Huawei Mate 60 Pro Review

The Mate 60 Pro went on sale without an announcement on 29 August 2023, and teardowns found the story inside: a Kirin 9000S, made by SMIC in Shanghai on a 7nm class process the sanctions were meant to make impossible, with 5G radios Huawei never advertised. That chip is why the phone matters. As a phone it performs like a Snapdragon 888 two years on, warm under sustained load and behind the 8 Gen 2 in every benchmark, but perfectly quick in daily use.

The rest of the hardware is first rate. The 6.82-inch LTPO OLED runs 1 to 120Hz under second generation Kunlun glass, the 5000 mAh battery takes 88W wired and 50W wireless, and the camera pairs a 50 megapixel main sensor with a physical aperture from f/1.4 to f/4.0 with a 48 megapixel 3.5x periscope that also does macro; the Pro+ sibling, which shares both, topped DxOMark in November 2023.

It makes satellite voice calls over Tiantong and sends BeiDou messages with no signal at all. Now the plain part. It runs HarmonyOS 4 with no Google services: no Play Store, no Gmail, Maps or YouTube apps, and no banking or streaming app that checks for Play services, which is most of them. Sideloading closes part of the gap only for as long as the phone runs Android-compatible software, and the HarmonyOS NEXT upgrade Huawei rolled out to the Mate 60 series in 2025 drops Android app compatibility altogether.

There is no official sale or warranty outside China. Unless you live in the Chinese app ecosystem, it is a beautifully built phone whose software will fight you daily. It launched at 6,999 yuan for 12GB and 512GB, about $960 converted, and was never priced in dollars.