Kirin 980 feeding two contrast devices

When it comes to handset vendors, Huawei is especially important to me. Their cameras were among the first I've ever seen here on AnandTech, and the Mate series is the one I've personally watched evolve over the years. Their products have had their ups and downs, but Huawei has consistently made steady progress from one generation to the next, raising the quality of the product and getting closer and closer to becoming known to smartphone vendors.

Today, Huawei has surpassed Apple to become the second-largest smartphone provider in the world, reaching a goal that they had presented as a strategy by 2015. However, the company has achieved this goal while coping with huge difficulties in the US market last year. point where now they are no longer actively competing. When asked what the company's strategy was for the future, the answer was relatively simple: create devices that perform well enough to naturally create a demand from users.

The Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro are Huawei's latest attempts to push the envelope in terms of creating iconic peripherals. In this review, we will review all aspects of the two new phones – and see if Huawei has managed to create something worth your purchase.

Let's start with the specifications of both phones:

At the heart of two new flagship projects, we find the new chipset Kirin 980 Huawei. Huawei is the only Android manufacturer able to take advantage of the full vertical integration of silicon and handsets. The new Kirin 980 is an important chipset, as it will power Huawei's and Honor's flagship devices for 2018 and 2019, at least until the next generation is unveiled. The Kirin 980 is not only important because of its use in Huawei's devices, but also because it is the very first 7-nm Arm-Cortex-A76-based and Android-compatible SoC on the market. This means that everything the new Kirin 980 brings in terms of performance and energy efficiency will be largely representative of almost all upcoming Android devices in 2019.

The Kirin 980 is equipped with four Cortex A76 arms – with a pair clocked at 2.6 GHz and another pair clocked at 1.92 GHz. They are accompanied by four Cortex-A55 cores at 1.8 GHz. To complete the processor complex, the chipset is also the first to introduce the new Arm G76 Mali GPU in an MP10 configuration running up to 720 MHz. We will detail the SoC in more detail in a dedicated page when we discuss more about the design of the phones themselves.

Starting with the "standard" Mate 20, we see a fairly significant design change from Mate 10 last year.

The Mate 10 was a bit strange in terms of device design, Huawei having chosen to place a fingerprint sensor on the lower front of the phone, even if the previous phones, as well as his brother, the Mate 10 Pro , also had it in the back. .

The Mate 20 is now a more "traditional" fingerprint sensor and also adopts the following trend: its almost no-bezel LCD design features a very large 6.53 "18.7: 9 LCD screen 2244 x 1080.

What I find most important in the new phone (which is not clearly shown in the pictures) is the fact that the Mate 20 is slightly narrower than the Mate 10, with a width of 77.2 mm. The few millimeters of reduced width do not seem like much, but it makes a huge difference in terms of usability, and I definitely prefer the new, slimmer and more elongated form factor of the Mate 20.

If you compare the Mate 20 Pro to the Mate 10 Pro, we see an even bigger design change.

The new Mate 20 Pro can only be described as Huawei's consideration of Samsung's Galaxy S8 / S9 designs, as the new phone has a striking resemblance to the features that define the ergonomics of Samsung phones. The Mate 20 Pro is the first Huawei phone to adopt a curved screen and a curved screen. The screen is an OLED with a diameter of 6.39 inches. This is also Huawei's first phone to exceed 1080p, with a 3120 x 1440 display with a very elongated aspect ratio of 19.5: 9.

Like the Mate 20, the Mate 20 Pro also slightly reduces the phone's width compared to its predecessor, the Mate 10 Pro. The new unit now measures 72.3 mm wide, which makes it a little narrower than a millimeter than a Galaxy S9 +. Combined with the new curved screen and curved backrest, this creates a feeling in the hand that is noticeably more comfortable than any previous Huawei device that I am used to using – and for me personally, it is also close to the point of view. a perfect form factor. that I have met.

What really struck me is the build quality of the Mate 20 Pro. This is by far the best built phone in Huawei, because it feels incredibly solid while maintaining fluid design on all sides. I think that the fact that Huawei does not use a sealing ring around the glass of the screen is what gives the phone a benefit in terms of sensation. All in all, it's very obvious that Huawei is taking inspiration from Samsung's ideas for design – but I do not blame them at all, imitation being the best form of flattery, and Huawei has done it perfectly well. ergonomics on the Mate 20 Pro.

The Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro screens continue to use screen notches. The Mate 20 uses a new minimalist "teardrop" notch design that houses the front camera as well as hides the front sensors just above and to the left of the camera lens, along with the grille of the camera. 39, listener above all. I never really had any problems with Huawei's notches (as shown on the P20 and P20 Pro), and the new design of the Mate 20 did not bother me too much. As usual, Huawei's software is still able to hide the notification bar to hide the notch, which I activated in daily use.

In contrast, the notch of the Mate 20 Pro is a first for Android phones. Here, Huawei takes note of the notch of Apple's iPhone X / XS – not only in terms of design, but also in terms of functionality. The new wider notch houses three new sensors / modules: a spot projector, a floodlight, and an infrared camera. This allows the Mate 20 Pro to have essentially the same fast, reliable and secure face unlocking methodology as Apple's FaceID.

The wider notch is unfortunately a compromise, it is at this stage that I thought that the notification bar did not have enough space to display the most relevant status icons, and that the operating system overflowed with status icons to the left "ear", usually dedicated to the notification icons.

I am not a big user of face unlocking, but the implementation of Huawei seems transparent, fast and reliable. The big surprise for the Mate 20 Pro is that unlocking the face does not replace fingerprint unlocking, but rather an option. You may have noticed that there is no fingerprint sensor on the back, it is that the Mate 20 Pro places it under the screen, at the front of the phone. Again, the implementation is good in terms of unlocking reliability and accuracy, although I would have hoped that it would be just a little faster. In addition, what is missing, in my opinion, is a better haptic feedback (or any other) haptic feedback when using the sensor. If you choose not to use the fingerprint sensor or use a conventional password unlocking method, it also becomes a waste – I was hoping here that Huawei would use it at least as a normal button of the same way that Samsung does it on the S8 and S9.

At the bottom of the phones, there is a surprising lack of speaker grille on the Mate 20 Pro. Here, the sound comes out of the USB-C port, which is very strange. It is obvious that the connection of a cable stifles the sound considerably. So do not expect to read music while charging the phone. Also at the bottom you will find the SIM card tray and the microphones.

On the Mate 20, we find the speaker grill, but the phone is certified only by IP53, as opposed to the IP68 rating of the Mate 20 Pro. Unfortunately, this is the only speaker on the Mate 20 because the headset does not act as a stereo tweeter. The Mate 20 SIM card tray is relegated to the left side of the phone.

The Mate 20 has a special feature that the Mate 20 Pro is not a 3.5mm headphone jack. Once again, Huawei's decision to give a model to the standard model while removing it from the Pro model leaves me puzzled. Again, a provider tries to describe the removal of a feature as a benefit.

The Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro are always delivered with an IR transmitter on the top of the phones, able to control various devices with it.

Finally, cameras are at the heart of the cameras: the Mate 20 are, with the V40, one of the few devices of the new generation that integrates three modules: wide angle, wide angle and telephoto. Huawei houses them in a square design layout, with the LED flash located in the fourth cutout. Huawei wanted this design to be unique to them and to be immediately recognizable and attributed to the company's devices.

The camera hardware is a mess of specifications because the two phones do not share a single module between them. The Mate 20 includes a 12 MP main camera with an f / 1.8 aperture, an 8 x f / 2.4 2x optical zoom module, and a 16 MP / 2.2 wide angle unit. The camera configuration of the Mate 20 Pro is more familiar because the main 40MP f / 1.8 camera as well as the 8x Optical Zoom 8MP f / 2.4 module look identical to those of the P20 Pro. Here, the addition is the new 20MP. Wide angle module f / 2.2. We will delve deeper into the question of the camera in the dedicated section later in this article.

Overall, the Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro are both a design change from Huawei and promise a host of features. The build quality is definitely an advantage of the new devices, especially for the Mate 20 Pro. Now let's move on to the internal components of the devices. We will look in more detail at the new generation hardware of both phones to see if they keep their promises.