Huawei’s new P40 range comes to Australia without official Android

Huawei is running the gauntlet, with its premium P40 and P40 Pro flagship phones coming to Australia but there’s a catch.

Huawei P40 Pro

Huawei is running the gauntlet, announcing the availability of its new P40 and P40 Pro flagship phones in Australia without official Android installed.

The handset is a story in two parts. Huawei is probably right to claim the P40 series is its best flagship to date, but its phones cannot run the official Android operating system. So there’s a compromise.

This problem has been coming for some time. Last year the Trump administration added Huawei to a US Department of Commerce ‘entity list’ which stops US businesses including Google and US chip manufacturers transacting with Huawei without a special permit.

Last year Google was forced to suspend Huawei’s access to the commercial Android operating system, along with signature Google apps such as YouTube, Gmail, Photos, Maps, Chrome, Keep and Drive and with it the Google Play Store. You get a shareware version of Android with an open licence.

Huawei P40 Pro - Deep Sea Blue

When it comes to apps, the killer for Huawei will probably be Google Maps and YouTube which are used widely. Android won’t offer Google’s standard version of security updates, although Huawei offers its own.

Huawei is suggesting to consumers three ways that they circumvent this. You can use Huawei Phone Clone to migrate an old phone’s contents to a new phone, and according to the Phone Clone documentation, that includes apps.

The second method is substitution. Huawei has its own app gallery where it says you can choose apps from more than 10,000 global partners.

Huawei says you can create menu icons to access browser versions of apps. For example, you can press an icon to open Google Maps in a browser. On modern phones this happens fast enough to appear like you are opening a real app, not a web app, but web versions won’t necessarily be as feature rich as apps. Still, you can watch YouTube content in a browser on a P40/P40 Pro in this way.

Alternatively, you can go to app developers sites and load apps from there.

Whether you bother with this is up to you. Some consumers may be prepared to go this route, others might find it too cumbersome, or simply be not prepared to vary from using the official Google operating system.

The phone hardware and software are different matters. Huawei offers four major new features: a better design with a bezel-less screen; fast 5G connectivity on an integrated chip, an upgraded camera system with 30x hybrid zoom on the P40 and 50x hybrid zoom on the P40 Pro, and new artificial intelligence (AI) features.

Hybrid zoom on smartphones offers poor quality images at very high magnification, but Huawei promises better quality with improved image stabilization.

Huawei P40 Pro - Silver frost

The standard P40 with a 6.1-inch OLED display has a trifecta of lenses: 50MP wide angle, 16MP ultra wide angle and an 8MP telephoto.

Its bigger sibling, with a larger 6.58-inch OLED display, has a 50MP wide angle, 40MP ultra wide angle, a 12MP telephoto lens and a 3D depth sensor.

This wide, ultrawide, and telephoto lens combination has been present on recent flagships.

Both back and front facing camera systems shoot portrait shots with blurred backgrounds.

Huawei has included two features we’ve seen on other handsets before.

The phone can save frames taken before and after you press the camera button, and AI can select the best shot. It’s similar to a feature on Google Pixel phones.

Secondly, the phone can eliminate transient people in the background. If you’re taking a group shot, and someone walks past as you press the button, the camera can eliminate that person from the shots by taking a series of frames. We saw this on a premium Samsung phone years ago.

Huawei promises clear shots in low light with its handheld “super night mode”.

The Chinese company also announced a Watch GT 2e smartwatch, but it’s not in Australia yet.

Both the P40 and P40 Pro are available for pre-order in Australia from today for $1099 and $1599. You get a free set of FreeBuds3 wireless buds if you order the P40 Pro before April 16, the day the two phones models become available.

The P40 is being sold by Huawei through its Chatswood Sydney store, Harvey Norman and Mobileciti. The P40 Pro is additionally being sold through JB H-iFi and Officeworks.

Past Huawei premium handsets have sold extremely well in Australia, but with the new Google restrictions, it’s a different ball game.

The other issue is whether Australians in isolation and quarantine are interested in buying high end smartphones at the moment, particularly with coronavirus and the economy on their minds. Many are out of work.