Huawei P50 Pro comes to us: 10bit images with Leica lenses
26.1.2022
Translation: machine translated
The Huawei P50 Pro will soon be available in Europe. In Huawei tradition, the camera is particularly impressive.
Huawei is coming back from the crisis. Finally. The former top brand is subject to a trade embargo by the USA, but has only let it slow down, but not stop it. With a lot of in-house development and above all large financial reserves, the company has managed to launch a flagship on the market. The Huawei P50 Pro is quite impressive and should especially inspire camera fans.
Four lenses become one camera
Huawei continues where the Chinese company left off with the P40 Pro: The camera. The lenses are from Leica and the pictures have 10-bit color depth. The cameras shoot with over one billion colors, which is what the screen can display. Most PC and smartphone screens can't do that yet.
The four lenses on the back of the P50 Pro combine into one camera on the software side. Huawei calls this "dual-matrix camera design". In practice, this means that the smartphone takes pictures with all cameras and mixes the best aspects of all cameras in one picture. This is highly simplified and the results will be more meaningful than Huawei's marketing narratives.
The terms "10bit" and "Leica" alone make a camera duel with the other flagships a must.
Big battery, small consumption
The trade sanctions of the US prohibit Huawei from building US technology into their devices. Nevertheless, the Chinese company somehow managed to install a system-on-a-chip (SoC) from Qualcomm. But without 5G technology, because that is apparently actually off-limits. Rumors persist that Huawei is extremely close to launching its own 5G SoC, but obviously it was not enough for the P50 Pro yet. Therefore, the modified Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 is only capable of 4G LTE.
A very interesting constellation is created here. The Huawei P50 Pro has a relatively large battery with 4360 mAh installed. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 is one of the most efficient SoCs on the market. 5G is still a big power hog, which relativizes the Snapdragon's efficiency in normal use.
However, the Huawei P50 Pro lacks these 5G components. Thus, it is a highly efficient SoC and not a power guzzler. That is why the P50 Pro boasts of a standby time of up to 527 hours and a talk time of 23 hours. However, since no one makes calls for 23 hours straight - and if they do, I sincerely feel sorry for them - or just leaves the phone lying around for 527 hours, the test will have to decide.
The question of the operating system
The P50's spec sheet raises questions: It lists the operating system as "Emui 12". Emui is a user interface, not an operating system. The following operating systems are available for selection:
- Android
- HarmonyOS
Emui 12 can be dragged over both operating systems. It is likely that the P50 Pro is Android. This conclusion can be drawn from the Huawei Nova 9, which also has "Emui 12" listed as the operating system but runs Android.
Hopefully, there will be an upgrade option to HarmonyOS soon.
Source: Huawei
According to Huawei, the Huawei P50 Pro will be shipped in Switzerland and Germany in two colors in the first quarter of 2022: Black/Gold and Cocoa Gold, a white-gold color. It will cost 1199 francs. In Germany and Austria, the price will be 1299 Euros.
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