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Three years ago, I would probably have laughed at you if you told me that HiSilicon was going to be shipping mobile processors

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that were competitive with the best CPUs from Qualcomm, Apple, and Samsung.

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And yet, here we are.

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Now to be clear, the Kirin 980, and by extension, the Huawei P30 Pro, is not industry-leading across the board,

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falling well behind, well, everyone, when it comes to gaming, thanks to its Mali-G76 MP10 GPU.

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But, the thing is, it's also not an also-ran, which means that I can no longer safely ignore Huawei's flagship phones as overpriced and underpowered.

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So, the P30 Pro has spent the last three weeks in my pocket, and I definitely have some thoughts to share about it.

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If I had to describe its look, I'd say the P30 Pro is slick.

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Both in terms of its clean, curvy industrial design, and its finish, which is one of the most slippery that I have ever held.

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I've actually only encountered a handful of phones that I'm afraid to hold against my ear with my shoulder for fear that they will slip out.

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But...

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This is definitely one of them.

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I actually even ended up switching to on-screen buttons rather than gesture control, so that I could hold it just a little bit higher and hold on to it better.

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So, a grippy case or a textured dbrand skin is strongly recommended for this one.

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Other than that, though, my main complaints are really audio-related.

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The P30 Pro lacks a 3.5mm caveman jack, which I am still not over.

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And, probably more importantly for most people, it's got a pretty crummy speaker setup.

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Now, the earpiece speaker is handled similarly to LG's G8, with the top portion of the screen actually vibrating against your ear in order to produce sound.

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Now, this has the benefit of making it easier to hear your phone in a crowd, and it takes some of the guesswork out of where you need to position it against your ear.

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The issue is that it also comes with some drawbacks.

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Now, LG decided to enable their screen speaker as a second speaker to boost output and create a stereo...

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...listening effect, but we actually complained that it made the phone noticeably vibrate.

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So, I'm pleased to say that Huawei left that feature out.

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But, that means that the P30 Pro relies solely on its bottom-firing speaker for Netflix binging and other content consumption.

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And, frankly, it's just not very good.

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It's loud enough, but I found it harsh sounding and just not competitive with other flagships.

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Back to positives, though.

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The lock button is pretty good.

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It is positioned such that I could reach both it and the in-screen fingerprint sensor comfortably without shifting my hand.

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That was one of my major annoyances with the Galaxy S10+.

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The volume rocker has no opposing buttons to accidentally mash.

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The SIM tray can accept both a second SIM or Huawei's nano-memory card, and...

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Is that an IR blaster?

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It is!

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AV and home automation fans rejoice!

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Honestly, as positive as all that is, though, it wasn't until I started goofing around with the...

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...camera that I really considered switching to the P30 Pro as my daily driver.

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Now, there are gonna be other people that are gonna cover its merit as an artsy photography phone.

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But, there are some killer features for normies like me as well, with the headline one being, of course, the hybrid...

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...50x zoom that uses a combination of the 40 megapixel main shooter and the 8 megapixel 5x optical zoom lens...

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...that uses a novel...

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...periscope technique to bounce incoming light off of an angled mirror and then reflect it at the sensor that's 90 degrees offset.

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Now, obviously, 50x zoom is hand-wavy, enhance nonsense.

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I mean, you can't just enhance past the data that you've collected, but their software hybrid zoom technique...

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...assisted by the optical image stabilization on both of those sensors actually worked far better than I expected.

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Yielding usable images at anywhere from 25x to 35x zoom, as long as you've got a steady hand or something to rest the phone against, because that is truly a lot of zoom.

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It's darn impressive, though.

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The other big star of the show is the new RYYB yellow sub-pixel configuration of the main sensor that allows it to collect an advertised 40% more light,

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helping the P30 capture some truly game-changing images under...

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...very dark conditions.

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So that's really, really cool stuff.

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It's just that, unfortunately, it didn't work out quite as well for me as I hoped.

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For one thing, you need to understand that phone camera lenses are not the same as real camera lenses.

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You're not just changing out the glass on a modular mount like on a DSLR.

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So, on the P30 Pro, each of those three lenses is actually a completely separate camera.

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So, if you...

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...like me, were imagining, then, that you could get amazing, stable video of your kid's poorly-lit performance from the back of the gymnasium,

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think again.

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The telephoto lens, aside from capturing at a lower 8-megapixel resolution,

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has a conventional sensor behind it with a completely different image processing pipeline.

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And that's never more clear than when you switch cameras in the middle of a recording and watch the colors go all wonky for a second.

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With that said, that is a pretty cool thing.

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That's a pretty cool feature, being able to switch like that.

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On that note, though, that's about the only cool thing that I could find about video recording on the P30 Pro.

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It's pretty disappointing overall, with very poor processing of its rolling shutter effect.

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Watch the way my head stretches here.

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And occasionally, really low audio levels that annoyed pretty much everyone who's viewed my YouTube stories over the last few weeks.

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So, in summary, the camera's fine.

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It's more than fine.

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It's the best that I've ever used from a Chinese cell phone company.

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And this comparison, in particular, makes the Note 9 look decidedly last-gen.

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But, let's be realistic.

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It's not godly.

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And when you're running around snapping pics of your daily life,

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even its fancy yellow pixels and multiple exposures are not going to be able to combat squirmy children,

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and its occasional complete ball drop, like the yellow cast on this shot and this spectacular autofocus fail,

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are going to come up now and again.

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Fortunately, the P30 Pro, which is the most powerful camera in the world, is capable of doing that.

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The P30 Pro is not a one-trick pony.

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It's got a lot more going for it than just the cameras.

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Now, two of my biggest complaints about the S10 Plus were its exit-wound-style display notch

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and its slower, less-accurate, ultrasonic fingerprint scanner.

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And Huawei, while falling well short of Samsung's outstanding brightness and color reproduction,

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not to mention higher resolution, has done a better job, IMO, of the display's layout,

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thanks to their minimalistic, symmetrical notch, and, of course, the high-resolution display.

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Thanks to their minimalistic, symmetrical notch, and, of course, the high-resolution display.

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Thanks to their minimalistic, symmetrical notch, and, of course, the high-resolution display.

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Thanks to their minimalistic, symmetrical notch, and, of course, the high-resolution display.

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And slightly wider side bezels that reduce accidental activations.

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Now, I was also initially very pleased to see that they opted for an optical in-screen fingerprint sensor.

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It's fast, and I had no issues with it during my time with the device.

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But Samsung also issued a patch for their ultrasonic sensor,

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I think about a week ago, as of filming this right now,

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and it's way better behaved now, much faster, even when my fingers are really dry.

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What Samsung still hasn't managed to address for me, though,

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What Samsung still hasn't managed to address for me, though,

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What Samsung still hasn't managed to address for me, though,

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is their signature random battery drain.

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And that is where Huawei blows away anything in their lineup.

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The last time I had a phone that lasted me two full days this consistently,

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I'm not even sure if it had a color screen.

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Even with the fairly basic always-on-display enabled,

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you could have convinced me that this phone had maybe a 6,000

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rather than 4,200 milliamp-hour battery.

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It's that impressive.

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But this positive note also happens to be a perfect segue

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into some of the negative things about the P30 Pro's software.

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One of the ways that Huawei manages such excellent battery life

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is EMUI's hyper-aggressive background app suppression.

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And while I definitely appreciate the benefits,

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I do find their approach a little bit over the top,

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and I want more control.

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So first things first,

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there's this ridiculous card notification

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that I can't swipe away.

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Why is that there?

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Then there's the constant,

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constant reminders that like,

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oh, I don't know, Sonos is running in the background.

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That's fine, Huawei.

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I use my speakers.

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It's okay.

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And then there's the fact

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that it puts instant messaging apps,

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instant, that's the key,

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like Google Hangouts to sleep without my permission.

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And before you ask,

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yes, per Huawei's instructions,

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I disabled that behavior,

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but it kept doing it anyway.

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So occasionally, I just won't get my notifications

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until I open the app,

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and that's just not acceptable.

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And while we're at it,

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neither are non-removable bloatware apps in the year 2019.

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Also, since I'm on a roll here,

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please let me pull down the notification shade

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while the phone is locked

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and add a double-press gesture

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that works system-wide to quick launch the camera.

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While the phone's off,

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I can double-press volume down to launch it,

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but while it's not,

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that just goes down two volume clicks.

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Like, okay.

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To be clear,

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the software is mostly fine.

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At least putting my carrier SIM in didn't wipe the phone

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like Samsung's craptastic implementation.

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This SMS app has a cool copy text feature for 2FA.

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That's nice.

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It's just that,

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overall, I found myself more annoyed by it than not,

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which just isn't good enough

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now that iOS, Samsung One,

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and Google's stock experience are just so polished

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and do such a great job of staying out of the way.

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And making matters much worse on the software side,

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actually, XDA has gone as far

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as to include a disclaimer about this

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in every article that mentions Huawei or Honor.

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And so, I feel like I should probably raise my pitchfork

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alongside them.

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Due to a recent policy change,

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it is no longer possible to unlock the bootloader

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on Huawei devices,

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which means, for better or for worse,

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you are stuck with EMUI and the feature and security updates

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that Huawei decides to provide.

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There will be no extending the life of your phone

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with lineage OS or something similar down the line,

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and that's a real bummer,

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and it's something that I'd like to see them fix.

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It's already lame enough that Android fans have to accept

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the, at best, two to three years of support

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compared to Apple's four to five.

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If you take away rooting,

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you're basically saying,

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yep, this thing's going in the landfill.

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Deal with it.

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And that's just not cool.

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So, summary then.

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I'm really impressed with this thing.

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I'm gonna be continuing my policy

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of not ignoring Huawei devices anymore,

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but I'm also pretty jazzed to go back to my Note 9

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because, quite frankly, display notches

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and long live the headphone jack.

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So check out dbrand at the link in the video description.

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So thanks for watching, guys.

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If this video sucked, you know what to do.

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But if it was awesome, get subscribed,

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hit that like button,

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or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured

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in the video description.

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which has cool shirts like this one

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and our community forum, which you should totally join.