Huawei Mate 20 Pro: the most techno phone of the year

The telephone equipment now goes beyond the point where it is easy to tell the difference between the best and the best, which makes this sense of novelty difficult to create.

The Huawei Mate 20 Pro at £ 869 proves that there is still plenty of new toys to show. This pushes the "new" more aggressively than Samsung or Apple recently, and not just in features that appear as clippings from the Innovations catalog. But this is Huawei: there are also some technical extras.

Design

Huawei's Mate 20 Pro approach is packed so rich in new and innovative features that it looks almost empirically better than the iPhone XS and the Samsung Galaxy Note 9. This is not obvious at first. on board. The Mate 20 Pro is more compact than the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, the Pixel 3 XL, the OnePlus 6T or the HTC U12 +.

The width and thickness determine the size of a phone. The combination of Huawei's very thin contours with a Samsung-like curved screen on the sides narrows the frame. The result is a 6.3-inch screen mobile that feels amazingly manageable.

The basics of design were invented by Samsung. The front and rear windows are curved on the sides, not only softened at the edges. Its sides are made of aluminum. Like OnePlus, Huawei also offers a finish for those who do not appreciate the glide of glbad. You can get a micro-engraved version that will not slide off the sofa as easily.

Drums

Crucially, Huawei has also not sacrificed battery life in favor of a smaller size. The Mate 20 Pro has a battery of 4,200 mAh, bigger than that of the Galaxy Note 9. More curiously, it does not seem to last as long as a charge of the Huawei P20 Pro. There will be no need for a booster charge in the early evening. It lasts all day, every day, according to our experience.

However, it is unlikely that you still have 40 to 50% of fees before midnight. It was common with the P20 Pro, or the newer Motorola E5, but 20 to 30% is much more likely here.

The battery also offers one of the most outstanding features of the Mate 20 Pro, the one that balances genius and madness. It can charge another phone wirelessly and recharge wirelessly. Just make sure the feature is turned on, place the phone back to back with another supporting Qi and power transfer starts. It's really smart, and the mobile phone first.

However, the practical aspects make you wonder if it will be useful in real life. The reverse wireless charging is relatively slow, and leaning on a glbad phone at £ 900 to stay on another glbad phone at £ 900 without them slamming to the ground looks optimistic.

The most sensitive would probably buy an external battery. And probably a cheaper phone. However, the prospect of offering to charge an iPhone XS sick of a friend too proud is undeniably alluring.

security

A fingerprint scanner on the screen is the big criticism of the other Mate 20 Pro. It is an optical sensor located behind the OLED screen, illuminated by the panel when it detects a hovering finger. This is not the first time that Huawei uses a scanner on the screen. Huawei put one in the horribly expensive Porsche Design Mate RS. You will see a lot in the next 12 months.

We are happy that he also enjoys a very good release of faces badisted by IR. The fingerprint scanners on the screen are not yet as reliable as a dedicated pad. This is not a surprise when the camera "sees" your finger across the OLED panel.

Sometimes it fails to recognize your finger, more often than the OnePlus 6T. And this can happen even when the figure completely covers the surface of the pad. Hope Huawei can improve this with software updates.

Camera

The camera is the place where the technology-based approach is best synchronized with the way you use the phone. A natural progression of the camera used in the P20 Pro, this one with three lenses with optical zoom three times. But instead of using a black and white sensor as the third eye of the matrix, there is an ultra-wide 20-megapixel lens.

In the light of day, the Mate 20 Pro takes great pictures. Its HDR sound is extremely efficient, and you have the choice between ten megapixel coherent photos using pixel deletion or extremely detailed photos of 40 megapixels. In good lighting at least. At night, unsurprisingly, the 40 megapixels are falling apart.

The iPhone XS and Pixel 3 XL offer slightly better results under certain lighting conditions. However, the second is a master of extremes. Its zoom is about the most effective of the moment, especially because the three-step lens is optically stabilized.

The wide-angle camera is excellent and takes much better pictures than the LG G7 ThinQ, this year's most "visible" phone with a wide-angle lens. The large photos of Mate 20 Pro are more detailed and cleaner than those of LG. The compositional flexibility offered here is superb, a point that is sometimes lacking in critics who seek to crown the "phone of the camera of the year".

Huawei's Super Night mode is another major highlight, similar to the P20 Pro version. It is the equivalent in computer photography of a shot with a very long exposure, combining a wide range of images taken at different levels of exposure. They are then combined to radically increase the dynamic range and reduce the noise.

It takes about four seconds with most scenes, can be used by hand and still offers the best low light shots you'll get from a tripod-free phone. You can also get normal night photos almost instantly and compare them with those of your rivals. Night mode can also be used with zoom and wide views for frankly sensational versatility in low light.

If you consider photography as a bell curve, whose extreme sides represent difficult conditions that most people can not stand, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro covers a larger area than any other phone on time current. Even though the treatment of "easier" conditions is not always as naturalistic as some.

The screen of the Huawei Mate 20 Pro is also excellent, largely because it uses a Samsung screen, like all the most expensive phones. The iPhone XS Max, Google Pixel 3 XL and, of course, the best Samsung – use all Samsung Super AMOLED panels. This one has a resolution of 3,120 x 1,440 pixels. It's lively.

What is the disadvantage?

Huawei has not thrown the whole life of its battery to make the Mate 20 Pro as compact and stylish as it is. There were other sacrifices, however.

The phone does not have a headphone jack, which has unfortunately become the norm for high-end phones. Many who consider this type of spending may have opted for a wireless headset, but it continues to disappoint. The best in-ear headphones, in particular, are not wireless.

Huawei may have also let the speaker cash for its compact design. The sound of the Mate 20 Pro comes from the earpiece and, curiously, from the USB-C socket at the bottom. The sound quality is good, with decent clarity and a suggestion of bbad, but the maximum volume is not as high as that of the Pixel 3 XL, iPhone XS or Galaxy Note 9.

Verdict

The Mate 20 Pro is the most complete phone of the year on a technical level. Huawei has applied the technology in a more refined way than before. It is usual to adapt a large screen to a narrower phone and therefore easier to handle than the competition.

Just like the Huawei P20 Pro, the camera is the highlight. Some prefer the Pixel 3 XL, for daylight images that look a little more like those of a digital SLR in terms of contrast and color management. However, no phone can handle as wide a range of situations as this one. A brilliant compositional flexibility and great night shots, even with the second and third cameras, make it the best phone for travel photography.

The fingerprint scanner on the screen, though interestingly, is the only weak point. He is already beaten by the OnePlus 6T for its speed and reliability.