Hands-on with Huawei Mate 10 Pro’s AI-powered smart battery & camera [Video]

The Huawei Mate Pro 10 is arriving soon to the US as the company’s latest flagship and the first with the Kirin 970 chipset, a dedicated Neural Network Processing Unit that will help improve AI tasks. But it’s also being used not only to handle AI tasks directly but also to intelligently manage and enhance battery life and camera performance. Below we go hands-on with the device to see how the new AI-powered battery and camera features make it stand out from the competition.

The Huawei Mate Pro 10 includes a huge 4,000mAh battery that unlike most of the competitors can truly live up to its claim of lasting up to 2 full days in our time with the device. It is the first to support TÜV Fast-Charge Safety Certified HUAWEI SuperCharge technology and that means super reliable 4.5V / 5A low-voltage fast charging. What it really means in the real-world is the ability to charge the Mate Pro 10 from 1 to 20 percent in 10 minutes, and, for instance, from 1 percent to 58 percent in 30 minutes.

But the much more interesting part of this device’s battery performance is how the company is intelligently managing everything with AI behind the scenes. The Huawei Mate Pro 10 includes an AI-powered Battery Management System, which means under the hood the device is taking full advantage of the Kirin 970 to intelligently manage resources and maximize memory allocation.

The result is the device begins to learn your behavior and allocate resources to help increase battery life. It’s not something you are going to actively notice taking place, but it’s nice to know that Huawei is putting a focus on getting better battery life with these types of optimizations powered by the new hardware and it shows in real-world usage. While the chipset helps with a lot of other AI-related tasks (like the camera below), it’s also the reason the Mate Pro 10 is able to squeeze out better overall battery life compared to competitors with similar sized batteries.

In addition, you’ll find Power saving and Ultra power saving modes that let you stretch out your battery even further at the usual expense of disabling of some system features that are taxing on battery life. Two full days might be the ideal maximum you’ll achieve depending on your usage, but it’s actually achievable with the Mate Pro where some of the competitors fall way short of estimates in reality.

For anyone that is making battery life a serious consideration when looking at the flagship Android competition, the Mate Pro 10 is definitely going to make for an attractive package. The AI-powered battery management system is certainly an interesting selling point for the Mate Pro 10 and the new chip, and it’s of course hard to complain about longer battery life.

Hands-on video with the Huawei Mate 10 Pro 

When it comes to producing a great camera, light is everything. Light is what allows the image sensor to see what’s to be captured. It doesn’t matter how good your specs are, it all starts with light, and if you don’t have enough, your camera will inevitably suffer.

Well Huawei knows this. That’s why it included one of the fastest apertures available on a smartphone in its new Mate 10 Pro. Featuring a Leica dual lens setup which boast an incredibly fast f/1.6 aperture, this smartphone is geared towards capturing the needed light in order to make your photos shine.

The wider aperture isn’t only great for capturing details in low light, it’s also ideal for obtaining that shallow depth of field that makes your subject matter stand out.

But the Mate 10 Pro’s camera is much more than just the hardware. That’s because the AI-powered Real-Time Scene and Object Recognition allow the Mate 10 Pro to automatically select ideal camera settings based on the subject matter and environment, and it works great in real-world tests. In other words, it allows you to take great pictures with automatic adjustments made intelligently, heightening the chances you’ll capture those special moments. It’s a truly intelligent automatic setting for the camera and it can really keep up with just about any environment and lighting condition you throw at it.

Speaking of AI-powered enhancements, there’s also a Bokeh Effect mode built into the Camera app that helps you pull off the perfect portrait of selfie photo. But again, it all starts with light, and that f1.6 aperture, combined with the dual lens setup and 20MP monochrome sensor, goes a long way towards making the Huawei Mate 10 Pro a smartphone camera that you can count on for amazing photos.

With some truly impressive camera and battery performance thanks to the Kirin 970 chipset, we’re excited to spend more time with the new Huawei Mate Pro 10 as it makes its way to the US carriers.