What do you get when you pick the best smartphone specs on offer today, bundle them into a single handset, and top it off with a beautiful design? Answer: Huawei Mate 20 Pro. The new flagship device from the Chinese smartphone giant is outrageously impressive and has definitely taken the competition in this incredibly competitive industry up a notch.
We bring you a low-down on everything you need to know about the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, which will definitely make you add it to your smartphone wishlist.
Huawei Mate 20 Pro: Release Date and Price
The Huawei Mate 20 Pro was unveiled by the company during its London event on 16th October. The smartphone will officially go on sale from 26th October but is available for pre-order in the UK through EE, Vodafone, Sky Mobile, O2 and Carphone Warehouse.
Without a contract, the Mate 20 Pro is priced at £899 or €1,049. The price might seem a bit on the higher side but taking a look at the power-packed device, it seems totally justified.
Huawei Mate 20 Pro: Specifications
Design
The smartphone has a beautiful all-glass design with elegantly curved edges all over and a fine metal rim on the sides. On first looks, it is quite similar to the Samsung Galaxy S9+, with thin edges on the side and broader ones on the top and bottom.
But there are differences too. Turn the display on and you’ll see a notch on the top of the screen. It is larger than the one on its cheaper counterpart – the Mate 20 – since it houses an additional 3D technology sensor for the facial unlocking feature. The device also lacks a physical fingerprint scanner as the phone introduces the in-display fingerprint sensor in addition to the facial unlocking.
Huawei devices have always received praise for their beautiful colour-patterned look and it is no different this time. The device comes in four colour options – Twilight (welcome back!), Midnight Blue, Black, and Emerald Green.
Each colour option looks scintillating on the glass back but the Black and Twilight colour choices do face a problem of retaining fingerprint smudges. The Midnight Blue and Emerald Green options, on the other hand, feature a ‘hyper optical pattern’ that has fine lines running diagonally on the glass back to give it a more textured feel. This also gives a better grip and resists fingerprints.
The Mate 20 Pro has the dimensions of 157.8 x 72.3 x 8.6 mm and weighs around 189 grams. It comes without a headphone jack and is IP68 waterproof certified, meaning it can stay submerged up to 1.5 metres underwater for 30 minutes.
Display
Talking about the display, the Mate 20 Pro has a magnificent 6.39-inch OLED screen. It is HDR enabled with a colour output of 16.7 million colours. The screen has a resolution of 3120 x 1440 pixels and pixel density of 538 PPI.
The OLED display produces pure blacks, has individually lit pixels and features an infinite contrast ratio.
The display sports the ‘Always-On’ feature that shows time, date and notifications even when the phone is in standby. The screen has thin bezels on all sides and the notch is slightly bigger than that of Mate 20, although it is not intrusive at all. If you’re still not a fan, you can activate a setting on the device to black out the display on either side of the notch, giving the entire portion a uniform look.
Just like OnePlus 6T, the Mate 20 Pro has also introduced the in-display fingerprint scanner. It is positioned slightly higher than expected but works smoothly nevertheless. On a locked screen, the display will highlight where you need to press your finger and flawlessly scans your fingerprint to unlock the phone.
Camera
The P20 Pro is considered to have the best smartphone camera currently, but the Mate 20 Pro camera surely matches that level, if not better it. The camera system has three snappers and smarter AI features.
The Leica Triple Camera system features a 40-megapixel wide-angle lens with f/1.8 aperture, a 20-megapixel ultra-wide lens with f/2.2 aperture, and an 8-megapixel telephoto lens with f/2.4 aperture.
The telephoto lens comes with a fixed 3x optical zoom. Since Huawei has done away with the monochrome lens found on previous devices, the 40-megapixel lens on Mate 20 Pro can handle both RGB and monochrome mode. Apart from letting you capture wide shots, the ultra wide-angle lens also allows for macro-photography, letting you capture a shot as close as 2.5 cm from the subject.
The camera system also picks up the long-exposure Night Mode shooting feature from the P20 series. That, coupled with the aperture shifting options, make this the most versatile camera system around.
Artificial intelligence support lets the camera system automatically recognize scenes and adjust the settings to get the best shot possible. Huawei has increased the number of scenes to 1500 and the camera can also track important objects while shooting and apply individual filters to each. The depth-sensing capability has also been upgraded, giving greater subject isolation.
On the front, the Mate 20 Pro comes equipped with a 24-megapixel camera with 3D Depth Sensing capabilities which is used for facial recognition unlocking, which Huawei claims is 30 per cent faster than that in any of its previous devices.
Battery and Other Specs
The Mate 20 Pro packs the largest battery till date in any Huawei device, with a capacity of 4,200 mAh, which should easily last you a day, or even more, of regular usage. The phone also supports fast charging and comes with a 40-watt Super Charger that can juice up your device up to 70 per cent in 30 minutes.
The glass back of the device ensures wireless charging support. But perhaps the most eye-catching feature is Reverse Wireless Charging, that lets the Mate 20 Pro charge other wireless charging compatible phones. You just need to place the Mate 20 Pro upside down and keep another phone with its back touching the back of the Mate 20 Pro, and it will start charging. Amazing, isn’t it?
The Mate 20 Pro is powered by the Kirin 980 chip, which will make the Mate 20 Pro the first Android device ever to use a 7nm chip. Apple was the first company ever to introduce such a chip with its iPhone XS series. Huawei claims that the processor gives 20 per cent speed improvement and 40 per cent better power efficiency than the Kirin 970 chip found in Huawei P20. The chip is paired with 6 GB RAM.
The neural processing unit (NPU) has also received a significant boost. The device more or less packs two NPUs, one of which handles image and scene recognition while the other takes care of natural-language processing and real-time video processing.
Out of the box, the device runs on a combination of Android Pie and Huawei’s own EMUI 9.0 interface. Although the operating system does pick up important Android features, the entire interface is just not as efficient as that of pure Android.
All in all, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro is a premium phone. It is the perfect combination of performance and beauty and is a phone you should definitely be looking to get your hands on, if you can shell out the money that is.