Huawei announced its P50 Pro yesterday. The price is historically in line with other P-series flagships, in total that’s 1199 euros for the 8 GB version and 256 GB of storageto which must be added the classic gifts that now accompany most of the products on the launch day, to make the pill sweeter.
Huawei is practically asking for the P50 Pro what Apple is asking for the iPhone 13 Proand the company is convinced that its product is far superior to what other manufacturers offer on the Android market today.
P for Huawei means photography, and the P50 Pro continues that tradition / revolution that began many years ago with the P10, a hybrid color and monochrome camera, and then continued with the P20 Pro, one of the first smartphones with high-resolution sensors and night shot.
However, Huawei has a problem, a problem for which does not have many faults: is asking 1,199 euros for a phone without Google services and apps and with a processor castrated by a 5G module that is turned off and cannot be activated in any way,
Today a phone with the Huawei Mobile Service can be used, with a minimum of adaptation: the apps are there, the ecosystem works, not everything is still perfect as it is in the Google world but it is not a drama as it was at the beginning. There are people who happily use a Huawei and do not regret the absence of Google at allindeed, there are those who have chosen it precisely because of the absence of Google.
Those who spend € 1,199 for a phone, looking at the promised technological side, will hardly adapt to a type of use that will always be conditioned in some way by these shortcomings. We think of the hundreds of photography apps that could be of use to those who shoot with the P50 Pro and that will have to be installed, if you can, going from Petal Search or directly from the APK and the need, in the future, to have a quick backup of photos with the cloud, it can be done in Wi-Fi but not in 5G. Or the absence of Google Photo.
The launch of the P50 Pro in Italy and Europe it is an act of courage: Huawei obviously does not plan to do the numbers that the old P’s did in the golden years, but simply wants to show that the injured giant can still roar, and has not been downsized.
Huawei, with the P50 Pro, he actually did the best he could do even though the phone oozes some pain. The use of the Snapdragon 888, a processor that Huawei is forced to use due to the impossibility of producing the Kirin, is an evident brake on what was the idea of the Huawei ecosystem. Huawei was designing the operating system on its processors, and its processors had everything inside it that was needed to push the camera as best as possible: year after year we were used to a net leap both from the software point of view and from the hardware point of view. this year was not so striking.
The P40 Pro Plus was so innovative when the P50 Pro is traditional: perhaps Huawei had accustomed us too well, with unique solutions that set a trend. The P50 Pro is a good step forward compared to the P40 if we look at the display, the charging, the design, but from a “P” series we were expecting a photographic revolution that does not seem to exist on paper.
The double telephoto of the P40 Pro+ was a clever idea to obtain the highest quality with portraits and at the same time have a high optical magnification thanks to the periscope, but on the P50 Pro Huawei has returned to traditional optics with a sensor that works at crop, starting from a base of 64 megapixels. The super-wide high-resolution lens that was probably the best 14 mm lens on a phone also disappears: in its place a very banal 13 megapixel f / 2.2.
The “novelty”, if we can say so, is the 40 megapixel True-Chroma Camera that works with a fusion system together with the other cameras. Huawei had already done this on the P10, and for some time had insisted on the need to have a black and white sensor to increase dynamics and make true Leica Monochrome portraits, only to realize that the result obtainable with a color sensor, removed the saturation , it was quite similar. The P40 Pro + was much better assorted, if we look at the cameras, of this P50 Pro, even if the P50 Pro is more current in other respects.
The price remains that of the old Huawei, the quality also, but the more we use it the more we seem to find ourselves in front of what is a “plan B”. Huawei had to review its roadmap, she had a plan (and a bright future) and found her way blocked,
To cope with the various problems of recent years, it has found itself forced to slow down in that race for technological development that had brought it to an absolute level of leadership: moving from Kirin to Snapdragon means reviewing all the projects, and while it did Huawei was also faced with the impossibility of creating new photographic sensors due to the bans imposed on it, and with the need to review the EMUI, together with HarmonyOS, to understand how to insert the Qualcomm component in something born for the Kirin, Reason why, at the moment, Harmony is not there.
The P50 Pro will probably sell for little, and will certainly be eclipsed from a technological point of view by the Samsung S22 Ultra or the new Oppo Find 5 Pro that will be out soon. However, we appreciate his courage and pride: on equal terms it would have been a completely different story.
