Having hosted an event earlier this evening for the Middle East and Africa region, we now know which flagship phones Huawei plans to bring to South Africa in the coming weeks. Key among them is the Huawei P60 Pro, which is the company’s latest flagship device in a series that has proved popular in SA in recent years.
We current have one in for review in Rococo Pearl, which we unbox here, and a review is in the offing later this month. Before that, however, we thought it best to detail our first impressions of this device, and what are early expectations are after doing some testing on its performance, camera, and other components.
In terms of looks the Rococo Pearl is quite the head turner. Its design is said to be inspired by China’s love of, and history with, pearls and definitely reminds us of the mother of pearl jewellery boxes that were so popular a few decades back.
While there is indeed a vintage quality to the design, every inch of the P60 Pro feels modern. The 6.67″ LTPO OLED is incredibly crisp and vivid for example, with it yielding a 2700×1200 resolution. Added to this are curved edges, which are not new for the smartphone segment, but make a welcome addition here.
In terms of performance, the P60 Pro feels rapid in-hand, and while we still some gripes with HMS on the software side of things, especially when it comes to duplicated apps or indeed wanting users to download as many as possible, in general the phone feels fast and responsive.
This performance is delivered via an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 4G chipset, 8GB RAM and 256GB of onboard storage. In our early benchmarking, a score of 1 038 916 was recorded via AnTuTu (v9.6.2), which has only been bettered by the Xiaomi 12S Ultra for devices we have reviewed.
It remains to be seen how telling the lack of 5G is, but we think the Google situation is what users will more interested in. There are a few emulating sandboxes available to download to get around this, like GBox, so we will see how the all-encompassing solution impacts battery life and performance once our review comes out.
The other noteworthy element to discuss at the first impressions stage is the camera. Flipping the phone over it is hard to miss the array, which features an Ultra Lighting and XMAGE system on the software side of things to ensure that no bad pictures are snapped. We confirm this to be the case, with the 48MP primary, 48MP telephoto, and 13MP ultra-wide angle lenses all performing well.
We also gave the video recording a go, which was solid, but we have noticed better stability on other flagships at 4K 60fps. We’ll continue to test this aspect, especially as Huawei wants to sell this device to content creators in particular.
All in all then, the Huawei P60 Pro looks to be another impressive flagship phone from this Chinese maker. We’ll share all our thoughts on the device after a couple of weeks of review under our belts, but for now, when it comes to hardware, this phone looks to be up there.
