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Huawei Mate 10

Huawei Mate 10 review

Editor Rating: Excellent (4.0)
Huawei Mate 10 review - Huawei Mate 10
Street Price£ 499.00
  • Pros

    Gleaming, stylish metal and glass body Powerful, AI-assisted octo-core processor Fantastic camera
  • Cons

    Not available to buy on contract in the UK
  • Bottom Line

    Android aficionados who want one of the first phones with mobile AI should consider tracking down a Huawei Mate 10 unlocked; it's almost as good as the Pro for a fraction of the price. Good luck finding one though.

The Huawei Mate 10 is the cheaper and less powerful counterpart to the excellent Mate 10 Pro, to which we recently gave a glowing 9/10 'Excellent' score in our review.

Like the Mate 10 Pro, the Mate 10 features a dedicated AI chip, dubbed the NPU (neural processing unit). As well as giving you an overall boost in performance, the NPU will learns which apps you use and when, and also help the camera’s auto mode get better at detecting things like pets, flowers, food, dramatic sunsets, etc and configuring things like shutter speeds and exposure accordingly.

While this isn't coming to the UK or US on contract, curious early adopters who’d like a slice of the mobile AI action, and are prepared to buy unlocked and SIM-free, should take note.


Huawei Mate 10: Design, features and storage

Design-wise, the Huawei Mate 10 borrows much from its bigger sibling; it's a non-conductive metal phone (read: no wireless charging) coated in layered paint and tempered glass. It's glossy, shiny and looks like it means business. The camera unit, light sensor and flash are accentuated by a shaded stripe, that's further enhanced when you slip on the supplied case.

Unlike the Mate 10 Pro, there's a 3.5mm jack on this one, up on the top, which is good news for people with older 'phones who've yet to upgrade to a Type-C/Bluetooth future.

There is a Type-C USB port at the base, for data transfer and charging. From empty, Huawei says that you'll be able to get a full tank in under 90 minutes, which we were able to replicate in tests, but only with the official SuperCharge charger (5V 2A/4.5V 5A). With other adapters, your results may vary. It took us almost eight hours to fully charge a Mate 10 using a USB 2.0 port on our desktop PC, for example.


On the front of the Huawei Mate 10 sits a fingerprint scanner for fast, near-instantaneous unlocking. The scanner's a tiny, dinky little lozenge, about 6mm high. In a way this is good, as it means there's more room for that big 5.9-inch screen, which rides up close to a very thin bezel, but people with bigger hands (i.e. this reviewer) might find this inconvenient. If it’d been located on the back, like the Mate 10 Pro's is, there’d be even more space.

A SIM tray, which will support two 4G nano SIMs at once - something possible thanks to Huawei’s new CPU - sits on the top left while opposite this lies a volume rocker and the power key. As usual, pressing both of these down lets you take a screenshot.

A single speaker sits at the base of the Mate 10 and while this phone supports lossless audio at 384K/32bits, songs streamed or played out of this distort at maximum volume. It’s an improvement on the Mate 9's single speaker, but high end noises still sound tinny at messy with the volume all the way up.


Huawei Mate 10: Screen

The Mate 10’s 5.9-inch screen is a Quad HD (2,560x1,440) LCD. It’s got an RGBW set-up and can kick out 730 nits of brightness.

By comparison, that's the same size as the old Mate 9’s panel, which had a Full HD (1,920x1080) resolution, so you're getting more detail crammed into the same real estate on a phone that’s 1.1m thinner.

It's not quite an edge-to-edge bezel-less display, but it might as well be. It seems like Huawei’s tech took a razor to any atom of unneeded space here, which perhaps makes it a shame that they couldn’t have put the fingerprint scanner on the back (freeing up even more room), like they did on the Mate 10 Pro.

Brightness-wise, 730 nits compares well to the 625 nits of the iPhone 8s and X and the Mate 9's 626. It’s not as colour-accurate or rich as the Mate 10 Pro's OLED, but it's still a good, detailed panel that punches through daytime glare without a problem.

Huawei Mate 10: User interface

Huawei's EMUI is present and correct on the Mate 10, updated to it latest version, 8.0.

The same neat and easy-to-navigate Settings menu is present and correct, as is the gallery of tweakable custom themes.

Despite the huge leap forwards that's implied by the version number jump - the previous version of EMUI is numbered 5.1 - little has changed on the surface, besides a new clock and some nice animated backgrounds, some of which change colour depending on the time of day.

Huawei says that most of the big changes are in fact under-the-hood performance tweaks including better power management, and a more stable photo gallery which won't see preview icons suddenly ghosting into view, as well as general all-round tune-ups.

The good news is that older Huawei phones like the Mate 9 and the P10 Plus are due to get the upgrade to EMUI 8.0 in due course, though no ETA has been announced as of yet.

Android 8.0 features like Chrome Autofill (Chrome remembers passwords), Instant Apps (launch or jump to an app's Google Play page from Chrome) and Notification Dots are all present and correct on the Mate 10 Pro, meaning you can join Pixel owners in having access to the latest Android features (for now, at least).

Huawei Mate 10: Kirin 970, mobile AI, memory management, and overall performance

We've extensively covered the features and functions of the Kirin 970 and is novel NPU both in out Mate 10 Pro review and elsewhere, so for the sake of space, we'll avoid repeating ourselves.

Boiling it down though, your main takeaway points should be that the 970 offers 25 times the processing power of the Kirin 960 chip which sat in last year's Huawei Mate 9, the P10 flagships and pretty much every Huawei phone from late 2016-early 2017 worth a damn.

This means faster app launch times, up 20 per cent on average from before while cold start launch times have been cut down from 40 per cent. Without having any actual figures to hand, that’s hard to quantify without digging around in the logcat; we’ll get back to you once we know more on that front.

Layman's terms: clever machine learning = your favourite apps will load more quickly and even newer apps will get an extra AI-assisted kick up the bum.


Huawei Mate 10: Network speeds and web browsing

Huawei's new CPU and antenna set-up means that for the first time both of the SIM card slots can support 4G LTE services. This is great news for people who rely on 4G voice (aka VoLTE) calls in order to have audible conversations, especially if you have two SIMs, for work and business, on the go.

It’s also, in theory, capable of giving you gigabit download speeds though though this is dependant on your network(s) rolling out 5CC LTE upgrades which, at the time of writing, none of the UK networks have started to do.

In the meantime here’s what you can expect to get on all of the major networks if you bought a Huawei Mate 10 in 2017.

Download speed / upload speed / latency

  • EE: 41.92Mbps / 48.36Mbps / 161ms
  • O2: 35.67Mbps / 24.54Mbps / 105ms
  • Three: 18.08Mbps / 19.7Mbps / 92.6ms
  • Vodafone: 22.75Mbps / 24.96Mbps / 97.6ms

We performed a series of tests using the Speedtest app in our office and various urban and suburban areas across central and south east London; the above results are aggregates of multiple scores, which doesn't reflect that Three tended to perform better outside of built up areas.


Huawei Mate 10: Main camera

The Huawei Mate 10 features the exact same camera set-up as the Mate 10 Pro; same f/1.6 aperture, same dual lens set-up with the same Leica Summilux lenses and the same 12-megapixel (RBG) and 20 megapixel (monochrome) sensors.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the performance was more or less identical, with low-light shots benefiting from that big aperture and the monochrome sensor, which lets you capture a lot without thumbing on the flash.

The bigger second sensor means the Mate 10 can pull off a neat trick - 2x lossless digital zoom. When taking pics, you can quickly toggle between 1x and 2x zoom using a one-touch control. It's great for taking shots of nervy, recently adopted pets, for example or anything that you can't (or would rather not) get to too close to.

The Mate 10 takes stills very very quickly, almost instantly in full auto mode. When holding down the shutter control for a burst of 100 stills, the Mate 10 would on average capture a full burst in just under 7 seconds, the same as the Mate 10 Pro.

As before, brightly lit outdoor scenes come out looking the best, though nocturnal shots are good, too. Night time is when you'll make use of things like light painting and timelapses, if you want to create arty montages of moving traffic.

Object tracking is generally good for taking shots of pets or people (particularly small people not prone to sitting still), but if you're snapping things like moving vehicles, it might be an idea to turn this off.

The ability to easily set separate focal and metering points, by long-pressing on the field, is great. This means you can stay focussed on your subject while automatically taking light sensitivity settings from another area of the field. The above example in the pub came in handy as we wanted to focus on the Trappist glass in the foreground, but set the metering point closer to the candle, to make the shot look a bit more interesting.

The ever-excellent Huawei UI with the orange and white Leica branding is present and correct. This is one of the better native camera interfaces out there. Along with the previously mentioned zoom toggle, it's very easy to access and tweak with various settings, if you want to fine tune things like shutter speeds and sensitivity.


For newbies, the Pro mode will even offer up short descriptions telling you what everything does with a tap of the 'i' info icon. The document scanner (which saves scanned text as PDFs) works well, while optical image stabilisation allows for smoother panoramas. All in all, it’s a great camera.


Huawei Mate 10: Video

The Mate 10 can shoot 4k UHD video at 30fps and 1080p Full HD at up to 60fps.

You can turn on object tracking, which helps if you're creating clips of moving objects, but this can be easily thrown off if your subject moves into a shadowy area, so results may vary. Image stabilisation measures compensate for any unsteady hands, meaning your clips generally come out looking smooth and in crystal clear focus.

Video editing options on the device are also limited to being able to trim the length of clips, though you can have more fun with the slow-mo mode, which lets you play back video entirely in slow motion, or pick a specific moment (your mates comically falling off of a bar stool, your cat pouncing on something) you'd like to rewatch in slow motion. Time lapse mode is also lots of fun, which reduces the frame rate to artificially speed up slow moving objects or people. You can enable this in selfie mode, too.

While you can shoot stuff in standard, vivid and smooth colour modes, there’s no way to film something in black and white, sepia or any of the other fun filters you can capture stills in.

Huawei Mate 10 Pro: Front camera

The 8-megapixel front camera takes shots quickly and accurately, but suffers from the lack of a flash and tap to focus, meaning that selfies taken in dark rooms or areas where there’s a single, strong source of light, suffer.

Eyeball stretching and skin tone changing modes mean if you want to look paler or like you’ve slapped on a load of fake tan, you can. The beauty mode applies a smoothing effect and makes your eyes look a little shinier too.


Huawei Mate 10: Prices and availability

Huawei’s decided to not offer the Mate 10 to any UK networks and so if you want one, your only option is to fork out for one unlocked and SIM-free.

Very few places are selling the Huawei Mate 10, but those that are will charge just under £500 for the privilege. In other words, that's half an iPhone X.

That's still a lot to part with for some, and the lack of contract options means that this is unlikely to be picked up by many. At the time of writing, WondaMobile is the only place we've been able to find that’s selling a 64GB Mate 10, for £498.


Huawei Mate 10: Verdict

The Huawei Mate 10 is an excellent phone, powerful, stylish and not that indistinguishable from the Pro version, meaning that if you wanted an Android phone with a mobile AI unit, and you're prepared to buy this phone SIM-free and out of contract, you should get this - it's almost as good as the Mate 10 Pro and it's about £200 cheaper.

That's providing you can find one. The lack of contract availability and, well, availability in general, means that buyers in the UK may have to keep an eye out for ones on sale elsewhere, or, while we still have freedom of movement in Europe, consider combining a booze cruise with a phone shop. You'll also need to keep your eyes peeled for updates, because there won’t be any network support, but then again, if you're happier buying phones out of contract, this probably won't be much of an issue for you. That said, the availability issue is why we couldn't quite give it the same score as the Mate 10 Pro.