42 ANDROID ADVISOR • ISSUE 44
REVIEW
a day even with heavy use. And if you’re not playing
games, taking videos or constantly using the screen to
browse the web, watch videos or send messages, it’ll
(almost) last two days.
When it’s empty, the included SuperCharge power
supply will charge the Mate 10 Pro to almost 60
percent in only 15 minutes.
As for the processor’s performance, it’s fantastic.
It comfortably sits with Snapdragon 835-powered
phones and thanks to the lower resolution than some
of those phones, the GPU doesn’t have such a hard
time rendering all those pixels so it can deliver as
many, if not more frames per second.
Only the A11 goes noticeably quicker in
benchmarks, but this doesn’t include image
recognition. Huawei says the Mate 10 Pro can identify
scenes in photos at a rate of 2000 per minute, while
the iPhone 7 Plus can manage only about 500.
And in real-world use, the Mate 10 Pro feels as
fast and responsive as you’d expect from a top-end
flagship phone.
The real question is whether developers will use
Huawei’s APIs to create apps that take advantage of
the NPU. If not, you’re not going to see a huge benefit
beyond translation and image and scene recognition
or other apps Huawei itself releases.
Translation needs to improve before you can
rely on it. Once you’ve downloaded the respective
language packs, you can use the app offline
It works pretty well, but in the (admittedly hard) test
above, it completely fails to translate the Spanish for
department stores and calls them “large surfaces”.