Huawei Mate 10 Pro review: great build quality and performance with exceptional battery life, but the software is buggy and poorly designed for an $800 phone
Huawei's premier smartphone is let down by bad software — We're less than two months into 2018, and so far, the year hasn't been very good for Huawei. Tweets: @dcseifert Tweets: Dan Seifert / @dcseifert : I reviewed the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, which is now finally available in the US. My take: a carrier deal would not have saved this phone. http://www.theverge.com/... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Huawei's flagship arrives in the US unlocked at $800, and The Verge's verdict splits the company's playbook down the middle: the hardware — build, performance, battery life — now competes at the top of the market, while the software drags it back down. That split is not new. Two years earlier, the Honor 8 review flagged the same buggy software alongside strong performance and battery, making this a recurring brand-level critique rather than a one-phone stumble.
Reviewer Dan Seifert's sharpest point is strategic: even a carrier deal would not have saved this phone, because at $800 buyers compare it against polished rivals and the software gap is what loses the sale. The timing matters too — weeks later Huawei would ship the P20 Pro, which The Verge called the best Android phone of 2018 so far, showing the hardware curve rising far faster than the software one.
First-order effects
- Huawei's US premium push stalls at launch: an $800 unlocked phone with no carrier distribution and a software verdict bad enough that the reviewer argues a carrier deal wouldn't have rescued it.
Second-order effects
- The software critique hardens into a pattern reviewers apply to every subsequent flagship — the Mate 20 Pro and P30 Pro reviews repeat it nearly verbatim — capping how much Huawei can charge for hardware excellence.
Third-order effects
- If hardware keeps outpacing software, Huawei's eventual answer has to be owning the stack itself — which is where the later arc points: cut off from US chips and platforms, the company rebuilt around its own silicon and shipped HarmonyOS, converting its oldest product weakness into a self-reliance project.
The trend: Huawei's decade-long pattern of best-in-class hardware undermined by weak software is the pressure that eventually pushed the company to build its own operating system and chip stack.