Huawei P50 Pro review: Fantastic cameras, but nothing more

Note: This review was first published on 16 March 2022.

Overview

Six months after unveiling an inevitably late Huawei P50 Pro to the world, Huawei finally deigned Singapore worthy enough to enjoy and use its 2021 flagship handset -- by making it available to consumers here in January 2022 at a grand price of S$1,548. Surely, the Chinese telecommunications and network giant must know something we don't, given its timing and pricing, despite being a late arrival.

(No, that's not a slight at Huawei, considering they are hardly the only phone makers to delay 2021 handsets until 2022).

As a 2021 device made for the international market, the P50 Pro sold here packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 4G chipset, instead of the Huawei Kirin 9000 processor available inside China-only variants. The phone is also Android-based with Huawei's EMUI 12 cloaked over it, making it compatible with sideloaded Android apps and existing AppGallery apps.

Like all P series handsets before it, Huawei P50 Pro undoubtedly gave its imaging capabilities the spotlight. In fact, we've had a detailed unboxing session ahead of its launch to see what Huawei might offer with its flagship device, so do join our editor's walkthrough if you've not seen it yet:-

Play

So, how will a 2021 flagship device hold up against fierce 2022 competition? Is the phone any easier to use now that AppGallery and the HMS Core had another year to get a footing here? Is the imaging prowess of the P50 Pro excellent enough to carry the phone's overall useability? Let's find out.

Note: This written review covers additional areas that we’ve not covered in our video overview above - like benchmarks and usage beyond first looks. We suggest taking both the video and the review below together for a fuller picture of the Huawei P50 Pro in Singapore.

Design and Handling

In essence, if you liked Chinese phone designs that dominated the market for the last few years, the P50 Pro makes for a familiar handset, with some embellishments to help itself stand out. 

The phone itself uses curved, glass-coated back with a prominent metal rim. The added premium touch comes from its high-polish appearance.

The signature appearance comes from P50 Pro’s Dual Matrix design, which is a fancy term for its two massive circular cut-outs housing its four rear cameras and LED flash module. This time around, the camera bumps aren’t as thick as their predecessors. It doesn’t exactly prevent the phone from wobbling on a flat surface, but it’s less awkward and bulky in hand.

The tried-and-tested ergonomics for the P50 Pro means that users would be choosing the phone based on their design preference. Personally, we’d like our phones to be less gaudy, so the massive camera housings aren’t our cup of tea, though it does make its rear look unique. The device is also rated IP68 for water and dust resistance, so it also checks the flagship feature boxes for design considerations.

Display and Audio

The P50 Pro offers a 6.6-inch 3D curved OLED display (2,700 x 1,228 pixels resolution) and 120Hz refresh rate. While it offers a high pixel density for content sharpness (450 pixels per inch), the odd 1228p resolution choice on P50 Pro would mean you’re straddling between 1080p content that looks almost sharp but not quite, and 1440p content that exceeds the phone’s resolution requirements.

Beyond that, the OLED display offers a natural, yet vibrant panel with amazing, lifelike contrast and shades. It also offers the users to fix refresh rates at either 60Hz or 120Hz, on top of offering Dynamic Screen Refresh Rate if you want to maximise battery savings and viewing quality.

A nice improvement is P50 Pro’s speaker configuration. Huawei moved away from using a single speaker to a dual speaker setup parked across the bottom and top rungs. It makes for a sufficient, well-rounded audio experience when watching short clips on social media, but don’t expect the audio to blow you away like Oppo's flagship phones.

UI and Features

The absence of Google Mobile Services on recent Huawei handsets is well-documented. To cut to the chase, here’s the down-low on installing apps on a Huawei phone in Singapore: you need to make full use of its built-in Petal Search feature to get hold of your favourite apps from third-party app stores. 

Of course, this leaves you vulnerable to glitchy, outdated, or infected APK files. But, it’s better than having a phone that can’t run much of what you usually need. Also, you can install apps that rely on Google Services (like Google Maps, Google Chrome, and YouTube), but don’t expect them to work 100%. Then, there’s also its AppGallery app store, which covers typical Android apps they’ve successfully onboarded to HMS.

The Singapore handsets (at least, the one we got for our review) run on EMUI 12 out of the box. It’s a reskin of your Android operating system (and not the pure HarmonyOS ones that are available in China). Huawei does not officially disclose which Android version EMUI 12 is based on, but further digging (by ourselves, thanks to benchmarking apps) show that it’s actually Android 11.

Huawei has been working at onboarding important daily apps to its AppGallery store. Important (and relatively new) ones are TraceTogether and Singpass, on top of your usual spread of banking, messaging, and entertainment apps. 

We’ve already gotten used to jumping through hoops in order to make the phone work like any other Android phone. But, it requests an insane number of permissions to work as a normal device. In essence, you’ll have to give plenty of access to its HMS Core, which turns up as 10+ permission menus across nearly every core function of the phone (GPS, calls, camera, audio, data, analytics, etc.) before you even finish setting up the device. 

There are also tons of requests by the P50 Pro to allow targeted advertising, which is a huge no-no in our books (you paid for the phone, not for more advertisements). Good on Huawei making it exceedingly clear on what you’re giving up to use its phones (unlike some brands), but it’s not any more reassuring if you’re mindful about what you share. It’s a real pity, given that EMUI’s UI and UX is one of the better Chinese Android interfaces out in the market. 

Finally, our P50 Pro unit comes pre-loaded with insane amounts of clutter – this does not include prompts for app downloads during setup. Below are two entire folders sitting in our Home Screen, where the Huawei phone tells you these are optional apps to get (identified by the blue-coloured checkmark in the bottom right of each app icon as seen in the above screengrabs). There are six full folders of this stuff – even before we started adding our own benchmarking and test apps within. 

Yes, they can be removed when you eventually get around to customising your phone, but there are no options to delete the entire folder quickly – you’ll need to remove each ‘recommended’ app individually before dissolving the folder. All that time spent could’ve been better used elsewhere.

This, together with the excessive permissions and advertising (even AppGallery shows you full-screen ads before you can start picking up apps), makes the P50 Pro easily one of the worst mobile experiences we’ve had in the last two years. Not because the Huawei interface is bad (in fact, it’s more pleasant than most reskinned Android UIs), but because other brands saw much more user-friendly progress with their Android interfaces.

If those missteps aren’t enough nails in the proverbial coffin, the phone’s convoluted file transfer tool might just be enough to erode your patience.

The P50 Pro is one of the few Android-based phones we’ve encountered that doesn’t let you simply drag and drop files between Windows PC and mobile – you’re officially forced to use HiSuite to do any file transfers, which also means additional, unnecessary software on your PC (when Android phones typically have no issues with wired file transfers between devices).

It doesn’t help that the very nature of HiSuite (a file manager and backup programme for your Huawei phone) asks for permission to access your phone calls, contact lists, calendar details, and SMS messages. HiSuite was also ineffective at transferring files, simply stopping midway and giving up with no apparent reason. We eventually had to employ a few tricks to bypass HiSuite to make our PC to Android file transfers in the end.

Imaging Performance

The P50 Pro (and Huawei P series in general) pay plenty of attention to its photography capabilities. This time, P50 Pro gets an upgraded Huawei XD Fusion Pro imaging engine to help bring out details in shots. Two of its cameras get True-Chroma imaging too, which allows more ambient light into the lens on top of greater colour data. Huawei has toned down on its Leica marketing, but make no mistake – it still has Leica Vario-Summilux-H1 lenses. P50 Pro users get:

• 50MP True-Chroma main camera (f/1.8 aperture, OIS)
• 40MP True-Chroma mono camera (f/1.6 aperture) that shoots in B&W 
• 13MP Ultra-wide-angle camera (f/2.2 aperture)
• 64MP Telephoto camera (f/3.5 aperture, OIS, AF)

This combination of cameras covers most shooting scenarios, from standard shots to portraiture, wide-angle, close-ups, and even black-and-white photography. Below are some samples we have from the camera.

Huawei’s P series has always produced pleasant-looking, social media-ready stills. The P50 Pro is no different in this regard – it adopts a natural-looking colour profile (likely helped by its True-Chroma effort), and has excellent mid-range telephoto capabilities. The cameras are also the handset’s most enjoyable feature, by far.

Benchmark Performance

Huawei P50 Pro in Singapore uses a 4G version of Qualcomm Snapdragon 888, unlike the Kirin 9000 units made for China. The phone was announced pretty late, in August 2021 six months later than its usual P series timing. Further bottlenecks and delays saw the P50 Pro only arriving in Singapore on 22 January 2022, which partially explains our delay in getting hold of this 2021 flagship device. Hence, it’s likely comparable to other 2021 budget flagship and premium flagship competitors in performance, but whether it can keep up with 2022 alternatives remain to be seen.

JetStream 2.0

JetStream 2 is a combination of a variety of JavaScript and Web Assembly benchmarks, including benchmarks that came before like SunSpider and Octane. It primarily tests for a system’s and browser’s ability in delivering a good web experience. It runs a total of 64 subtests, each weighted equally, with multiple iterations, and takes the geometric mean to compute the overall score. The higher the score, the better.

Geekbench 5

Geekbench CPU is a cross-platform processor benchmark that tests both single-core and multi-core performance with workloads that simulate real-world usage. Geekbench 5 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 1000, which is the score of an Intel Core i3-8100. The higher the score, the better.

3DMark Wild Life (Unlimited)

3DMark Wild Life is a cross-platform benchmark for Windows, Android and Apple iOS for measuring GPU performance. Its graphics test consists of multiple scenes with variations in the amount of geometry, lights and post-processing effects, mirroring mobile games that are based on short bursts of intense activity. Wild Life uses the Vulkan graphics API on Windows PCs and Android devices. On iOS devices, it uses Metal.

In Unlimited mode, the benchmark runs offscreen using a fixed time step between frames. Unlimited mode renders exactly the same frames in every run on every device, regardless of resolution scaling. The higher the score, the better.

PCMark for Android - Work 3.0 and Storage 2.0

PCMark for Android is a benchmark for testing the performance of Android phones and tablets. The Work 3.0 test checks how the device handles common productivity tasks such as browsing the web, editing videos, working with documents and data, and editing photos. Storage 2.0 checks write-in and read-out performance for internal storage, external storage (if applicable), and SQLite database management. Together, the benchmarks can clue us in on how capable a phone is at handling everyday use. Work 3.0 scores are above, while Storage 2.0 scores are immediately below for each device - the higher the score, the better.

Since this is a newly introduced benchmark in our reviews, we’re building up our database of PCMark scores for Android phones.

Battery Life

Our standard battery test for mobile phones has the following parameters:

• Looping a 720p video with screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
• Constant data streaming through email

Huawei P50 Pro packs a 4,360mAh battery With the help of a 65W Huawei SuperCharge adapter, it took 30 minutes for the P50 Pro to go from 0% to 67%, and 70 minutes to charge from 0% to 100%. 

Oddly enough, the P50 Pro clocks in lower than most SD888 (with 5G chipset) alternatives. It also doesn't quite keep up with the supposedly demanding SD8G1 chipset -- we expected the Qualcomm variants of Samsung Galaxy S22+ to perform worse, but we were proven otherwise.

Conclusion

If it wasn’t for political instability and insufferable suit-wearing executives with egos too big to fit their tailored threads, the Huawei P50 Pro would’ve been a desirable flagship device. The phone looks and feels pleasant, it runs quite smoothly, and has an impressive imaging performance that truly exudes its P series proposition well. 

But, that’s where the phone’s positive qualities start and end.

At S$1,548, it’s not competitively priced for its feature set, despite making good on its flagship-tier promises through performance and appearance. 

One, the chipset uses a 4G modem, which doesn’t gel well with how local telcos are increasingly readying up for proper islandwide 5G network coverage in 2025. You’re basically buying outdated technology – which would’ve been fine two years ago when consumer 5G wasn't prevalent in Singapore yet, but times are different now.

Two, is the extra effort needed to get a recent Huawei phone to work almost like a full Android device and even after achieving that, your apps won't be updated unless you manually fetch new versions to install. If your work platforms use Google Workspace (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Slides, etc.), or if your favourite content sits on YouTube (as a creator or consumer), or if you use Google Maps, you’ll have to sit out of all these options, or settle for fewer features by using them through a browser. 

Of course, the HMS gap is much narrower than its initial launch, but your alternatives are workarounds and aren’t replacements or integrated tools that are just one login away. Fortunately, many of your daily apps already have an AppGallery version available, so it’s just that Google Services bit you need to figure out with time and effort.

Three, and likely not solely Huawei’s fault, is the delay in the P50 Pro coming to our shores. Given how phone refresh cycles are, it wouldn’t be right of us to recommend a phone announced in April 2021 when it only bothered to arrive in January 2022. 

At S$1,548, it’s the price we’d pay for a 2022 Huawei flagship – and not its older variant. We recognise how difficult it must have been for the P50 series to even be possible (given its international delay as well), but it’s a tough sell telling consumers to drop a grand-and-a-half for a device nearly a year late to the scene. To borrow an example, the cheaper, 5G-capable Samsung Galaxy S22+ (with a newer, better chipset) ships barely a month after P50 Pro was made available in Singapore. 

Finally – and this one is on Huawei even after looking past the problems beyond its control – the phone packs itself with so much unnecessary software that it actively impedes your path towards enjoying its wonderful UI. We appreciate the built-in tips that help users get the phone to work better, and we understood the need to inform users of privacy details they are giving up in exchange for using the P50 Pro. But, the clutter was uncalled for, and so was the file transfer’s software.

You’d imagine that Huawei’s challenging circumstances were enough to drive itself towards making a better phone that convinces the masses of its mobile superiority and technology. But, the company chose the darker path of riddling its amazing device with ads or recommendations, on top of packing your display so full of downloadables you don’t care for or need. Folks who play with second-rate Android emulators on PC would know how frustrating such an experience is, and it’s not something we’ve expected coming out of Huawei.

We’ve judged the P50 Pro as a 2021 flagship phone despite arriving in early 2022. Even with the leeway offered, its performance and appearance could hardly keep up with its user-friendliness, or value for money. Consumers would likely be less forgiving than we are.

To us, the Huawei P50 Pro is promising, but also too little, and too late. Even for an average user who doesn’t care for processors, specs, or network types, you’d expect the flagship phone to simply work– and likely find the opposite to be true. For all its amazing photo and video capturing capabilities, the phone's overall usability leaves much to be desired. If only the Huawei P50 Pro was an imaging add-on device to a regular phone, perhaps it could still redeem itself.

For those who would like to check out the phone personally, it’s available via all Huawei authorised stores, major telco partners (M1, Singtel, StarHub), authorised retailers, and Huawei official online storefronts like Lazada and Shopee.