The brand-new Huawei Mate50 Pro is not your typical phone. It’s better – and I mean way better – than the average smartphone, in specs, design and features.
It’s beautiful, with a sleek frame that has no awkward bumps or dips; it features a camera that’s as good as one you’d find in a photographer’s kit; and it has several fantastic features I didn’t know I needed – and now can’t live without.
How to buy the Huawei Mate50 Pro:
The phone went on sale on December 23, and you can order it right here.
- Freebuds 5i (pay Dh100, save Dh229)
- 12-month multi-countries warranty service (with multi-country support)
- Three-month extension warranty (with multi-country support)
- Huawei Music six-month VIP plan
- Huawei Video+ six-month VIP plan
- Huawei Mobile Cloud 200GB (for three months)
The future is now
The Mate50 Pro is Huawei’s futuristic flagship phone, and it carries that theme throughout its interior and exterior. I’ve always liked Huawei’s designs, but their latest phone’s hardware is stunning. Around its camera module, which Huawei aptly calls a Space Ring, the phone features a beautiful Clous de Paris embossed design – a pyramid-like pattern you typically see in the dials of expensive watches. Its glass rear cover comes in black or silver, but I especially love the orange rear cover, which is made from vegan leather.
The Mate50 Pro sits at number one position in current smartphone camera rankings at DXOMARK, a France-based independent benchmark for scientifically assessing smartphones, lenses and cameras. And I can see why.
Moon photography
This could be the phone that finally grants you and me a perfect shot of the moon. Its XMAGE camera system has something for everyone, including a fabulous periscope telephoto camera that supports a zoom range of up to 200x, bringing scenes from the great beyond right in front of your eyes. Its cutting-edge Ultra Aperture XMAGE Camera features a 10-size adjustable physical aperture, and you can manually adjust the depth of field and degree of blur for professional-quality photographs. For those of us who are more interested in selfies, Portrait mode and Night mode capture vivid, detail-rich images, even in low light. And if you’re looking to capture the birds and the bees instead, the wide-angle macro camera magnifies objects at a millimetre-level with outstanding clarity.
Camera aside, reviewers have found that the Mate50 Pro checks off most of the items on their wish lists. When you use its 6.74-inch FullView Display screen, its brightness dims based on ambient light, to reduce flickering and relieve eye strain.
Helpful bits
1) The phone cleverly optimises storage space by removing duplicate files and compressing all those rarely-used apps we’ve downloaded and forgotten about. And forget about gorilla glass – the Mate50 Pro is armoured by Kunlun glass, which boosts drop resistance 10 times over.
2) But I think its best feature, by far, is Huawei’s new EMUI 13 user interface, which streamlines daily interactions with simple, one-touch navigation. The phone features an all-new SuperHub, a kind of floating window you can use to temporarily store text, pictures, videos and files. It makes cutting and pasting incredibly easy, and transferring files between the phone, tablet or laptop, a painless process. The system even allows you to connect to devices – like your earbuds or laptops – with a simple drag.
3) Now, my issue with most phones is – the more powerful their features, the faster their batteries die out. But the Mate50 Pro packs a 4,700mAh battery in its slim frame, which is about a day with all these bells and whistles at top use, and is fast-charging, both in wired and wireless form. Reviewers say that when the battery level falls to one per cent, its SuperEnergy Boosting feature pushes the phone to extend standby time by three hours – that’s equal to 12 minutes of call time. It gives us enough time – when we desperately need it – to make emergency calls or book our ride home.
Cons
However, there are just a couple of things that might make you hesitate to buy the Mate50 Pro. First, it doesn’t support 5G – but as someone who just wants a solid internet connection (no matter which G it is), I don’t find this to be a big deal.
Another, probably bigger hitch, may be Huawei’s lack of support for Google Mobile Services (GMS). I’ll admit, this was my main area of concern. It has been an issue with the previous iterations from Huawei. But let’s unpack this, for a second – does losing out on GMS mean you don’t get the apps you use the most? Apparently not.
The fact is, most people who use Huawei phones don’t miss GMS because Huawei’s Mobile Services’ (HMS) AppGallery has an extremely capable ecosystem of over 203,000 apps. It now hosts all the apps I generally use – and you likely do, too. Google Maps and Uber? Check. All the social media superstars, like Instagram, Meta, Twitter, TikTok, and Snapchat? Check. Even YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, noon and the many food delivery apps I keep in a folder front and centre, are in there. So, there’s really no FOMO (fear of missing out).
Conclusion
All in all, Huawei’s Mate50 Pro is everything you’re looking for in a phone, without realising it. From aesthetics to camera capability to smart features and durability, it’s a powerful new offering from Huawei. And it’s available for orders right now! Buy it here.
Our recommendations are independently chosen by Gulf News editors. If you decide to shop through links on our website, we may earn an affiliate commission from Huawei.
