Huawei's first "AI-powered" smartphone, the Mate 9, debuted last year, and the Chinese company continues to dive further into the benefits of artificial intelligence in its newest smartphones. Huawei announced the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro smartphones today, both of which promise not only hardware improvements over the Mate 9, but also more AI power thanks to a dedicated neural network processing unit (NPU). While most of us are accustomed to AI assistants on our smartphones (think Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Alexa), Huawei is taking a more embedded approach to AI, focusing on how a dedicated NPU can increase performance and efficiency over time as it learns about everything you do with your smartphone.

Design

The Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro have a number of small and somewhat confusing differences between them. Let's first cover what they have in common: both run Android Oero and EMUI 8.0. Huawei's Kirin 970 CPU, 12-core Mali G72 GPU, and new NPU for AI processing power both devices. The handsets also have the same 4,000 mAh battery that supports fast charging, allowing them to charge up to 58 percent in just 30 minutes.

Huawei continues its collaboration with Leica on the Mate 10 handsets. Both have dual f/1.6 rear camera setups, featuring a 20MP monochrome lens and a 12MP RGB lens with optical image stabilization. The front-facing camera is the same, standard 8MP shooter on both models, too. Both the Mate 10 and the Mate 10 Pro have all-glass bodies with a nearly one-inch-wide, reflective stripe on the back of the handset underneath the camera setup. The smartphones' design is very similar to the Mate 9, just with slightly slimmer bezels and refined details.

But that's where the similarities stop: on the Mate 10 Pro, the fingerprint sensor is on the back of the handset just below the camera lenses. The Mate 10 also has a fingerprint sensor, but it's built into the home button on the handset's bottom bezel (the Pro has no physical home button). The Mate 10 Pro has a six-inch, 2160x1080 AMOLED display with an 18:9 aspect ratio, making it slightly taller and thinner than the Mate 10 with its 5.9-inch, 2560x1440 LCD display with a 16:9 aspect ratio.

While the two displays are different, a unifying feature is HDR10 support. Seeing the two Mate 10 models side-by-side makes you take a closer look—the size difference is just noticeable enough to irk anyone who expected the two handsets to have the same dimensions despite different internal features.

The Mate 10 has a headphone jack on its top edge, but the Mate 10 Pro doesn't. Both power up via a USB Type-C port, and the Mate 10 Pro will come with a USB Type-C adaptor for wired headphone use. The Pro's design is IP67 rated for water and dust protection, whereas Mate 10 doesn't have an IP rating at all. The Mate 10 has 64GB of storage and 4GB of RAM while the Pro will have 128GB of storage and 6GB of RAM. Both support dual 4G SIM cards, which is a welcome upgrade from the Mate 9, which only supported one 4G-capable SIM card at a time.

Arguably the most disappointing difference between the two models is the display quality. One would think any handset with a "Pro" designation would have the higher-quality display panel. While OLED offers unique benefits, the Mate 10 Pro doesn't have a display panel with QHD resolution, which is a shame.

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Software and AI hype

Huawei may have skipped a bunch of numbers by jumping from Emotion UI 5.2 all the way to EMUI 8, but it claims that's symbolic for the big steps forward the company is taking for artificial intelligence. The Mate 10 models have a dedicated neural network processing unit that both helps make AI features smarter over time as well as increase the smartphone's daily performance and efficiency. Unlike the Mate 9, which was updated to support Amazon's Alexa, the Mate 10 doesn't manifest AI in a voice assistant alone. Instead, Huawei built upon the smart features already present in the Mate 9 and added new features that use AI to make different aspects of the Mate 10's experience better.

Take the new camera software features: now, with the help of the NPU and Huawei's new dual ISP, the rear cameras can identify what you're taking a photo of and adjust the image in real-time. In Huawei's demo, the Mate 10's camera app noticeably changed the image I saw through its lens depending on if I pointed the camera at a plant, flower, or food. The camera can identify 13 "scenes" at launch, and a small icon showing which scene it identified will show up at the bottom-left corner of the camera app before you take a photo.

I wouldn't call these changes filters, but rather real-time manipulations of photo effects, like contrast and saturation, to produce a "better" image. I was impressed to see the camera app change the image immediately depending on what the subject was. However, "better" is always subjective—sometimes the camera made colorful fruit too saturated for my liking. If you're not into AI-detected scenes, you can always control the camera yourself using Huawei's basic camera controls.

Non-native apps can take advantage of the Mate 10's NPU as well. Huawei explained that developers can either make apps using Huawei's Kirin APIs or make apps using Tensorflow or Caffe 2 (both existing, open API frameworks) in which they can program functions to use the NPU instead of the smartphone's CPU or GPU. Microsoft's Translator app comes preinstalled on the Mate 10 models, and it uses the NPU and Huawei's AI framework to complete near-immediate translations of text and characters. After taking a photo of a sign filled with Chinese characters, the app took less than a second to translate the characters into the English words "what are you doing for Halloween?"

The dedicated NPU will also help optimize the performance of the Mate 10 smartphones by aiding a feature found in Huawei's Mate 9. Just like last year's smartphone, the Mate 10 models will optimize performance over time by learning which apps you use regularly and dedicating more power to those programs before you even open them. Also, since the NPU can complete AI tasks like real-time computer vision and image recognition and sorting, the CPU and GPU won't be under as much stress over the lifetime of the smartphone.

Huawei's AI approach is more subtle than most users are accustomed to, particularly those of us who only interact with AI assistants like Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa. Huawei integrated Alexa into the Mate 9 through a software update and app placement, but Alexa wasn't mentioned as a feature of either Mate 10 models. Apparently, Huawei isn't necessarily focused on building an AI assistant that users can directly interact with (as they would a human assistant). Instead, the company appears to be leveraging its AI hardware and software to make its smartphones more powerful and smarter over time.

The Mate 10 will cost €699 when it comes out in late October in over 15 countries, including Spain, Singapore, Australia, and more. The Mate 10 Pro will cost €799 and will be available in November. Huawei has yet to release one of its smartphones on a major US carrier, but it insists the US market is important to its long-term goals. Details about when the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro will come to the US have not been released yet.