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The latest and greatest handset in Huawei’s line-up arrived amid a cluster of other powerful flagship phones.
And while it runs the risk of being knocked to the sidelines by the likes of Apple or Samsung, once you get your hands on the Mate 20 Pro, it definitely starts to impress.
Huawei is, after all, the second biggest phone manufacturer in the world, and it didn’t get there by being careless. It takes a lot of what makes other phones great and adapts that as it sees fit.
When you hold the Mate 20 Pro in your hands, you can’t help but be reminded of Samsung’s Galaxy S8 and S9 devices. It’s got the same curving screen and barely-there bezels that made people sit up and take notice of Samsung’s hard work.
Similarly, it’s trying to take on the photographic prowess of Google’s Pixel 3 with a triple-lens camera on the back that’s been co-developed by the legendary brand Leica.
It’s like the company is trying to get all the best bits of each phone and shoehorn them into a single device.
Largely, it succeeds.
Performance
Having used the Mate 20 Pro (which is the souped-up version of the standard Mate 20) for a few days, I found it to be more than capable of doing just about anything you need it to.
Huawei has packed it with power using one of its own Kirin processors along with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Weirdly, you can’t use a microSD card to expand the storage as Huawei has invented its own kind of memory – the propriety nanoSD card. As Sony will attest, making your own proprietary storage isn’t always a good thing.
Design
The screen is a 6.39-inch display with an iPhone notch cutout at the top. Like the Samsung phones with massive screen sizes, the Mate 20 Pro isn’t too big to hold because the bezels are so small. The buttons, aligned along the left hand side, are nice and clicky.
One of the big features of this phone is that the fingerprint scanner has been placed under the glass display. There’s an optical sensor buried in there that scans a 2D image of your fingers and unlocks the phone with a nifty ripple effect. This is great if you spend most of your day with the phone lying on the tabletop. It’s still got the front-camera face unlock feature as well so when you’re holding it, you don’t need to dab away at the back of the device to open it up. During my tests, both methods worked speedily and flawlessly.
Sadly, like all other phones at the moment, there’s no headphone jack on the bottom. But Huawei rightly throws in a pair of USB-C headphones that you can plug into the charging port.
Features
Speaking of charging, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro has a pretty nifty trick in that it supports reverse wireless charging. That means you can juice it up by lying it on any wireless charging pad or flip the phone over and charge another device right off the back of it. This is both incredibly geeky and incredibly cool.
Considering the amount of power under the hood, the battery life on this thing is incredible. It’s got a 4,200mAh battery that puts other phones to shame. I had plenty of juice left at the end of the day despite using it for streaming music and video, gaming and all the other stuff you ask of your phone each day. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it go for 48 hours without charging, but I was still impressed with the staying power. Considering how big the battery is, the phone isn’t even that heavy; it only weighs 189g.
Although the Mate 20 Pro runs Android, Huawei has added its own interface on top. It contains much of the same features of Android 9 Pie, but has a few extras thrown in on top. Sadly there’s a fair amount of bloatware that’ll need cleaning out when you set up the phone. Once you’ve cleared the detritus and got your usual suite of most used apps running, it’s all good.
Camera
Camera performance is exceptional. Huawei really nailed the camera features on their phones with the P20 Pro it launched earlier in the year. Wisely, it hasn’t changed a winning formula.
Co-engineered by Leica, the main camera is 40-megapixels alongside a telephoto lens fixed at 3X optical zoom and another wide-angle sensor. Huawei says it’s as good at low-light photography as it is at macro photography when you’re getting up close to a subject.
Like Google, Huawei is putting a lot of artificial intelligence into the camera so it’ll perform neat tricks like the blurry ‘bokeh’ portrait mode and apply special lighting modes and filters. It’s also got the company’s ‘HiVision’ software baked in, which works like Google Lens and lets you identify landmarks or works of art by pointing the camera at them.
Should you buy one?
All told, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro is exactly what a flagship phone needs to be in 2018 with the relevant bells and whistles accounted for. It’s got really well-designed hardware, plenty of software smarts and a few noteworthy features like the fingerprint-scanner.
If your phone is a year or 18 months old then there’s probably no real need to upgrade yet. But if you are in the market for a new smartphone then you’d do well to consider the Huawei Mate 20 Pro.
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