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Huawei Mate 20 Pro
Huawei’s P20 Pro received plenty of plaudits for its unique, dreamy design and fantastic Leica-tuned camera. Sadly, the phone was never sold in the U.S., keeping this great camera system out of reach for many Americans. Let’s hope the new Mate 20 Pro and the Mate 20 escape that fate, because they carry on many of the P20 Pro’s best attributes. Huawei hasn’t yet announced whether they’ll make it stateside, but historically the Mate line has been sold here, and after playing with them, our fingers are crossed.
We’ll be focusing on the more expensive Huawei Mate 20 Pro here, but you can read our Mate 20 hands-on review for more details on that phone.
Colorful design, bright screen, biometric security
We’re just going to say it: The Mate 20 Pro doesn’t look as good as the P20 Pro. There’s something about the way the P20 Pro lined up the triple-camera set up on the back that made it one of the most beautiful phones on the market, particularly dressed in the stunning “twilight” color.
That color lives on in the Mate 20 Pro — though slightly tweaked — along with four others, but it’s the camera setup on the rear that has us torn. The big, blocky square that houses three cameras and a flash looks like a Lego brick glued to the back of the phone. Curved edges all around help make up for it, and make the Mate 20 Pro more comfortable to hold, but the square will be polarizing. We ended up getting used to the same design on the Mate 20, so tastes may vary.
Over on the front is a 6.39-inch OLED screen that’s curved around all the sides as well. It has 3,120 x 1,440 resolution with a 19.5:9 aspect ratio, and the screen looks sharp, bright, and colorful with inky blacks.
If you don’t want to register your face to unlock your phone, there’s an in-display fingerprint sensor.
A notch at the top of the screen is about the same size as the notch on the iPhone XS, and unlike Google’s massive notch on the Pixel 3 XL, it has a 3D depth-sensing array for facial recognition. The setup process is almost identical to setting up Face ID on an iPhone, and the phone unlocks quite quickly.
Similar to Google’s Autofill service, Huawei has Password Vault. It lets you store passwords and use the facial recognition system to access the app — without having to type in a password. You’ll essentially get an iPhone XS-like experience of accessing secure apps with just your face, which is something we’ve been wanting more of on the Android side (Samsung is one of the few manufacturers that has a similar service). We haven’t had a chance to try this out to access different apps, so we can’t comment on how well it works.
Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends
Alternatively, if you don’t want to register your face to unlock your phone, there’s an in-display fingerprint sensor. That means you’ll see a fingerprint icon on the screen, and when you put your finger on it, the phone will unlock – no outside sensor needed. We saw this technology before on the Porsche Design Huawei Mate RS, but it was slow, and janky. On the Mate 20 Pro, Huawei claims the unlocking speed is 20 percent faster. It reacted quickly in our brief test, but we’d have liked to get more haptic feedback when unlocking the phone.
The standard lens packs 40 megapixels with a f/1.8 aperture, followed by an ultra wide-angle lens with 20 megapixels at f/2.2.
The Mate 20 Pro has slim bezels all around and looks quite attractive from the front. But we have to bring up the Mate 20 here. The cheaper phone with fewer features actually looks better. It doesn’t have the fancy facial recognition camera, which allows it to have a much smaller “teardrop” notch at the top of the screen. The much slimmer bezels all around deliver an almost full-screen, bezel-less experience. It’s an LCD screen, though, with a lower resolution, so the screen doesn’t have the same luster as the Mate 20 Pro.
The Mate 20 Pro also has another advantage — it’s IP68 water resistant, which means it can be submerged under five feet of water for 30 minutes, unlike the Mate 20, which is only rated to survive splashes.
Versatile camera
The next big trend with smartphone photography is to make mobile cameras more versatile. Samsung just announced a phone with four cameras, and LG unveiled the five-camera LG V40 earlier this month. Huawei’s sticking with a three-camera setup on the rear, but each camera now has a purpose, and gone is the monochrome sensor.
The standard lens packs 40 megapixels with a f/1.8 aperture, and it’s followed with an ultra wide-angle lens with 20 megapixels and a f/2.2 aperture, as well as a telephoto 8-megapixel lens with a f/2.4 aperture and built-in optical image stabilization. If that set up sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a much more powerful variation of the LG V40’s triple rear camera setup. The increased megapixel count on the Mate 20 Pro means you can expect much higher resolution photographs that can pack in way more detail.
Switching between the three lenses is fast, but not intuitive. You have to slide a zoom slider down to an arbitrary 0.6x setting to be able to access the ultra-wide-angle camera. The images taken by all three cameras look sharp, and it was fun playing around with new perspectives.
Huawei Mate 20 Pro Compared To
LG V40 ThinQ
Samsung Galaxy Note 9
Moto E5 Plus
HTC U11
Xiaomi Mi Mix
Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge
YotaPhone 2
Sony Xperia Z3
HTC One Remix
Huawei Ascend Mate 2
LG Optimus 4X HD
HTC One S
Samsung Galaxy S II
Google Nexus S
T-Mobile myTouch 3G
Huawei uses A.I. to suggest when to use the different lenses, and recognize a primary subject in the camera to keep it in focus. Like LG introduced with the V30 last year, there’s an A.I. Cinema Mode that lets you apply video effects, such as using a 21:9 cinematic aspect ratio, or a Sin City-esque effect that keeps people in color, and everything else in black and white.
On the front, a 24-megapixel sensor is used for both facial recognition and selfies, but we haven’t had a chance to test it with the latter yet.
The Mate 20 Pro features several A.I. assisted camera modes, including this A.I. Color mode that tracks the primary subjects and maintains a hue effect. Andy Boxall/Digital Trends
This camera looks to be a winner again, and we’re excited to pit it against Google’s Pixel 3, which currently has one of our favorite cameras on a smartphone.
Strong performance, Android 9 Pie, big battery
The Mate 20 Pro is powered by Huawei’s Kirin 980 chipset, which Huawei claims is 20 percent faster and 40 percent more efficient. Two built-in neural processors help with the A.I. functions, and an 8-core GPU delivers 75 percent better performance. We haven’t put the phone through its paces yet, but we didn’t see any problems moving around through Huawei’s new custom Android interface, called EMUI 9.
It’s based on Android 9 Pie, so you’re getting the latest version of Android with all its features, which you can read about in our handy guide. Huawei said it has reduced the complexity of the user interface by stripping the number of menus in the Settings app, increased system responsiveness, and eliminated slowdown over time. The operating system was quite responsive in our time using the phone, but we’ll need more time to verify some of Huawei’s other claims. Regardless, the interface still looks a little too close to iOS for our liking.
It will take more testing to see how the Mate 20 Pro’s camera stacks up against the competition.
There’s 6GB of RAM, and 128GB of internal storage that can be expanded thanks to a MicroSD card slot.
The 4,200mAh battery on the Mate 20 Pro is 200mAh bigger than the P20 Pro’s battery, which is an impressive accomplishment, considering how thin this phone feels. If that big battery sounds like you’ll have to wait a while for it to fully charge up, think again: Huawei claims its 40-watt Huawei SuperCharge technology will get you up to 70 percent with just 30 minutes of charging. That’s impressive, and something we’ll definitely be testing.
Fast wireless charging is on board as well, but more interestingly, the Mate 20 Pro has the exclusive ability to wirelessly charge another phone — you heard that right: reverse wireless charging. If you’re with a friend who has a phone that can wirelessly charge, but neither of you have battery packs, just place their phone on the Mate 20 Pro, and you can top them off. We don’t know yet how fast this is, and how much battery life the Mate 20 Pro will lose in a short amount of time, but it’s unique, and we’re excited to try it out.
Price and availability
Huawei has not shared pricing and release details for the Mate 20 Pro yet. We expect the price to sit around the $1,000 mark, and we speculate Huawei will bring the Mate 20 Pro to the U.S., but likely closer to January. We can’t confirm this just yet, but we’ll update this story as soon as we learn more.
It will take more testing to see how the Mate 20 Pro’s camera stacks up against the competition, and how much it has improved over the P20 Pro. This phone also checks off all the boxes from performance to battery life , so we’re excited to see how usable it is day-to-day. Stay tuned for our full review soon!