Fantastic camera versatility; big screen, small frame; tries hard to justify its high price
No headphone jack; in-screen finger scanner needs to be more reliable
Phone hardware now exceeds the point where it is easy to tell the difference between the good and the very best, making that sense of novelty difficult to create.
The £869 Huawei Mate 20 Pro proves there are still plenty of new toys to show off, though. It pushes the “new” more aggressively than Samsung or Apple have recently, and not solely in features that come across like snipping from the Innovations Catalogue. But this is Huawei: there are a few such techy extras packed in as well.
Design
Huawei’s Mate 20 Pro approach is to pack it so full of new and innovative features, it seems almost empirically better than the iPhone XS and Samsung Galaxy Note 9. This is not evident on first picking the phone up, though. The Mate 20 Pro is more compact than the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, the Pixel 3 XL, OnePlus 6T or HTC U12+.
Width and thickness are what determine how big a phone feels. Huawei’s combination of very slim borders and a screen that curves, Samsung-like, at the sides, narrows the frame. What results is a 6.3-inch screen mobile that feels surprisingly manageable.
The design basics have been cribbed from Samsung. Front and back panes of glass are curved at the sides, not just softened at the edges. Its sides are aluminium. Like OnePlus, Huawei also offers a finish for those not keen on glass’s slippiness. You can get a micro-etched version that won’t slip off the sofa quite as easily.
Battery
Huawei has, crucially, not sacrificed battery life in favour of smaller size, either. The Mate 20 Pro has a 4,200 mAh battery, larger than that of the bigger Galaxy Note 9. Curiously, it does not seem to last quite as long off one charge as the Huawei P20 Pro. It won’t need a booster charge in the early evening. It lasts all day, every day, in our experience.
However, you are unlikely to have 40-50 per cent charge left by midnight. This was common with the P20 Pro, or the more recent Motorola E5, but 20-30 per cent is much more likely here.
The battery also offers one of the Mate 20 Pro’s most out-there features, one that treads the line between genius and madness. It can wirelessly charge another phone, as well as having wireless charging itself. Just make sure the feature is switched on, put the phone back-to-back with another that supports Qi, and the power transferal starts. It’s genuinely clever, and mobile phone first.
However, the practicalities make you question how useful it will be in real life. Reverse wireless charging is relatively slow, and relying on one £900 glass phone to stay on another £900 glass phone without them clattering to the floor seems optimistic.
The more sensible would probably buy an external battery. And likely a cheaper phone. However, the prospect of offering to charge a too-proud friend’s ailing iPhone XS is undeniably appealing.
Read more: These are the best Android phones you can buy in 2021
Security
An in-screen fingerprint scanner is the other Mate 20 Pro’s big brag. This is an optical sensor that sits behind the OLED screen, lit up by the panel when it senses a finger hovering. This isn’t the first time Huawei has used an in-screen scanner. Huawei put one in the horribly expensive Porsche Design Mate RS. You’ll see many such scanners in the next 12 months.
We’re glad it is supported by a very good IR-assisted face unlock, too, though. In-screen fingerprint scanners are not yet anywhere near as reliable as a dedicated pad. This is no great surprise when the camera “sees” your finger through the OLED panel.
At times it fails to recognise your finger, more often than the OnePlus 6T. And this can occur even when the digit completely covers the pad area. Hopefully Huawei will be able to improve this with software updates.
Camera
The camera is where the tech-led approach syncs best with how you use the phone. A natural progression of the camera used in the P20 Pro, this one three-lens array with a three times optical zoom. But instead of using a black and white sensor as the third eye in the array, there’s a 20-megapixel ultra-wide lens.
In good daylight conditions the Mate 20 Pro takes great photos. Its HDR is extremely effective, and you have a choice of consistent ten-megapixel photos using pixel binning or extremely detailed 40-megapixel ones. In good lighting at least. At night, the 40-megapixel unsurprisingly falls apart.
The iPhone XS and Pixel 3 XL do offer slightly better results in certain well-lit conditions. However, the Mate is a master of extremes. Its zoom is about the most effective around, particularly as the three times lens is optically stabilised.
The wide-angle camera is excellent, and takes much better photos than the LG G7 ThinQ, this year’s most “visible” phone with a wide-angle lens. Mate 20 Pro wide photos are more detailed, and cleaner-looking than LG’s. The compositional flexibility on offer here is superb, a point sometimes missed by critics looking to crown the “phone camera of the year”.
Huawei’s Super Night mode is the other highlight, and it’s similar to the implementation seen in the P20 Pro. It’s the computational photography equivalent of a very long exposure shot, combining a large array of images taken at different exposure levels. They are then combined to radically increase dynamic range and decrease noise.
It takes around four seconds with most scenes, can be used handheld, and still offers the best low light photos you’ll get from a phone without a tripod. Or you can get normal night shots near-instantly, and they compare fairly well with those of rivals. The Night mode can be used with the zoom and wide views, too, for frankly sensational low-light versatility.
If you consider photography a bell curve, whose extreme sides represent tough conditions most can’t handle, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro covers a greater breadth than any other phone at present. Even if it’s handling of “easier” conditions is not always as naturalistic as some.
The Huawei Mate 20 Pro’s screen is excellent, as well, largely because it uses a Samsung panel just like all the most expensive phones. The iPhone XS Max, Google Pixel 3 XL, and of course the top Samsungs – they all use Samsung Super AMOLED panels. This one has a resolution of 3,120 x 1,440 pixels. It’s sharp.
What's the downside?
Huawei didn’t throw out battery life to make the Mate 20 Pro as compact and elegant as it is. There were other sacrifices, though.
The phone does not have a headphone jack, which has sadly become the norm for high-end phones. Many considering this kind of spend may have upgraded to wireless headphones anyway, but it continues to disappoint. The best-sounding in-ear headphones in particular are not wireless.
Huawei may also have let the speaker take a hit for the compact design. The Mate 20 Pro’s audio comes from the earpiece and, oddly, out of the USB-C socket on the bottom. Sound quality is fine, with decent clarity and a suggestion of bass, but top volume isn’t as loud as the Pixel 3 XL, iPhone XS or Galaxy Note 9.
Verdict
The Mate 20 Pro is the most tech-packed phone of the year, and Huawei has applied technology in more tasteful ways than it ever has before. It’s used to fit a large screen into a phone narrower, and therefore easier to handle, than the competition.
Just like the Huawei P20 Pro, the camera is the highlight. Some may prefer the Pixel 3 XL, for daylight images that look a little closer to those of a DSLR in terms of contrast and colour handling. However, no phone can handle as wide an array of situations as well as this one. Brilliant compositional flexibility, and great night shots even when using the second and third cameras, make this the best phone around for travel photography.
The in-screen fingerprint scanner, while interesting, is the sole weak point. It is already beaten by the OnePlus 6T for speed and reliability.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
