Huawei Mate 20 Pro review

In a year where every new phone raises the bar a bit higher that its predecessor, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro has just enough premium features to stand out from the crowd. It’s a powerful smartphone with three rear cameras and a modicum of distinctive style, but its bold signature is a handful of neat tricks you won’t see on other phones until next year.

In fact, if it wasn’t for Huawei’s overbearing, slightly ugly software, the Mate 20 Pro would be the best Android phone you can buy in 2018.

Specs:

Dimensions: 157.8 x 72.3 x 8.6 mm (6.21 x 2.85 x 0.34 in)

Weight: 189 g

Build: Front/back glass & aluminum frame

Chipset: HiSilicon Kirin 980 (7nm architecture)

CPU: Octa-core (2x2.6 GHz Cortex-A76 & 2x1.92 GHz Cortex-A76 & 4x1.8 GHz Cortex-A55)

GPU: Mali-G76 MP10

Operating System: EMUI 9, based on Android 9

Memory: 6GB or 8GB RAM

Storage: 128GB or 256GB ROM

Expandable storage: NM (Nano Memory), up to 256GB (uses SIM 2)

Display type: AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors

Display size: 6.39 inches, 100.2 cm2 (~87.9% screen-to-body ratio)

Screen resolution: 1440 x 3120 pixels, 19.5:9 ratio (~538 ppi density)

Mobile network support: GSM / HSPA / LTE

Wi-Fi support: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct, hotspot

Bluetooth support: 5.0, A2DP, aptX HD, LE

GPS support: Yes, with dual-band A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS, GALILEO, QZSS

USB: 3.1, Type-C 1.0 reversible connector, USB On-The-Go

Rear camera:

a. 40 MP, f/1.8, 27mm (wide), 1/1.7", PDAF/Laser AF

b. 20 MP, f/2.2, 16mm (ultrawide), 1/2.7", PDAF/Laser AF

c. 8 MP, f/2.4, 80mm (telephoto), 1/4", 5x optical zoom, OIS, PDAF/Laser AF

Front camera: 24 MP, f/2.0, 26mm (wide)

Battery : Non-removable Li-Po 4200 mAh battery

Color : Emerald Green, Midnight Blue, Twilight, Pink Gold, Black

What you can get in the packaging is their Super Charge adapter that's rated 40W of massive output, a user manual, a clear casing, a Type-C cable, a Type-C to 3.5mm jack adapter and an in-ear headphones, which is not common nowadays.

We do have a little bit of top bezels and of course we do have a wide notch, which has a 24 MP front facing camera, an earpiece, and a bunch of other sensors like ambient light sensor, proximity sensor, dot projector and everything else they need for that 3D face unlocking to work. If you really hate that notch, you can actually hide the notch in Settings. Because it's using OLED panel, so the blacks looks really dark and it looks pretty much like the top bezel.

Take a look at the top, you'll find an IR transmitter, which allows you to control your home devices and peripherals, two antenna lines and one microphone, which is used for noise cancellation and video recording. On the right side we do have a red color power button and volume keys, and they're both made out of metal and feels good. On the bottom we can see another two antenna lines also, a Type-C port with a speaker behind it, two microphones and a SIM tray which will house two nano SIMs or one nano SIM with a NM card.

So the build quality is premium and compared to the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus, it feels ever so slightly better because it is a little bit more narrow and I find that it is just easier to get access to the buttons. Not only that, the edges they've done on the Mate 20 Pro is just a little bit more rounded, so it feels a little bit smoother and feels better in hands.

The face unlocking is also much quicker than the S9 Plus. it can almost unlock your device in less than half seconds, this is really quick. There's no fingerprint reader on the back of the device, instead they use in-display fingerprint reader. So you can tap the screen first and it will wake up the little fingerprint icon, then you place your finger on the position where the icon lights up, then you can unlock your device in about half or one second, but not as fast as those devices that uses rear fingerprint reader.

The OLED panel used by Mate 20 Pro seems really good. It doesn't have the screen bleeding or dark shadowing problems around the edges like the IPS panel does. The color reproduction is also really good. It also does have the Colour mode and temperature settings that allows you to adjust the white balance and things like that. We do also have an eye comfort mode so you enable it during reading at night. It also provides a feature that allows you to adjust the font size of the system text by sliding it to the left or right. The gamma of the screen is a little bit off, with a gamma of 1.4, which is unusual, it should be around 2.2 or something like that. The screen brightness tops out at 790 lux, which is really bright.

The touch accuracy and responsiveness of this device is really decent. When you goes through the screen with your finger, there's no stuttering happens. It is very smooth and it seems that they have it synced perfectly with the refresh rate of the screen, which is great. The UI performance is also excellent, but this particular ROM comes with many bloatware pre-installed, so you have to take some time to uninstall it if you don't want to see them.

It does support full screen gestures mode like the MIUI does. You can swipe up and hold for a while to show your recent apps and perform multitasking, you can just swipe up without holding to go back to home screen, you can also swipe from the side to brings you to the previous screen, just like the 'Back' button does.

In Antutu benchmark test we do get a fantastic result of almost 270000 of score, which is really good. The Chrome web browsing is really fast and smooth, in fact it is better than the Mate 20 X. This is probably aided by the fact that this version I have has 8GB of RAM, larger than the 6GB of RAM by Mate 20 X. And like the Mate 20 X, they both have a superfast UFS 2.1 storage, and the speeds we get are one of the fastest we've seen nowadays: a whooping 900 MB/s of sequential reads that's faster than most SATA3 SSD's and around 185 MB/s of sequential writes.

The GPS performance of this phone is solid, no complaints, and only hovers around 4 meters of accuracy and locks on almost every satellites it sees with good signal strength. The 4G+ speeds are okay but not the fastest, and we have a decent Wireless AC performance with good signal strength.

As for the battery life, it is really good and it is better than the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus. I managed to get around 9 hours of on screen time with 14% of battery juice left. During the test I was set the screen brightness to 200 lux with heavy usage: A bit of gaming on PUBG, YouTube streaming, Amazon Prime video, some web browsing etc. This is gonna be a two-day or even three-day mobile phone, depends on how you use it.

One problem with the EMUI is they are not allowing you to use custom launchers like Nova Launcher. Yes you can enter the Nova Launcher and all apps are shown up, but eventually it will brings you back to the default Huawei Launcher when you swipe up and go back to the home. You can't override the settings of default launcher, which is a shame.

Onto the gaming performance, it is expected that the performance will be very good with this particular chipset. I tried playing PUBG on ultra frame rate, HD, and there's no any performance drop while playing this game, until it gets hot after gaming for about half an hour or so.

For the audio quality, it sounds decent, it does have a nice level of bass, and the loudness is good as well from the dual speaker (one from earpiece, one from Type-C port). Some people may ask will the sound output from the Type-C hole become muffle after plugging in the cable into it, but in fact it doesn't muffle too much. The audio output from the Type-C to 3.5mm jack adapter sounds really good, nothing to complaint about it. Same goes with the voice call quality, it is excellent.

For the camera part, yes the rear cameras does take decent images, but the video recording quality is not so good. Using the normal lens, it is okay, EIS is working but sometimes it will drop a few frames while recording. Here come the bad part while recording with the wide lens and tele lens: it drops a lot of frames while recording videos and the video quality is not quite sharp compared to other flagship phones. You can observe the difference when you play the video on a 4K monitor or TV. Also the sound recorded has some noise cancellation or reverb effect, quite distracting. The video performance on low light doesn't seem good too, it does drop a few frames while recording at night, and there's noise on the video. On the front facing camera, it does have EIS also, which is good, performance of the EIS is nice and smooth.