Traditionally, along with flagships, Huawei also introduces a “light” version in the middle price range. The current update of the line, P40, was no exception – today we have a new “almost flagship” P40 Lite as our guest. This device is of particular interest because it is the first Huawei model without Google services, which will be officially sold in Ukraine.

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Huawei P40 Lite design

Huawei P40 Lite is available in three colors: Midnight Black (black), Sakura Pink (pink) and Crush Green (green); we had a third version in the editorial office. The bezels around the display are moderate, slightly wider at the bottom than on the sides and top; the display occupies approximately 83.5% of the front panel area. Unlike the P30 Lite, which had a waterdrop notch in the center of the screen, the P40 Lite has a punch-hole in the top left corner.

The body of the smartphone is made in the form of a traditional “sandwich” – however, like the P30 Lite, only the front panel is glass; The back cover is made of plastic, very successfully imitating glass. The frame between them is also plastic – although it feels like metal to the touch.

On the upper side there is a noise reduction microphone (plus a speaker slot at the junction between the front panel and the frame), on the left there is a SIM card tray (the installation of two nanoSIM cards is supported, instead of one of them you can install a branded NM Card up to 256 GB), on the right – a volume rocker and a power button combined with a fingerprint scanner. Below you can find holes for a multimedia speaker, a main microphone, a USB Type-C connector and a mini-jack for connecting a wired headset – mid-budgets are not in a hurry to refuse it yet.

By today’s standards, the Huawei P40 Lite feels like a medium-sized smartphone, but compared to the P30 Lite, it has become slightly larger (plus ~ 6 mm in height and 4 in width) and heavier (183 g versus 159 g for its predecessor). It lies well in the hand, the side edges fit comfortably in the palm of your hand, the plastic back cover does not feel particularly slippery, so it will not be too easy to accidentally drop the smartphone.

Display

The Huawei P40 Lite has a 6.4-inch IPS display with a resolution of 2310 x 1080 pixels (which gives a pixel density of ~398 PPI). It produces a good picture with natural colors and large viewing angles, and the brightness even when viewed from the side decreases very slightly, while the color reproduction practically does not suffer.

In the display settings, you can switch between two video modes – “normal” and “saturated”. In the first, the smartphone shows calm colors and a comfortable warm shade by default.

Saturated greatly expands the color gamut, causing colors to become bright and saturated, almost like AMOLED displays. In this case, the image acquires a distinct chilly tint, but this can be corrected in the same menu – by switching to a warm color temperature or manually adjusting it on a color disk. In addition, similar results can be achieved using the “eye comfort” menu item, which turns on the blue filter – both on an ongoing basis and on a scheduled basis.

The maximum brightness is about 460 cd / m², when you turn on automatic adjustment outdoors in sunny weather, it can rise even higher, up to ~ 520 cd / m² – so it will not be difficult to read the information on it. The minimum brightness is only 1.5 cd / m², so even in complete darkness it will not “hit the eyes”.

Hardware platform, performance

The Huawei P40 Lite uses a proprietary chipset – HiSilicon Kirin 810. It includes an eight-core CPU (2 productive Cortex-A76 cores operating at frequencies up to 2.27 GHz, and 6 energy-efficient Cortex-A55 cores operating at frequencies up to 1.88 GHz) and a six-core GPU Mali-G52. The smartphone is available in a single memory configuration – 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal storage.

The Kirin 810 is a new mid-range processor built on a 7nm process, and it turns out to be a notable improvement over the Kirin 710 that powered last year’s P30 Lite. In terms of performance in synthetic tests, it looks very worthy, outperforming other “mid-budget” without any problems.

In the throttling test, the Huawei P40 Lite showed excellent results, the processor frequency under constant load did not decrease, while the heating was more than moderate – the smartphone body remained only slightly warm.

As mentioned above, the fingerprint scanner is located on the side and is combined with the power button. It has a very high speed of operation, the smartphone unlocks almost instantly, we did not observe false positives – in general, we were very pleased with its work, at the moment it is clearly a more convenient solution compared to both the under-screen scanner and the one located on the back side of the hull.

Software

Huawei P40 Lite is running Android 10, supplemented by a proprietary shell EMUI 10.0.1. This is the second Huawei smartphone without Google services and, accordingly, access to the Google Play Store, which visited our editorial office (the first was Huawei Mate 30 Pro ), and the first to be officially sold in Ukraine.

We will not talk in detail about the EMUI interface within the framework of this review – in this regard, the P40 Lite does not differ from other Huawei models based on Android 10 in anything special, except for the composition of the software; everyone can check out our detailed video review of EMUI 10 here .

And now about the most interesting thing – how does an Android smartphone feel without Google and what has come to replace it? The fact is that Google Play services are used far from only Google’s proprietary software (they include a whole set of tools, for example, for working with location, payment functions, working with maps, etc.). Therefore, Huawei has implemented its own set of libraries, Huawei Mobile Services (HMS Core), designed to replace Google Play services, and now the AppGallery branded market is used to install applications, in which you will need to create a Huawei ID account (it was also present on earlier Huawei models with support for Google, but now the company has begun to develop it more actively).

Of course, the choice in the AppGallery cannot be compared with the Google Play Store – so, although it managed to find Telegram, Viber, Rozetka, monobank, Privat24, but at the same time, AppGallery lacks such very popular applications as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Dropbox etc. They can be installed manually from apk files – for example, from APKMirror or APKPure resources (of course, at your own peril and risk), however, Google proprietary software will not work on Huawei P40 Lite even after manual installation. The most critical here is, perhaps, the lack of YouTube (you can use the third-party YouTube Vanced client instead) and Google Maps (we managed to get one of the month-old versions loaded from APKPure to work, but without the ability to login).

Last but not least, contactless payment. Although the smartphone has NFC support, Google Pay, as you might guess, is missing. Unfortunately, Huawei does not yet have its own system, although work on this is already underway, both at the global level and in the Ukrainian market, so in the future we can hope to correct the situation.

Multimedia

Huawei P40 Lite has only one multimedia speaker, the speaker is not used to create a stereo effect. It turns out to be loud enough so that the owner of the device does not miss a call even in a rather noisy environment; if we talk about quality, then it has a good elaboration of mids and not bad – high frequencies, while bass, quite expectedly, is practically absent here.

Camera Huawei P40 Lite

The rear camera includes four modules: the main 48 MP, f / 1.8 aperture and phase detection autofocus, ultra-wide with a resolution of 8 MP and f / 2.4 aperture, a two-megapixel macro module and a depth module. The recommended shooting mode for the main module is 12-megapixel, but if desired, the user can also take full-size shots – both regular and in the “48MP AI Ultra Clarity” mode; in the latter case, shooting takes a few seconds, and the pictures themselves are noticeably better – much clearer and with higher detail. So if you need to take a full-size frame, this mode will be your main one.

The camera app looks standard and will be familiar to all owners of the latest Huawei models. Swiping up and down the preview window changes the zoom, left and right does nothing. In the lower mode ribbon, you can switch between night mode, portrait, AR-camera, etc.; the last paragraph, More, contains less popular options like Pro-mode, slow-mo, panorama, HDR, super-macro and so on. In the main window, next to switching flash modes, filters and calling system parameters, there is the inclusion of image enhancement using AI (in the general case, it usually leads to an increase in the color saturation and contrast of the image), as well as the AI Lens mode, which can scan QR codes and search for objects (primarily goods) on the Internet. Pro-mode allows you to manually set ISO, shutter speed, exposure compensation, choose the type of focus and white balance.

During the day in sunny weather, the pictures are quite high-quality and clear, with natural colors and a minimum amount of noise – however, small details like grass or surfaces with a small pattern can be smeared with noise reduction.

The dynamic range in the normal mode is wide enough that the need to turn on the HDR mode only arose in the case of very contrasting scenes. HDR works quite delicately, in general, it allows you to better work out the details in the bright areas of the frame, which in normal mode are overexposed; at the same time, the shadows are at least a little brightened, but just enough to reveal the information hidden in them – they are not illuminated too strongly; in addition, in HDR mode, dark areas are noticeably sharper.

At night or in a room with a lack of light, the detailing is expectedly noticeably reduced, however, both the noise level and the operation of the “noise reduction” algorithms turn out to be acceptable for a smartphone of this price range. Turning on the night mode (in which shooting takes a few seconds) allows you to get a greater dynamic range and better detail, while, according to our observations, the effect of its use is the more noticeable, the dimmer and more uniform the light, without bright point sources in the frame, illuminated stage.

The camera application allows you to take pictures with a 2x digital zoom – the quality is quite good, the clarity is almost at the level of ordinary 12-megapixel photos. The ultra-wide module also demonstrates a generally very good picture – except that the edges of the frame turn out to be noticeably “blurred”, plus the color saturation is slightly lower than that of the main module.

Autonomy Huawei P40 Lite

The battery capacity of the P40 Lite has become noticeably larger than that of its predecessor – 4200 mAh versus 3340 for the P30 Lite. It supports proprietary fast charging (40 W), which allows you to charge a discharged smartphone up to 70% in just half an hour, while a full charge takes a little more than one hour. The battery capacity is quite enough for two days of moderate use, in the Geekbench 4 “battery” test with a screen brightness of 200 cd / m², the smartphone lasted 8 hours and 16 minutes. and scored almost 5000 points.