Huawei Mate 20 Review: Huawei's Cutaway Lighthouse

• Tear shaped notch
• Australians only have black model
• Has a headphone jack
• LCD rather than OLED

Most manufacturers tend to make their phones "lighthouses" as big as possible, the second level model a little smaller. That's not what Huawei thinks, because the Huawei Mate 20 has a 6.53-inch LCD screen, compared to the 6.39-inch AMOLED you'll find on the Mate 20 Pro.

This means that the Huawei Mate 20 is just a little bigger than its more expensive brother, at 157.8 x 72.3 x 8.6 mm, compared to 157.8 x 72.3 x 8.6 mm for the Mate 20 Pro. There is a slight difference in weight between 1 g, Huawei Mate 20 weighing 188 g against 189 m for the Mate 20 Pro.

So, did Huwaei decide to pay for the price charged by Mate 20? First of all, the Huawei Mate 20 has an LCD screen on which the Mate 20 Pro gets a much more aesthetic AMOLED screen. With a resolution of 1080×2244, it is a little less neat than the 1440×3120 of the Mate 20 Pro, although it's something you will not notice unless you have it side by side.

Huawei made some other design changes between its two flagship products, as well. The Huawei Mate 20 has a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, which is completely absent from the Mate 20 Pro. Where the Mate 20 Pro draws sound from its speaker via its USB C port, the Huawei Mate 20 is equipped with a standard mono speaker with bottom trigger. If your phone is your music source, it is recommended to use a paired headset or bluetooth speaker.

Notches are a design element that dissociates the mind of the divider, and that is always the case when you reduce them.

The Huawei Mate 20 has a notch for the front camera, but in the case where the notch of the Mate 20 Pro is a standard rectangle, the Mate 20 uses a drop-shaped design for a special effect. notch smaller. There are still not many tear-shaped phones on the Australian market, although others come from manufacturers like Oppo.

Notches are a design element that divides and it's still true when you reduce them. I had a tendency to notice the teardrop notch more often than a standard rectangular notch, simply because the rounded elements stand out on what is otherwise a rectangular display, but your own tolerances may vary. If that bothers you as much as me, you can opt for complete darkening of the sides.

On the back of the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, you'll find the square grid of the camera, which is apparently meant to remind you of Porsche headlights. Huawei offers a variant of Porsche Design Huawei Mate 20 Pro, although nobody knows yet if we will see these phones fall below. The dual camera lenses on smart phones are not lacking, so the design of Huawei really stands out here.

Under the camera you will find a standard fingerprint sensor. Huawei incorporates this sensor into the glbad of the Mate 20 Pro, but it is on the back of the Mate 20, although that's not bad news. There is something very cool about touching your screen to unlock your Mate 20 Pro, but the process is slower because reading takes longer and requires more force. The rear-mounted fingerprint sensor on the Huawei Mate 20, on the other hand, is quick to unlock.

Huawei manufactures the Mate 20 in what he calls "four vibrant colors". There's black, midnight blue, emerald green and twilight, the changing color pattern we saw for the first time on the Huawei P20 Pro.

Do not be too excited by this range of colors, because the only shade in which Huawei will officially release Australia will be the least exciting black finish. If you want a more extroverted Huawei Mate 20, you have to import one.

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• The triple camera has been set, but it remains very good
• Good night shooting ability for its price range
• Camera AI mainly works
• Lighting portraits remain clumsy and daft
• No monochrome lens

The Huawei Mate 20 Pro is, for the moment, my favorite camera phone, which allowed the Mate 20 to become an unenviable position when it s was trying to test it. While it shares the same physical network as its big brother, it has a reduced range of real sensors in play.

Specifically, the Huawei Mate 20 offers you a wide sensor of 12MP f / 1.8, a lens 16MP f / 2.2 ultra-fast and telephoto 8MP f / 2.4. It's still a powerful combination, especially at the price of the Mate 20, but the reduction in camera capabilities has an effect on the overall quality of the picture and on the camera. all features. You are limited to 2x optical zoom while the Mate 20 Pro offers 5x, although its 40MP sensor is downsampled. This is not really an "optical" zoom. You can zoom digitally with the Mate 20, as with many phones, but the results get worse as you push it.

Huawei offers the same AI-badisted camera capabilities as the Huawei Mate 20 Pro. Huawei's AI-based camera software is significantly improved in 2018, with fast scene identification and a rather nice approach to setting parameters.

Like the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, there is still a pause before deciding whether to turn on the ultra-wide lens for super macro mode, which is slightly annoying. I still hope that Huawei will update the camera application to incorporate a super macro mode dedicated to situations where you want to make close-up shots.

The Huawei Mate 20 Pro also impressed with its low-light camera capability, although a growing number of phone cameras are using multiple exposures to handle the same type of capacity. I was curious to see how well Mate 20 would behave, so I took them both for a little shooting in low light. :

Here is the same picture taken by the Mate 20 Pro:

Here is the Mate 20's point of view with the activated night mode:

And here's how the Mate 20 Pro handled this with its 40MP-badisted night mode:

The Huawei Mate 20 does a solid job in low light, even in its basic AI mode, but it's not quite as good as the Mate 20 Pro, which remains the best camera we've tested so far. However, for its price range, there is really not much to do with the Huawei Mate 20.

In the front, Huawei is equipped with a single 24MP f / 2.0 camera behind the slot fit drop, identical to the Mate 20 Pro. Huawei's basic selfie is fine, but like the Mate 20 Pro, it also features some quite ridiculous lighting modes.

So, for example, this is a good, regular selfie taken with the Mate 20:

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Whereas this is the effect I want to reverse on the opening credits if I am lucky to have the lead role in Doctor Who :

[19659014] Like the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, you should also pay close attention to portrait lighting modes because your choice is set by default until you change it, and it is not always obvious that this is the case. Unlike the Apple iPhone XS, you can not post-edit your lighting choices, so you're stuck with what was in place when you take each portrait taken with the camera before or after back.