Huawei Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro: one more step in artificial intelligence inside your mobile
With the increase in size of all devices in general we have almost forgotten the term phablet, but that does not mean that the ranges that are characterized by a diagonal around six inches will disappear. Huawei is very clear that the Huawei Mate 10 Pro still has a lot to give, and has continued with this line introducing the Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro.
Precisely the screen diagonal is one of the four fundamental pillars that the company has this range of smartphones that lives a kind of rebirth from that Mate 7. Pillars such as a large battery, advanced cameras and high performance, which comes from the hand of the Kirin 970 that we met at IFA 2017 and the new Nova that come with the flag of artificial intelligence.
We therefore have two different devices, and choosing between one model or another will mainly mean a difference in their screens. The main one is the resolution, although in this case the variation is smaller since it is not a jump in number of pixels, but in size. The Huawei Mate 10 Pro opts for the ratio 18: 9 on its 6-inch screen with a FullHD + resolution, while the Mate 10 stays at 16: 9, 5.9 inches and FullHD.
The types of panel are different. On the one hand we have Huawei Mate 10 Pro with an IPS LCD, while his older brother opts for an OLED. This, together with the resolution, will make the experience somewhat different, although the two opt for the large-screen maximum compacting the terminal.
There are also differences between both terminals in the use of the front by the screen. In part, that is because in Mate 10 has been chosen to include a fingerprint reader on the front, one that is elongated as we have seen in other devices of the brand such as P10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro.
Failing to check it when we have it in our hands, Huawei speaks of an 82% screen-to-front ratio in the case of Mate 10, which would be placed between those range stops that have put effort in the design so that the screen be almost the only protagonist of the front. It would be above the iPhone X (79.8%) and below the Samsung Galaxy S8 (83%).
In the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, the fingerprint reader is placed on the back of the terminal, so Huawei can afford to improve the screen ratio and make a mobile phone with many fewer frames. This is located in Huawei Mate 10 Pro under the lenses of the cameras and not on the side in an attempt to not leave our fingers marked on the camera when unlocking the phone.
Huawei Mate 10 Pro: First steps in artificial intelligence
The presence of Huawei in the past MWC had several protagonists in what refers to the mobile division: the renewal of the Nova range with the Nova 2 and 2 Plus and an appetizer of what was to come in terms of the processors of home. Appetizer in which what most sounded for that Kirin 970 was the unit dedicated to artificial intelligence within the SoC and the NPU or Neural Process Unity.
In this way the Huawei Mate 10 Pro are the first smartphones, both at the brand level and in the other manufacturers, to carry a neuronal processing unit. Of course, at the moment it is a bet whose fruits we will see if they end up being the basis of innovation in the future of smartphones, which is precisely what they believe in the brand.
For the moment, beyond the materialization of this in the exclusive Huawei Mate 10 Pro, the user can begin to perceive the action of Artificial Intelligence in photography and in the recognition of images. In this way Huawei also comes out ahead of what other of the most important manufacturers in the market are doing that also bet on the implementation of the AI.
As explained, the NPU is 35 times faster than the CPU when it comes to recognizing images, giving figures of 6 and 120 seconds respectively for the recognition of 200 images. In this way, in the company’s internal tests based on the nception_v3 model, Mate 10 is placed at the top of the podium.
In these tests the phone was capable of recognizing 2005 images per second, above some iPhone 7 Plus and Samsung Galaxy S7 with 487 and 75 photos per minute respectively. And there’s the trick, we’ll have to do our own tests when we analyze it to see how it behaves in front of more modern mobiles.
The objective is that the physical integration in Huawei Mate 10 Pro, AI eliminate the dependence of the cloud for its uses. As software is developed there is a lower battery consumption (for a passive and intelligent administration to learn the user’s usage pattern), they expect the photography to improve with the recognition and a suitable processing on each occasion. In this way, they want the good use experience to be extended over time, what they call “Stay Fast”.
High performance of Huawei Mate 10 Pro
The new Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro come equipped with the Kirin 970 processor introduced last September, and in addition to its Artificial Intelligence chip uses eight cores: four Cortex A73 2.4 GHz and four Cortex A53 to 2, 8 GHz. It will be accompanied by 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal storage that you can expand using microSD, although in the case of the Huawei Mate 10 Pro version there will be a version of 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage.
Another of the fundamental pillars of the Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro has always been to have a very good autonomy. It is not something that depends entirely on the components, much less, but the volume is determinant for the capacity of the battery, and for the Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro again have managed to save the cubic millimeters needed to integrate batteries of 4,000 mAh as we saw in the previous editions.
As for the battery, Huawei ensures that its Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro has 30% more autonomy than its Mate 9 with the same 4,000 mAh. Get, according to the manufacturer, up to 1 full day of autonomy with continuous use and two days with normal use. Without a doubt, these are impressive figures that will have to be corroborated in our analysis.
The AI here should play another key role in the user experience, learning the behavior, tastes and needs of the user when adjusting the brightness and load pattern (frequency and at what time it is usually done ). And to the AI the fast charge is added, ensuring that in 30 minutes of charging you get to 58% of the battery in the Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro.
So we have as a result a powerful mobile, with a large RAM memory and that takes its first steps in Artificial Intelligence. Very good work on the part of Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro, although as always we will have to wait to assess it conclusively when we can test it for our analysis.
The Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro range has also always presumed to use an advanced camera, which in this case doubles as usual in the most powerful Huawei and Honor from the Huawei P9. On this occasion, the alliance with Leica can be seen in the SUMMILUX-G lenses, which crown the two unknown moment optics of 20 megapixels and f / 1.6 of maximum dual aperture.
Sensors that again seek to take the images with greater definition and better color by combining a monochrome of 20 megapixels and another RGB of 12 MP, the latter being the one that enjoys the company of optical image stabilization (OIS). The AI in Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro intervenes here with AI Motion, a term with which the recognition of images in the scene has been baptized, focusing on one aspect or another depending on what it is about (in the moving photos you will try not to obtain a blurred shot, etc.) .
Huawei Mate 10 Pro: Remembering your role as a mobile for work
Like the Samsung Note, the Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro have always been characterized by large screens and have a certain orientation to be the terminal for work use. Precisely both companies have opted this year to enhance the mobile phone as a desktop, we saw it in Samsung with Dex and now we see it in Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro, but in this case there is no external base, and this is its main characteristic.
The Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro can act as a computer by transferring its content to a monitor with only one HDM-USB cable type C, but in this case, the phone is still active and can be used as a touchpad or keyboard. Of course, if you want you can also add mice and Bluetooth keyboards for a complete experience.
It also applies a control of what is displayed on the screen in relation to messaging and other applications, so that the user can adjust the level of privacy. This way, if you are making a presentation there does not have to be a message on screen that you send or a call you receive.
Therefore, instead of using a DeX like Samsung to convert the phone into a computer, the Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro both are already a computer itself in which it is enough to connect it to the screen. It is, however, another interesting step towards convergence, and it will be interesting to see how Huawei’s bet is opposite that of Samsung.
During the presentation tests we have seen how applications open in large windows and not only in mobile mode. We are looking forward to testing it thoroughly to see how the most used applications behave in this mode.
And they are twins for …
Although both share processor and are not far in size, both Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro have differences in aesthetics and in some of the components, which in the end result in a different user experience.
We have seen that the screens are not the same, and in addition to the resolution there is also a difference in the color of the pixels, since the Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro both are the one that incorporates a FullView RGB-W screen, being this “W” of “white” qualifying that in addition to green, blue and red there are also white pixels. For what? According to the brand in this way, greater brightness is achieved, speaking 30% more.
In addition to the screen, it is the Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro in this case which can give 1.2 Gbps talking about connectivity, although both have LTE Quad Antenna (four antennas, more or less in the corners), 4×4 MIMO + 256 AM and LTE category 18. And something that is quite striking (and important for dual SIM users): Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro are the first smartphones that support 4G in both SIM cards.
A new EMUI in Huawei Mate 10 Pro
For some time, the numbers of the software versions in Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro have played a role at the level of the general user, and the technological ones play with it to transmit the leaps of greater importance to the user. We have seen it with an iPhone 8 that has not been 7s and now we see it in an EMUI 8.0 that has not been the 6 that would touch. Why?
Google has released this year version 8.0 of its operating system, Android 8 Oreo, and the Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro not only premiere new version of the manufacturer’s own layer, but also go to market with this latest version of the system of Mountain View . In this way Huawei is aligned with Google in terms of software and nomenclature, which also affects the incorporation of the artificial intelligence of the NPU at the software level.
In fact, EMUI 8.0 is designed for artificial intelligence (like the Kirin 970), being one of its three pillars along with maximizing user experience with the screen and increasing productivity. And the way to transfer the contribution of the NPU in Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro to the user experience are the new engines such as EMUI AI Engine, and it will be noticed at the moment in four aspects:
Better experience with the camera in Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro: the AI Vision Engine makes it possible to identify images in real time, so that the Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro recognizes the scenarios and adapts the parameters of the photograph to make it look better, even improving the images coming from networks social and messaging (usually compressed and with loss of quality). In addition, the NPU allows the filter application to be processed in the terminal without having to resort to the cloud.
Better performance and experience with EMUI (Performance Engine): there has been a change of the F2FS (file system), the scroll in the galleries Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro has been improved (so that no black squares appear) and other aspects that improve the EMUI experience according to the maker. With respect to Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro, the manufacturer claims that performance has been improved with respect to its predecessor with Android Oreo.
Greater autonomy: learning the usage guidelines the Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro adapts the greater battery consumption. In addition, with the AI Experience Engine Smart Tip engine you can identify the situation and execute something according to which it is, so that you can optimize the consumption and accommodate the use.
Applications (3rd Parties Apps Engine): at the moment we know only about the translation app that Microsoft has designed exclusively for Huawei, but the manufacturer has opened the AI APIs to third parties in two ways.
On the one hand there are some that are on the chipset, so developers can benefit from the NPU. And for those who want to develop in the framework of the AI, the engine EMUI AI Engine routes if a model includes TensorFlow Lite or Caffe2 to take advantage of the NPU. As an example is Microsoft’s real-time translation application, which uses the Kirin APIs and the NPU (which allows no latency by not depending on the cloud), will be released in the Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro.
Other particularities in terms of the EMUI 8.0 interface and user-system interaction are the Floating Navigation Dock, which is a virtual start button that replaces the physical, supporting the gestures that we usually see in Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro such as the swipe, double tap , etc. Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro also includes the Smart split-screen with double screen, which allows you to watch videos and chat at the same time and identify the type of app to avoid interruptions.
We also find multi columns in horizontal orientation, which organizes the columns as if it were a tablet automatically when detecting that the phone is taken horizontally, recognition of accidental touches, full screen mode in 18: 9 also for third-party apps and changes in the color of the text according to the background.
Versions and prices of the Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro
The new Huawei Mate 10 is already pre-sold in some stores, and will be available on November 2 at a price of 699 euros in the 64GB + 4GB version. It will come in the colors Pink Gold, Champagne Gold, Mocha Brown and Black (pink, gold, brown and black), and like last year, there will be a Huawei Mate 10 “Porsche Design” version.
The Huawei Mate 10 Pro will also arrive in November in colors Titanium Gray, Midnight Blue, Mocha Brown and Pink Gold (gray, blue, brown and pink), and will be available for 799 euros in its version of 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of memory in more than two dozen countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Thailand and the United Kingdom.
