[Huawei Mate 10  Real Life Review] anthropoidape:
After five years with a Galaxy Note 3, and just unimpressed by any of the current Samsung options, I have taken delivery of a Huawei Mate 10 Pro.

Really like it so far, but of course there are some things I want to tweak.

Big positives:

I am already impressed with the battery and the speed of charging it with “supercharge”

The screen is very nice

Everything is very snappy. It's a quick and smooth experience using this phone for anything.

Fingerprint scanner… I always thought this was a bit of an over-the-top inclusion on phones but I love it now that I’ve tried it. And on this phone, recognition is instant. Personally, the back-panel location is also optimal. I have set up both my index fingers and I am already used to using this feature and can't understand how I put up with entering a pattern or PIN for so long.

Things I was worried about that are okay:

EMUI seems okay to me, not sure why people hate it.

Bloat and customising and branding from my carrier is really unobtrusive. Kudos to Optus for this, they used to really suck.

WiFi… I read that some people find wifi lousy on this phone. Totally fine and quick for me, perhaps because my previous phone was so old anything would look better.

Bluetooth audio – seems totally fine. For me, this pretty much just means Spotify. Works fine so far.

What I’ve done to get it working and looking the way I want:

First, fixed ads. Man it is incredible how much ads ruin the internet. I don’t know how anyone can stand using a mobile device without ad-blocking. DO THIS.

https://xdaforums.com/mate-10/themes/help-unrooted-device-ad-spam-t3740126

nb Spotify and FB Messenger don’t work properly with the hosts file in that thread; I had to grab a different hosts file.

Installed an OLD version of ES File Explorer and blocked updating on it. I need to have a useable file system just as a matter of principle.

Installed chrome beta and disabled notifications from it, so I stop getting that “close all incognito tabs” notification. No, it’s not porn… incognito’s the only way I know to stop some news sites I read from counting how many articles I’ve viewed that month and then hitting me with a “pay up” overlay.

Chopped up my micro sim card so I could get a mobile connection (thanks for supplying one Optus).

After some playing around with EMUI, I am using Nova Launcher instead. I couldn’t get EMUI to look the way I wanted it to – it’s not so much functionality as being able to customise. I have the desktop grid set to 10x6 and the app draw to 11x7, which for me looks spot on at 500dpi. Using Nova means the EMUI widgets, eg weather widget, don’t work. I am using Chronus for these widgets. I already had the paid versions of both Nova and Chronus.

Switch on the navigation dock and hide the navbar

Enabled developer options and set DPI to 500.

Some things to be aware of (culled out of various threads):

Huawei uses fairly aggressive battery management which shuts down apps you do in fact want to keep running such as Virtual Hosts (for ad blocking - see above), and anything that runs a widget that should keep updating.

To keep an app running you have to (I think!) change settings in both “Apps” and “special access”, that is:

Settings – Apps & Notifications – Apps – [name of the app] – Battery – Launch, then set to “manage manually” and turn on auto launch, secondary launch, and run in background.

Under “special access” (no idea how to get there, I just search settings), allow “ignore battery optimisation”.

Things I still want to sort out (I will try to edit this post when I find solutions):

Media volume through the speakers and headphones is a bit quiet. Bluetooth audio is fine though. Not that critical and for me, a problem with just about every device out there. Time for a Bluetooth headset?

The phone comes with Swiftkey installed. I am not sure yet but it feels like swiftkey freezes briefly every now and again. I will play around with keyboards to check.

Make the change to DPI persistent. Maybe this can be done with ADB? I have not tried yet.

It would be great if the fingerprint scanner could be given more uses. For example it would make a great “home” button. It can be made to work by sliding to show the notification panel or to browse photos. That’s cool, probably not what I would have picked for functions though.

No sound on some videos through speakers, but sound through headphones. Clearly a software problem.

At this stage I am not rooting. I will at least wait until I’m satisfied I don’t have any hardware issues requiring warranty. It doesn’t look like there is anything I need to root for now though.

Overall:

Overall I am really, really happy with this phone. I tried to make myself want a Galaxy S9 or a Note 8, but I just can't take to the look of them. The Mate 10 Pro is very, very close to ticking all my boxes. It doesn't trip any deal-breakers for me and I am really picky about getting things to work the way I'd like them to. I would like to be able to customise a little more and if I could have root and xposed etc without blowing my warranty I would, but there would only be minimal reason to do this.