This is the Huawei Nova 10 Pro, the latest premium mid ranger that Huawei has released into Western markets. Huawei phones are still without Google services, so does the Huawei Nova 10 Pro have the features to make up for that and be worth getting outside of China? and let’s find out in our full review.
Huawei Nova 10 Pro Overall Review
The Huawei Nova 10 Pro is an upper mid ranger that brings some neat features a higher OLED display, super fast charging and dual selfie cameras. The phone’s design is quite snazzy. The plastic back panel has a sandblasted texture finish, which shimmers in the light. The Nova logo is interesting, and the twostep camera bump with its golden accents looks quite nice. Both the back and the front of the phone curve into a razor thin frame, which is also made of plastic. Huawei Nova 10 Pro doesn’t have any official ingress protection. Too bad, considering its premium price. The display here is a curved 678 inch OLED with a fast 120 Hz refresh rate, and its resolution is higher than most other phones at 1200 P, resulting in a sharp pixel density of 429 DPI. The picture is crisp and contrasting. The support for ten bit color depth here and HDR Ten. And the color accuracy is great depending on the color mode you choose in Settings. Plus, the 120 Hz refresh rate makes your swiping and scrolling feel extra smooth, and it will dial down to 60 Hz when you’re not interacting with it to save energy. The brightness is an outstanding, but it’s solid. We measured a maximum of 560 nits with the manual brightness slider, and this boost to 780 nits in auto mode when in bright conditions. The fingerprint reader of the Huawei Nova 10 Pro sits under the display. It’s really fast and quite reliable for audio. There’s a pair of stereo speakers, with the top one having both the top GLIL and acting as the earpiece. They earned a good mark in our loudness test, and the audio quality is good too, with nice highs and some bass, and you can get 128 or 256 gigs of storage onboard the phone. But that’s not expandable. Let’s talk about the interface. It’s Huawei’s Emui 12 based on Android 11. It’s a heavily customized interface, and like I mentioned already, there’s no support for Google services here. Instead, by default, EMUI Twelve relies on proprietary Huawei apps for all of the phone functions. Rather than the Google Play Store, you’ll need to use Huawei’s App Gallery, which often has popup ads. The Gallery has expanded over the years, but it still doesn’t have some popular apps and games. If the app isn’t available, Huawei’s pedal search engine will show you a list of places where you can download it from right inside App Gallery. However, even if you side load the apps you might want, if they require Google services to run, you’re still out of luck here, the chip said of the Huawei Nova 10 Pro is a Snapdragon 778 G. It’s actually a 4G version of the chip, because Huawei cannot use 5G for now. In benchmarks, performance is quite solid both in CPU and GPU tests. The problem is this isn’t a cheap phone, and for the same money you can find competitors with more powerful hardware. And when it comes to sustained performance, we observe heavy thermal throttling in a prolonged CPU stress test. We didn’t run into any problems in real world tasks, though. Huawei Nova 10 Pro has a 4500 mah battery,
Battery life is decent, but nothing spectacular. Huawei Nova 10 Pro was able to score an endurance rating of 89 hours in our proprietary tests. Where it does shine though, is with charging speed, thanks to the bundled 100 watt Huawei Supercharger. With it we were able to charge the phone from zero to 99% in half an hour, and with a special turbo mode switched on, we could charge to full in 26 minutes In Huawei Nova 10 Pro . Now we have the cameras. Let’s start with the selfie cams for a change. There’s a 60 megapixel ultrawide cam and an eight megapixel portrait camera, both with autofocus. Photos from the ultrawide selfie cam come out at 13 megapixels, and there are two fields of view to choose from. The widest view is quite wide enough for a group of people to fit in the shot. The quality is impressive, with detailed, sharp, well exposed and colorful subjects, great dynamic range and spot on focus. The slightly narrower view is just a further crop, and the overall quality remains just as great. The other camera shoots eight megapixel portrait selfies with natural bouquet, thanks to its 52 millimeter equivalent lens. If there’s plenty of light, the results are great. Your face is rendered well with a nice detail, and sharpness colors are great. Contrast is all right, and dynamic range is wide, and the bokeh looks good too. The zoom level here seems to be a bit too much, though, and getting your face in the right framing means you have to hold the phone pretty far away. 4k videos from the ultrawide selfie camera shot at either field of view are good. The subjects are well exposed and with enough detail. Noise is low, the colors are accurate, and contrast is also good in Huawei Nova 10 Pro.
The dynamic range could be better though, and while there is always on EIS, the results still aren’t that stable. The 4K selfie portrait videos are detailed, sharp and with good colors. The dynamic range and contrast are just average, and we run into the same framing issues as with the stills. There’s no stabilization for this camera. Now onto the rear cameras. Huawei Nova 10 Pro have 50 megapixel main cam, an eight megapixel ultra wide camera with autofocus, and a two megapixel depth sensor. Photos from the main camera come out in twelve five megapixels, and they are excellent. There is plenty of detail, and we really like the natural looking and rendition of fine details like foliage. Besides that, there’s low noise, good contrast, balanced dynamic range and punchy colors. The 50 megapixel sensor of the main camera has the potential for two times lossless zoom. These are very good, slightly softer than the regular photos, but the rest is a match. Portraits are good on Huawei Nova 10 Pro, the subject is detailed and well exposed, and colors look realistic. The separation is adequate, though it may miss in more complicated scenes. Eight megapixel photos from the ultra wide camera are decent. There’s a good amount of detail for such a camera in Huawei Nova 10 Pro, but the colors are a bit washed out and the contrast and HDR effect are a bit over the top with some heavy sharpening. Many of the sample photos we took were inexplicably soft, as it’s out of focus on Huawei Nova 10 Pro. Since this camera has autofocus, it can take macro closeup photos. They’re likable with nicely rendered detail, low noise, good dynamic range and lively colors in low light. Photos from the main camera already have plenty of image stacking and processing going on. Even without night mode, the results are great with plenty of detail, adequate sharpness and bright exposure. Colors are nicely saturated, noise is low and dynamic range is wide. Clipped highlights are quite rare on Huawei Nova 10 Pro. There is a night mode you can toggle on, but you get more less the same results, and these take more time to shoot. Sometimes they even come out softer than the auto mode. There is no night mode for the ultrawide camera and you can tell. Even though the photos are likable with OK colors and resolve detail, the dynamic range could have used the boost that the Ned mode rings. 4k video from the main camera is decent. There’s enough detail with a likable rendition. Colors pop and there’s adequate contrast. The dynamic range is on the narrow side though, with some club highlights, and the footage is overall a little soft, maybe because of the always on stabilization. The 4K videos from the ultrawide camera are all right, but nothing too exciting. They have a mediocre amount of detail and acceptable dynamic range. The colors are a bit washed out looking. Low light video from the main camera is excellent. There is plenty of detail, good sharpness, nice exposure and saturated colors. There’s low noise across the board, and both the contrast and dynamic
Range are praiseworthy too. So that’s the Huawei Nova 10 Pro. There’s a lot to like here the Snazzy design, the blazing fast charging, the higher curved AMOLED and nice cameras. On the other hand, there are a few concerns here and there. The Nova Ten Pro is not a cheap phone, and at this price point there are competitors that have waterproofing a faster chipset and Google services to boot. If you don’t mind living outside of the Google ecosystem, the Huawei Nova 10 Pro could be worth considering if its price goes down. Or another alternative is the vanilla Huawei Nova 10 Pro. It cuts some of the premium features, so you get a single selfie cam 1080p screen and 66 watt charging. But it’s much cheaper.
