Huawei Nova 10 Pro review: an “almost” flagship phone

The Nova series of smartphones is one of the best sellers in Huawei’s portfolio, probably because it is “strategically” located on the border between high-end premium and traditional mid-range models. It generally adopts a modern design, powerful but not top-end hardware and powerful cameras. Basically, Huawei promises flagship capabilities in a price range more accessible to the general public, who don’t have €1,000 to spend on a phone.

Nova 10 Pro looks like a flagship

The Nova 10 Pro is basically a mid-range phone, but its design doesn’t reveal that up front. In fact, it doesn’t look much different from Huawei’s top-end models like the P50 Pro, for example. The phone is equipped with a large OLED screen that’s curved at the edges, has a metal bezel, cutouts for two front-facing cameras and a camera island decorated with gold details. Incidentally, the plastic back also has a matte texture and shines in the light.

Although the design is “almost” premium, lacking only the glass on the back, I can’t say I’m a fan of it. The camera specs in white letters on a gold background I can’t say denotes elegance but rather is borderline kitsch. And the curved edges are nice from the outside, when you see the phone in an ad, but not at all practical, which has been proven over the last few years. Most heavyweight manufacturers are starting to revert back to flat screens on top models.

What we can appreciate about Huawei, however, is that it still offers basic accessories in the package. The screen is factory protected with plastic wrap, the 100W fast charger is in the package, along with the cable and a silicone case. Unfortunately, Huawei still offers chargers with USB-A, it hasn’t completely switched to USB-C. So SuperCharge fast charging is only for its phones. You won’t be able to power a laptop, for example, at high speed with this charger. Curiously, though, this model gets much faster charging than its “siblings” in the P or Mate series.

The screen is very powerful, but not state-of-the-art

One of the most “flagship” components of the Nova 10 Pro is the display, a 6.7″ panel with FullHD+ resolution and 120Hz refresh rate. It’s not quite up to the level of flagships like the P50 Pro, but it has pretty high brightness, high resolution and displays very smooth animations. Not being an LTPO model, we don’t have variable refresh rate in the true sense of the word, just software adjustment at various thresholds (60/30 Hz) depending on the application.

The problem remains, however, that this display will probably never be used to its true capacity. All movie and TV apps like Netflix or HBO Go won’t display HDR images on this device, as it’s not “certified” by the services. So for most video apps you’ll be limited to SD resolution with SDR color profile.

Performance is within the limits of your hardware configuration

The Snapdragon 778G processor isn’t exactly new, nor is the Snapdragon 888 chipset on the company’s other flagships. Huawei has managed to find a compromise solution with Qualcomm, in which the company can buy the American company’s chips, but without the 5G modem. This means that a special, Huawei-only edition has to be developed, which means delays in availability. Qualcomm’s newest flagship chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, has only recently been modified for 4G, and comes on the Huawei Mate 50 series. The industry is now preparing for the transition to 8 Gen 2 in the winter.

So the Nova 10 Pro’s performance might be a little behind other mid-range models that will be released in the near future. However, Huawei’s optimization speaks for itself again, with the phone offering an extremely smooth user experience, as it did on Kirin models a few years ago. Even though we’re talking about a mid-range model, performance in normal use is towards flagship, with no lags and no jerky animations.

The problem arises when you want to “stress” it with advanced games or more complex applications, where the mid-range processor can’t cope as well as a flagship one. But there’s also a major advantage of a less power-hungry chip: low power consumption. It doesn’t consume much battery power in games either, and the phone generally doesn’t heat up, it just warms up. In performance tests, the processor performed within expectations for a mid-range chipset of its kind, and in the 3DMark stress test, it kept its performance intact at 98.6% after half an hour of continuous running. Admittedly, we ran the “standard” Wild Life test, more suited to mid-range models, not the “extreme” flagship test.

Benchmarks

• AnTuTu – 511.454
• GeekBench – Single-Core: 780 / Multi-Core: 2,827
• 3DMark Wild Life – 2.497
• 3DMark Wild Life Stress Test – Best loop: 2.496 / Lowest loop: 2.462 / Stability: 98.6%
• PCMark – 11.032

Nova 10 Pro has the fastest charging on a Huawei

Battery life has always been a feature that Huawei phones have been better at than other manufacturers, largely due to software optimizations in EMUI that don’t leave apps “awake” in the background if they’re not needed, similar to what Apple does. Of course, large capacity batteries have always helped too. With a 4,500 mAh battery and an efficient processor like the Snapdragon 778G, the Huawei Nova 10 Pro lasts up to two days of normal use on a single charge. Under stress, you could probably discharge it in a day or even faster, but that wouldn’t be a problem for this model.

Charging at 100W, you can get from 20% to 80%, which is when charging is fastest, in just 10 minutes. Fully charged, the phone charges in less than half an hour, from 0 to 100%. Basically, you can plug your phone in for a few minutes and have enough battery life for the rest of the day at any time. The important thing is just to have the original charger and compatible cable always at hand.

Huawei’s software has improved, but it hasn’t gotten rid of its problems

In recent years, the discussion around Huawei phones has mostly centered around software. The Android-based EMUI 12 continues in the same direction Huawei has always gone, with an iOS-like interface that tries to provide as seamless an experience as possible. In this respect, the company succeeds, offering pretty much everything it offers on HarmonyOS in China and on Android devices in other regions. Sure, anyone who has used an iPhone knows that many elements are “copied” directly, but there are a few interesting Huawei features. For example, you can group apps into larger e-folders, but access them by tapping directly on the icon without opening the folder.

And as good as the software experience is, many users won’t want to hear about Huawei because of the lack of Google services. Huawei has worked in recent years to develop the AppGallery ecosystem, where you find many apps, both international and local, but not the ones everyone uses every day. Anything from Google is missing, and major social networks like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter are not found here. TikTok is, at least.

Sure, there are solutions to most problems. You can install GSpace for a sort of virtual machine that gives you access to the Play Store, and from there you can install and run apps with the logged-in account, mostly without problems. However, there can be various bugs in using this, and notifications come through GSpace, not come natively through your phone’s standard system. Still, there’s no solution to replace Android Auto, for example.

Fortunately, some banks’ apps are available on AppGallery, and recently even Revolut was released. Bolt is, but Uber isn’t. And some banks still don’t offer Huawei support. Moreover, there is no 100% functional payment system in Romania. Huawei Wallet is integrated with the Curve service, but not with others.

Still though, installing apps from outside the AppGallery is either too complex for average users or too dangerous for most people who would use a smartphone and are not technical people by nature. Not many users want to spend time searching for apps in multiple sources to install them, and installing APKs from less “safe” sources can lead to other problems like installing malware. Unfortunately, you can’t “survive” in the mobile environment with just the app offering available on AppGallery, despite Huawei’s colossal efforts over the past few years.

But the situation is better now than it was two or three years ago, so at least some users might buy these phones now without much fuss, but atheists will remain dependent on someone more knowledgeable or on Huawei tech support, which offers assistance via WhatsApp for using apps in AppGallery and beyond. Speaking of which, WhatsApp isn’t available in the AppGallery either, so you’ll still have to install the app from somewhere outside the store before contacting the support team.

Huawei Nova 10 Pro has one of the best mid-range audio systems

The categories Huawei has always been good at are speakers and fingerprint sensor, and these remain good to very good going forward. The stereo speakers sound loud and pleasant, even at full volume, with a little bass, but not much, but better than other devices in the mid-range category. What’s more, Huawei has done something we don’t often see on other devices: perforated the top of the device, to give the call speaker more space through which to push sound out. A side function of the perforations at the top is that you can’t completely cover the speaker, because sound also comes out through the call grille and out the top.

The fingerprint sensor used by Huawei isn’t a very special one, being an optical one integrated into the bottom of the screen. It works smoothly and unlocks the phone immediately. This is the phone on which I’ve had the fewest unlock failures of late.

The cameras are above average in the market

Huawei has built its reputation in the smartphone area mainly by making high-performance cameras. This is generally true for the cameras of flagship phones, but models in the lower ranges have also often benefited especially from the software and processing algorithms.

Outside of Huawei’s flagship models, the Nova 10 Pro probably has the best performing cameras in the company’s portfolio. We’re talking about a 50-megapixel main sensor in RYYB format, not RGB like most manufacturers use, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide, and a 2-megapixel depth computing camera. You could say we’ve seen cameras like this elsewhere, and that’s pretty much true of the last two, but the main one is more special. Then, on the front, we have a 60-megapixel ultrawide camera for regular shots and an 8-megapixel zoom camera, called a “portrait” camera.

Photo gallery 2 images

As expected, the ultrawide camera isn’t a great performer, offering low resolution, poor detail even in bright light, but with a bit more dynamic range than other models on the market. Its advantage would be that it is an autofocus one, which also allows macro shots, which have an unexpectedly good quality. In fact, I would say that this ultrawide camera is better for macro than for wide shots.

Photo Day

Then the main camera is really good, providing well-exposed and detailed photos on auto settings and with AI processing. Huawei’s software still isn’t infallible, detecting the “snow” scene on a cloudy day, but most shots are good, and the 2x hybrid zoom photos are decent.

Night mode is only on the main camera at 1 or 2x, and the results are good, but not great. Other phones have surpassed this performance, but I can’t help but notice the Huawei’s nighttime colors, which, while not at all realistic, tend to be more appealing than those taken with other cameras with more natural profiles.

Night photo

Actually the colors are pretty “exaggerated” on pretty much all cameras and in all shooting modes, but it seems to me most that Huawei exaggerates on the front cameras. The ultrawide front camera is really useful if you want to take group shots, but there’s also a “1x” zoom for normal shots. However, I can’t understand the 2x zoom on the 8 megapixel camera. Only someone with extremely long hands would be able to take a halfway decent portrait where there’s not just a big head in the shot, and the camera quality is pretty poor compared to the main one anyway.

The frames are darker and the colors are weaker. But all the front cameras have some sort of beauty filter that you can’t turn off, making faces look much more “cosmeticized” than they naturally are. I prefer photos where facial and skin imperfections show through to those where I look like I’ve stepped out of professional TV makeup.

Huawei has also made “vlogging” features, where you can film yourself with two cameras at once, such as the front and back, or two on the back, in various ways. In reality, no one will probably use them, as there aren’t many situations where you’ll want to do that for a “vlog”. They might be successful though on the new BeReal clones from TikTok and Instagram, but only if they catch on with the public.

Conclusions

Huawei made a very good mid-range phone with the Nova 10 Pro, and the “standard” Nova 10 isn’t much different, it lacks the front-facing zoom camera (which isn’t of much use anyway), has a smaller 4,000 mAh battery and 66W charging, and a 0.1″ smaller screen. If I had to choose, I’d go with the cheaper, non-Pro model. Of course, I’d only do that knowing that I’m dealing with phones without Google services and all the disadvantages that come with that.

Huawei’s problem is that in the price areas it’s targeting there’s already a lot of competition, with models that are very capable in every way, and don’t have the problem of lacking Google services. Thus, phones like the Nova 10 Pro become models more for fans of the brand, rather than truly competitive ones in the market, at least at the standard price of 2,999 lei, respectively 2,499 lei for the “standard” variant.