DxOMark: The Huawei P40 Pro offers excellent mics but poor speaker output

While we await DxOMark's camera review of the new Huawei P40 Pro+, the P40 Pro has now been put through the website's audio tests. The results? About expected. For Huawei audio, that means polarizing.

The Huawei P40 recorded an overall audio score of 59. That's pretty bad and continues the company's trend of making flagships with poor audio capabilities—by DxOMark's standards anyway. For some reason, Huawei phones seem to always do well in the camera test, but fall way behind the competition in the audio tests. In fact, all of Huawei's current flagship phones have scored in the 59 to 61 range. Consistency. The Mate 20 X is the only outlier so far, but it's hardly a regular smartphone, so its impressive audio performance is reasonable.

The P40 Pro scored 54 in the playback category. This is due to Huawei's reluctance to implement a proper stereo speaker setup. Playback is where the Huawei phones typically lag behind the competition, and it makes sense seeing as the P40 Pro has a single speaker setup. The P40 Pro earned a recording score of 74. That's not just impressive; it's phenomenal. To be exact, that's the highest score DxOMark has ever awarded in that category. It's incredible that a phone manages to have such a polarizing performance: incredible recording, and disappointing playback.