Huawei Mate 20 Pro review: An explosion of features



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Huawei makes the decision to purchase quite difficult for smart smartphone connoisseurs in 2018 and its Mate 20 Pro seems to want to continue this momentum until 2019. Like its predecessor, the P20 Pro, the Mate 20 Pro features three cameras at the back. Like this phone, it's a very good camera.

Unlike the P20 Pro, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro incorporates Huawei's latest Kirin 980 processor, making it the first Android phone to use a chip built with the help of a 7-nm manufacturing process.

Huawei Mate 20 Pro: what you need to know

It may sound a little mumbo technical, but it's important. Chips built on a 7nm process should be more energy efficient than those, such as Snapdragon 845, built on processes of 10nm or more, and contain more transistors for the same chip size. The result should be faster speeds and longer battery life.

This is not the only improvement to the Huawei Mate 20 Pro. It is also Huawei's first curved screen phone. His fingerprint reader is under the screen, he runs Android 9 Pie with the latest Huawei EMUI 9 software launcher, and he has a new, enhanced set of triple cameras.


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Huawei Mate 20 Pro: Key specifications and release date

  • 6.39in 1.440x 3.120 AMOLED
  • 2.6GHz octa-core, Kirin 980 7 nm processor
  • 6 GB of RAM
  • 128 GB of storage
  • Dual NPU (neural processing unit)
  • Triple rear camera: 40MP, f / 1.8 primary; 20MP, ultra wide angle f / 2.2 (16mm equivalent); 8MP telephoto lens, f / 2.4
  • Fingerprint reader on the screen
  • Front-facing depth-sensing 3D infrared camera
  • 15W wireless charging with reverse charge function
  • 4,200 mAh battery
  • Price: without SIM card. € 1,049 (pre-order contract open at EE)
  • Release date: October 26

Huawei Mate 20 Pro review: Design and Key Features

Aside from the characteristics of the title, the only thing you'll notice right away about the Mate 20 Pro, certainly compared to the Huawei P20 Pro, is that the cameras at the back have gone from their strange style setting to Morse code to a more elegant style. 2 x 2 squares, with flash in the upper left corner.

What is less obvious with the Mate 20 Pro is that the finish of the blue and green models is slightly textured with thin diagonals at the back. It's still a glass panel at the back, but if you put your fingernail on it, you'll hear a slight zither noise, as if you're running your finger over a vinyl record. Not that I recommend you do it, of course.

It is a very nice finish that has the advantage of not showing fingerprints as bad as a brilliant rear. Alas, it is not available in all colors; The two-tone black and pink gold and twilight finishes, just like those of the P20 Pro, are only brilliant and make it possible to pick up unsightly fingerprints quite quickly.

Whatever the finish chosen, the Mate 20 Pro is as modern and sophisticated as any other flagship smartphone. In fact, with its curved edges at the front and back, it does more than remind the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus. The phone is also dustproof and water resistant to IP68 and houses a 4,200 mAh battery.

READ NEXT: Google Pixel 3 XL: a great phone but Google tramples

The fingerprint reader is perhaps the most interesting. It's not at the back or side, or below the screen at the front. It is integrated into the very structure of the screen, just below the center. This on-screen reader uses pressure sensors to detect the presence of your thumb or finger and works, just like a fingerprint reader, to unlock the phone.

It is fast and largely reliable, but registration takes much longer than a "normal" fingerprint reader. This is the case if you use the fingerprint reader. You may find it faster and more convenient to use the front-end 3D depth-sensing infrared camera to unlock the phone with your face.

This technology uses technology similar to that of the iPhone Xs and Xs Max: a forward-pointing infrared spotlight and an infrared camera detect the distortion of these points when they hit your face. Using this data, the Mate 20 Pro is able to unlock the phone almost instantly, under all types of light. I did tests in the dark, with my face against the light and in conditions more conducive to the technology of unlocking faces, and it worked perfectly every time.

However, there are some aspects of the design that are problematic for me. There is no 3.5mm headphone jack or microSD storage expansion. It supports nano memory cards, but they are quite difficult to find. The Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus has both of these features, making it the most flexible choice.

Huawei Mate 20 Pro: camera

The P20 Pro's triple camera lineup was a revelation when we tested it earlier in the year and in the Mate 20, Huawei has further perfected it. The phone always has three cameras at the back. The main snapper remains a snapper with an incredible 40 megapixel resolution with a brilliant aperture of f / 1.8. Even the telephoto lens has the same specifications: 8 megapixels with an aperture of f / 2.2 and an optical zoom of 3x.

The novelty is that, instead of the third camera being only for black and white shots, the Mate 20 Pro is equipped with a very wide angle camera. Activated by pressing the zoom control in the Camera application until reaching "0.6x", this camera will shoot at a focal length equivalent to 16mm from the camera, which means that you can photograph large groups of people closely without using panorama mode.

It's very fun to use and similar to the wide-angle camera as on the LG G7 ThinQ. Be careful, however: the optical distortion slips in a visible way on the edges of the frame, so you do not get closer to you. The new lens also unlocks a new macro mode, which allows you to photograph your subjects at a distance of only 25 mm.

Otherwise, the image quality is just as good as with the Huawei P20 Pro. It's great whether it's good lighting or poor light, and if you select the default 10 megapixel mode, the camera uses the additional resolution of the main sensor to zoom impressive up to 5 times in the camera. This is not a strictly optical zoom, but it surpasses the digital zoom of the iPhone Xs Max and the Pixel 3 XL to 5x.

Of course, Huawei also wants to boast the increase in efficiency of its AI Master mode, which is also available on other handsets produced by the company. This identifies the things we usually focus on our smartphone cameras – "covered", "clouds", "sunset", "dogs" or "portrait" – and applies the most appropriate settings for that scenario. With the dual NPU (neural processor) configuration of the phone, he can even do it now with video.

The identification process works reasonably well. I even saw him identify the bikes properly at once, but the corrections he brings are sometimes a bit suspicious. If it detects conditions of "cloudy background", it overesaturates in compensation and creates artificially brilliant images. Fortunately, it is possible to disable this: just press the X next to the scene / object identification tag and the "corrections" are removed.

Huawei Mate 20 Pro: performance, battery life and display quality

We have not yet evaluated the Mate 20 Pro, but the first impressions of the phone are mixed. On the one hand, it is fast, fluid and as responsive as any other smartphone. And it puts a blinding performance into the benchmarks we use. In fact, on paper, it seems that the Huawei Mate 20 Pro is the fastest Android phone ever.

In everyday life, however, especially when I play the most difficult games, I have been less than conquered and it is far from the level of a phone Snapdragon 845 or the current generation of iPhones. PUBG Mobile, for example, can only be played at a "medium" and "smooth" frame rate currently, and the phone simply feels less vivid and responsive. Hopefully this is due to the fact that the Kirin 980 is a brand new chipset and that the situation will improve with a software update or two. For now, however, it's a mixed picture.

The life of the battery is, thankfully, a little more impressive. In our regular video reduction tests, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro achieved the best performance I've ever seen with a Huawei handset, lasting 15 hours 21 minutes. This is not as long as the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 or the OnePlus 6 but, combined with Huawei's aggressive battery management techniques, which essentially stops proactively background tasks deemed unnecessary. , I can see a two-day battery life with use.

What is perhaps even more interesting, is that the Mate 20 Pro comes with a 15 W wireless charge which, with the right wireless charger, will charge the phone at a speed similar to that of the charger. It can even be configured to "recharge" other devices. . Turn the switch in the battery settings, place the phone back to back with another phone or device that supports Qi wireless charging, and hop, Mate 20 Pro can act as a full wireless Qi charger. And if you want to charge even faster, the phone supports Huawei's new SuperCharge 40W. I still do not know how fast the phone charges, but Huawei claims 70% charge in 30 minutes, which is even faster than OnePlus' fast charging system, which can charge a phone up to 60% in 35 minutes.

The quality of the display is also good. The phone has a 1,440 x 3,120 AMOLED display with perfect contrast and, in "Normal" mode, a relative color accuracy, capable of reproducing 95.4% of the color gamut sRGB. The maximum brightness is 466cd / m2, which does not quite match the best product by Samsung or Apple, but guarantees the readability of the screen under most conditions.

And, before closing, we must highlight a new key feature. Remember the office mode of the Huawei Mate 10 Pro? This allowed you to plug a USB Type-C to HDMI cable directly into the USB Type-C port on the phone and turn the phone into a desktop computer with an Android powered windowed user interface and the possibility to connect a keyboard and a mouse via the user interface. Bluetooth. Well, the Mate 20 Pro allows you to do exactly the same thing, but via a wireless connection. All you need is a screen that supports Miracast.

Preorder now from EE

Huawei Mate 20 RS Porsche Design

But wait, before I finish, there is one more thing. Yes, Huawei returns again this year in the production of an RS Porsche Design version of the Mate 20. What's different? Not much except for a little more RAM and storage (up to 8GB and 512GB respectively), branding and a combination of leather and back glass that, in red and black, look like something from Michael Jackson's Thriller.

Oh, and of course, it's even more expensive than the classic Mate 20 Pro, at 2,095 euros for the best-performing model (8 GB RAM, 512 GB of storage) and 1,695 euros for the 256 GB version. storage. Seriously. Two thousand dollars for that?

Huawei Mate 20 Pro exam: early verdict

Nevertheless, stay true to the classic Huawei Mate 20 Pro and everything will be fine, because that's all the P20 Pro was and more. It has a larger screen, a faster chip, better battery life and a more flexible triple camera arrangement than before. This is a great smartphone that gives a refreshing look to the usual crowd of bright glass flagship smartphones, especially with its subtle patterned glass back.

The question that remains is whether bettors will be prepared to do the same for a phone that does not come from the stable of one of the most established names. In my opinion, they should absolutely, because the Huawei Mate 20 Pro is about to become – with some caveats here and there – an incredibly good phone.

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