Huawei P60 Pro reviewed — a camera beast without equal

Even with its lack of Google Mobile Services (GMS), the Huawei P60 Pro is an outstanding flagship smartphone.

MyBroadband has been testing the P60 Pro over several weeks before its launch in the Middle East and African markets on Wednesday, 10 May 2023.

We found the device to be highly capable for the premium or power user’s requirements.

Off the bat, the 6.67-inch curved display with a variable refresh rate from 1 Hz to 120 Hz and 1,500-nit peak brightness was a joy to use.

Videos, photos, and viewfinder imagery were crisp and colour accurate.

But that was just one of the phone’s many strengths — with its primary focus being its photographic capabilities.

True to form, Huawei has equipped the P60 Pro with one of the best, if not the best, smartphone cameras on the market.

The camera system consists of two 48MP sensors — one for the primary lens and another for the telephoto.

The former has the largest physical aperture of any smartphone camera lens — at f/1.4 — while the latter has the largest aperture for any telephoto lens — f/2.1.

This means they let in huge amounts of light for the camera’s sensors to absorb, ensuring high picture quality and colour reproduction in night-time shooting and darkly-lit environments.

The results are nothing short of otherworldly.

While some smartphone cameras tend to overdo night-time exposure, the P60 Pro came very near to what I saw with my naked eye, with some added exposure in darker areas.

You can also take long exposure shots if you want to photograph stars, require specific light effects, or make it appear like darkly-lit moments were captured in broad daylight.

While the extent of the zoom itself is impressive, at up to 100× digital, I found the quality that the telephoto lens retains at lower zoom levels particularly remarkable.

While optical zoom goes up to 3.5×, even some images at 20–30× zoom looked like they were taken at 1× zoom on my Galaxy S22, which itself has a great camera.

At high zoom levels, some quick comparisons with the Galaxy S23 Ultra showed the P60 Pro almost always edging slightly ahead in terms of getting the details right.

This capability could make the P60 Pro the ideal companion for wildlife and bird photographers or anyone who feels their phone does not get close enough to the action.

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When it comes to everyday use, the P60 Pro did not disappoint either.

The four-curved edges made it very comfortable in hand and easy to navigate the upper parts of the screen, without risking a drop.

I did knock it off a table once, and it hit the floor face-first from about a 1.2-metre height.

Fortunately, the Kunlun glass spared it from any cracks.

Huawei claims this form of protection provides ten times the fall-protecting strength of rival glass manufacturers.

Curved screens are still susceptible to damage when taking knocks on their edges, so a screen protector is nonetheless a worthwhile investment.

The P60 Pro’s battery frequently lasted well over 24 hours with moderate use, and even kept going strong after three days of light usage.

You won’t be spending a lot of time looking for an outlet, and when you have to plug in, it won’t be for long either.

The smartphone supports 88W wired and 50W wireless SuperCharge.

Unlike many flagship smartphone makers, Huawei also includes a charging brick in the P60 Pro’s box.

It features both USB-A and USB-C ports for connecting either type of cable and charging at up to 88W.

The table below shows how long it took for the P60 Pro’s battery to reach various states of charge using 88W SuperCharge with the USB-A to USB-C cable provided alongside the charging brick.

The other feature that is lacking due to the US’s trade embargo is 5G.

However, the P60 Pro’s 4G modem’s performance was so fast, we frequently measured download speeds of over 100Mbps, while using Cell C’s network.

As a closing thought, we must address the elephant in the room — the glaring lack of official GMS support.

That will certainly be a deal-breaker for some, but it does not mean you will be completely Google-less.

In the early days of GMS-less Huawei smartphones, owners had to resort to some fairly elaborate and tech-savvy workarounds to get Google apps and services on their phones.

These would not always work well and could consume battery at an exponential rate.

These days, users can install Gbox straight from the Huawei AppGallery, which creates a virtualised environment of random Android smartphones that support Google services.

That allows users to install the official Play Store versions of Google apps like YouTube, Google Maps, and YouTube Music, as well as popular social media apps such Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp.

Official versions of the most security-sensitive apps — like those used for banking— are available directly from the Huawei AppGallery.

If you don’t wish to risk sharing your credentials through another software layer, then you can run some of Google’s apps — such as YouTube — via a mobile browser.

The Huawei P60 Pro will officially launch in South Africa in the coming week, with pricing to be confirmed.

Interest buyers can already put a R1,000 deposit on the smartphone through the Huawei South Africa Store. Doing so will give them a discount of R2,499 on the phone’s price.

In addition, buyers get the Watch GT 3 SE and FreeBuds 5i for free, with a combined value of R6,198.

Other benefits include a 3-month free trial of Huawei Cloud with 200GB of storage and 100 days of free Huawei Care Screen Protect.

Below are the specifications and images of the Huawei P60 Pro.

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