For the past couple of years Huawei has slowly chipped away at the (not undeserved) stigma that Chinese products are usually inferior knockoffs. With the Mate 10 Pro, the Shenzhen-based tech giant has made its best argument yet.
It’s a gorgeous and powerful handset that has received critical acclaim from the tech press, and were it not for a paranoid American government, would have been the first Huawei device to reach the mainstream US market. Even with its expansion plan falling through, the Mate 10 Pro is gaining credibility in Europe and China as a device that can hang with Apple and Samsung.
The Mate 10 Pro is actually the middle model of a three-phone series. We’re focusing on it because the standard Mate 10 lacks several key features of current flagship handsets and the premium Porsche edition is ludicrously expensive.
While Huawei’s phones have always been well-built, they’ve lacked originality. They all seem to share a mostly nondescript design without a style to call its own -- until now.
Whether it’s the visor-like strip that runs across the back of the device, or the completely symmetrical layout of the dual cameras and fingerprint reader, to the unusual colour schemes, this is a handset that stands out from the many other black, rectangular slabs on store shelves.
AI ON BOARD
But what really sets the Mate 10 Pro apart from the rest is its brain: The Kirin 970 chipset, developed in-house by Huawei. The company says it’s the first mobile processor in the world to have a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which is essentially a souped up CPU with cores dedicated to running AI tasks.