge from 75%, up to 100%. Charging from closer to 100% is always very slow as the phone tries to preserve the heal of the battery life, by trickle charging or slow charging, the closer they get to 100%, and this was pretty much the case here as well. It took close to a full hour to charge the remaining 25%, but charging up to the first 50% can indeed be done in just 30 minutes.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion I am pretty impressed. This is a £399 phone and the night mode on this camera and the daytime selfies left me saying “wow” the moment I opened them on my computer, they’re really that good!

You also have the wide angle module which one famous flagship smartphone that costs more than double than this one does, lacks! And we have the macro module which turned out to be quite useful!

The performance was very good. I haven’t noticed any lag or any slowdown whatsoever, and that’s thanks to the Kirin 980 processor and 6GB of RAM on this unit.

The Side Mounted fingerprint unlock is insanely fast. Literally the moment you rest your finger on it to unlock the phone, since that’s also the power button, it instantly unlocks.

Something I didn’t mention was that it also has an LED notification light inside the top speaker grill. Pretty cool!

At £399 you get the perfect blend of performance, features, battery life and camera. It comes out on the 8th of November and you can purchase it on all major carriers here in the UK.