It may have taken years, but Huawei now has serious momentum to maintain. The Huawei P20 Pro and its “AI-assisted” night camera mode produces results that made Apple’s look amateur.
The Chinese company has continued turning the tech up in its new Mate 20 Pro. It has the most advanced processor seen in an Android phone to date, two-way wireless charging and an extremely versatile camera array.
The firm has also announced the lower-spec Mate 20 and a new Watch GT, which snubs Android's operating system for its own software. But Huawei’s strategy of maxing out on tech doesn’t work every time. If you’re willing to spend £1,000 on an Android phone, there had better be justification for it. That seems to be the Mate 20 Pro’s motto, anyway.
Huawei Mate 20 Pro
The most useful application of Huawei’s tech excess is seen in the Mate 20 Pro’s camera. There are three sensors on the back. A large LED flash finishes off the 2x2 LEGO brick design that makes this appear the most tech-laden phone of the moment.
It does not use Huawei’s signature move, though. Huawei has implemented more black and white companion camera sensors than any other phone-maker, to reduce image noise and increase dynamic range. But it says software processing has reached point where such a sensor is no longer required.
The Mate 20 Pro’s camera array is a natural development of the P20 Pro’s setup. A 40-megapixel main sensor is flanked by an optically stabilised 8-megapixel 3x zoom and a 20-megapixel ultra-wide. This phone lets you zoom in and out. Most flagships offer only one of these options. And the new Pixel 3 XL’s zoom is purely digital.
The ultra-wide camera lens is also macro-ready, with focusing distance of just 2.5cm. Add the reworked version of the AI-assisted night mode of the P20 Pro and the Mate 20 Pro seems to offer greater photographic versatility than any phone currently on the market.
Samsung actually beat Huawei to announcing this concept with the quad-camera Galaxy A9. However, early reports suggest its array’s image quality is not exciting. The Mate 20 Pro’s seems to be.
Read more: These are the best smartphones for any budget in 2021
Outside the camera box
The tech excess continues around the front. Huawei has more-or-less copied Apple’s Face ID with the Mate 20 Pro’s front camera setup.
It features an IR dot projector, used to scan your face for solid face recognition in poor lighting, which stretches a traditional optical sensor. The camera itself uses a 24-megapixel sensor, yet another case of the tech oneupmanship of which Huawei is so fond.
The Mate 20 Pro also has a feature Apple reportedly considered for its top iPhones, an in-screen fingerprint sensor. IR-based face recognition makes such a feature arguably superfluous, yet more proof of how aggressively feature-packed this phone is.
Hover a finger over the display and the area used by the finger scanner glows. This in-screen tech works by searching for your fingerprint in-between the pixels of the OLED panel. Huawei used the same style of scanner in the more expensive Porsche Design Mate RS, announced earlier in 2018.
The Huawei Mate 20 Pro is also the first phone to offer two-way wireless charging. Its battery can be charged using a Qi pad, or it can charge another just by holding their backs together. This feature even works with one of Apple’s X-series iPhones.
The Mate 20 Pro functions as a showcase of technologies. It’s an alternative vision of what a £1,000 phone should be, and makes the iPhone XS models seem rather staid by comparison.
Read more: These are the best Android phones you can buy in 2021
It also serves as Huawei’s acknowledgement it can’t challenge similarly priced rivals from Apple and Samsung without continually outdoing them with more advanced technology. The fact that Huawei actually develops some of the components makes this all the more impressive.
The Mate 20 Pro’s Kirin 980 CPU is made by Huawei subsidiary HiSilicon. It’s the first 7nm architecture CPU to be used in an Android phone, the first to match Apple and its A12 Bionic processor. This doesn’t mean it’ll match the iPhone XS Max for power, of course, but it is out ahead of Qualcomm, which supplies the chips for most non-Huawei and Honor phones.
It is perhaps for the best Huawei hasn’t been quite as aggressive about the Mate 20 Pro’s hardware design. Instead it follows current popular trends, with a metal and glass body and a very high screen-to-area ratio. The display is a 6.3-inch 3120 x 1440 pixel curved OLED, similar to those of Samsung’s phones.
There’s a little optional Huawei touch, though. The Mate 20 Pro comes either a standard glassy finish or one with a “hyper optical” pattern. This involves etching a pattern of ultra-thin lines along the glass. This makes the finish a little less shiny, and the rear significantly less slippy. It’s glass, without the usual annoying parts.
Huawei Mate 20
If the Huawei Mate 20 Pro sounds too much like showing off, the Mate 20 offers the most important elements, without the parts that see the price rocket quite as high. It loses the “two-way” wireless charging, the advanced face unlock and in-screen fingerprint scanner. The screen has a small teardrop notch rather than a wide one too, simply swooping around the front camera.
This is a much more conventional high-end phone, but as it has a similarly versatile camera array and CPU, the core abilities are similar. Huawei’s decision to use an RGBW LCD screen does seem unfortunate, though.
This is a 6.52-inch LCD panel with the usual red, green and blue sub-pixels in each pixel, plus an additional white one used to increase peak brightness. However, it also has a visible impact on perceived sharpness because the Mate 20 “only” has a 1080p-grade screen. The sub-pixel pattern is less tightly-knit, and this was the first thing we noticed on seeing the phone. You eyes will, of course, bed into this effect, though.
Read more: These are the best Android phones you can buy in 2021
Huawei Watch GT
Huawei has also announced a bold new watch alongside the pair of Mate phones. The Huawei GT is a round watch that looks like a fully featured Wear OS model, but uses Huawei’s custom Lite OS instead.
The system is basic. There’s no app store, no games, no web browser on this watch. Its premise is most potential smartwatch buyers want a watch that delivers smartwatch basics like on-wrist notifications, fitness and sport tracking, but with battery life better than the 1.5 day norm.
Huawei has far exceeded that. The Watch GT lasts up to 30 days without any heart rate or GPS tracking, two weeks with 90 minutes exercise tracking a day or 22 hours of GPS tracking. All of these claims are remarkable, suggesting the watch outlasts not just smartwatches but basic fitness trackers and all but the most expensive runner’s watches.
The Watch GT hardware is impressive too. Its face surround is 316L stainless steel and the casing is waterproof to 5ATM. It’s ready for the swimming pool. And it still has GPS, a heart rate monitor and the usual array of motion tracking sensors. The heart rate sensor uses an unusually wide array of six LEDs and companion sensors. The Garmin’s Fenix 5 Plus only has three.
Heart rate sensors fire these LED lights into your wrist tissue, while sensors measure the light level, which varies as blood is pumped through the wrist. Huawei says it uses AI, or more accurately clever algorithms, to use the data from these six LEDs to filter out anomalous readings.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
