 This is the Huawei Mate 10 Pro. Now if you've been on YouTube much in the past few months, you've probably seen this phone before, or maybe read some suspicious user reviews. But despite Huawei's best efforts, nobody in the US has been able to buy this phone until just this month when it went on sale unlocked at a handful of places like Amazon or Best Buy. Now there's a whole backstory about Huawei trying to break into the US market with this particular phone, and how it's been completely unable to get any carrier support, despite coming awfully close. Now that might be due to some factors that are outside of Huawei's control, such as a distrust of the company by the US government. But it got me wondering, is the Mate 10 Pro a phone anyone should buy? Even if Huawei had been able to get it on AT&T or Verizon or any other US carrier, would anyone have bought it anyways? In terms of hardware, the $799 Mate 10 Pro has almost everything you'd expect from a flagship phone in late 2017 or early 2018. It has a metal and glass body with great build quality and tight tolerances. It's water resistant. It has a tall aspect ratio screen with minimal bezels. It has stereo speakers, and of course, a dual rear camera system. Inside of the phone is Huawei's own top of the line processor, six gigabytes of RAM, and 128 gigabytes of storage. There's a huge 4,000 milliamp hour battery that can keep it going all day and then some. It even has an IR blaster, so you can use it to control your TV or other electronics. And like many other high-end phones, it doesn't have a headphone jack, but Huawei does provide both these ear pod knockoff headphones and a USB-C to 3.5 millimeter adapter in the box. It also doesn't have wireless charging, despite the fact that it has a glass back. But those are fairly minor complaints. If there's a hardware feature you want, the Mate 10 Pro probably has it. And for the most part, the hardware works really well. The Mate 10 Pro is as fast as any recent Android flagship. The hardware is nice to hold, and like I said before, it has terrific battery life. It doesn't have any obvious annoyances, like a poorly placed fingerprint sensor or an extra button for a voice assistant you'll never use or a notch that covers up part of the top of the screen. The 6-inch display is a lower resolution than many of its peers at only 1080p, but I haven't really had an issue with that. It's OLED, so it has deep blacks and vibrant colors and has excellent viewing angles, and it gets bright enough outdoors for sunny days. I really like the Mate 10 Pro's speakers, which automatically switch from mono to stereo when you turn the phone from portrait to landscape. And while I wouldn't say that the Leica-branded rear camera's as good as, say, a Pixel 2 or an iPhone X, it's certainly a capable shooter, with fast focus and performance, good detail, and pleasing, if maybe a little bit saturated, colors. The app has a ton of features and options, including manual controls, various portrait and fake blurring modes, and automatic scene functions that attempt to optimize the camera for whatever your subject happens to be. My favorite mode is the monochrome option, which only uses data from one of the Mate 10 Pro's camera sensors to produce some of the nicest black and white images you can get from a smartphone. But as good as this hardware is, Huawei's software never lives up to the hardware's potential. Now the Mate 10 Pro does run Android 8.0 Oreo, but it has Huawei's EMUI interface on top of it, and this is about as far from a clean version of Android as you can get. The best way I can describe it is it's a poorly made knockoff of iOS. Huawei has customized almost everything about Android, and often it's not in a good way. For example, you can't expand notifications on a lock screen like you can do with every other Android phone. So deleting an email or marking it to do complete can't be done without unlocking the phone. The settings menu and the share sheet have been lifted right out of iOS, and most of the apps for sharing are hidden by default for some inexplicable reason. Sure, you can change some of those things by downloading a different launcher or messaging app or whatever, but you can't change things like the quick settings menu that doesn't match the rest of the notification shade or that awful share sheet. On top of that, there's frustrating bugs. Even when I did download another launcher and attempted to use that, the Mate 10 would frequently reset the default to Huawei's own launcher. This just isn't the kind of software experience I expect on an $800 phone, especially when there are already so many better options available. It's bad enough for me to say that nobody should buy the Mate 10 Pro, especially not at this price. You can get all of the hardware performance with none of the software headaches from any number of other Android phones available, unlocked, or through carriers. Then I think about what would have happened had Huawei been able to launch this phone with AT&T, and how worse everything would have been with a carrier's bloatware loaded on top of it. It just makes me feel like this wouldn't have made much of a difference for Huawei. It's hard to see anyone buying this phone as it is right now, carrier support or not. I think that Huawei has done a lot right with the Mate 10 Pro's hardware, and if it wasn't so expensive, I could perhaps excuse some of its software issues. But this is a premium priced phone, and you should get a premium experience with it, which unfortunately, the Mate 10 Pro doesn't provide. How it's been completely unable to get any carrier support despite coming awfully close. Because there's spies. Trying to do work here, Neelay. What the fuck?