Huawei, a chinese brand formed in the late 1980s has a come long way since its inception from a former Liberation Army engineer, Mr. Ren Zhengfei. They initially focused on manufacturing phone switches, but have since expanded to building telecommunication networks and manufacturing communications devices for the consumer market. With initial offerings such as the Ascend and MediaPad series all the way to the famous Honor and P series, this company has been climbing the staircase making it one of the most popular smartphone manufacturers around. I mean, the very fact that the company surpassed Apple’s global smartphone sales back in July of 2017 means a huge deal, they were just one spot behind South Korean big boys, Samsung. Fast forward to the 1st week of November 2018, Huawei started releasing this beast of a device that shows how the company fought its way to the very top with flagship after flagship. I’ve gone back to this after a while and boy did I forgot all the reasons why I stayed away from Huawei devices (more on this later on), the more I used it the more I liked it. Loaded with the geekiest of numbers, plethora of features, that infamous Twilight color back and EMUI 9.0 layered on top of Android Pie, this one has to be one of smartest of phones you can get entering 2019. Yes! I am talking about the alien-eyed camera, color changing back and sleek RED power button device.. The Huawei Mate 20 Pro, part of Huawei’s Mate 20 series (which also has the normal Mate 20 as well as the larger Mate 20 X). As much as I raved about it a second ago, I still have a few complaints – but maybe that’s just me being fussy about the smartphone I want or maybe not?
“WHOA, YOUR PHONE CHANGES COLORS?”
Yes, the phone did change colors, sort off. That twilight finish on top of the glass back looked nothing but stunning as it kept changing shades with the reflection of light, sadly it seemed to fragile so I had to cover it up with the plastic clear case that comes inside the box.
The Mate 20 Pro houses an aluminum frame with glass panels on both the front and back. It comes in at 189g with a 6.39” display, which is quite easy on the hand and fits well for a phablet. You can either buy the single sim or dual sim variant which also houses Huawei’s proprietary expandable memory slot which they’ve produly termed, “Huawei Nano Memory”. I didn’t quite get this move, why house a proprietary memory card slot when you could have gone with something universal and easy to find? I’m gonna assume it’s because of Huawei’s move to get you into their ecosystem and also to probably save on hardware space? From whatever I could search on the interwebs, it looks like Huawei is the only manufacturer that makes these. I mean, it’s not ideal but it’s there if you wanna use it. There’s obviously no headphone jack on this, something that’s been a trend recently but it does have an infrared port along with NFC which supports wireless charging. Oh and did I mention the in-display fingerprint sensor? More on that in a bit. Let’s get inside the phone now.
“DAMN, IS THAT EMUI 9.0?”
I personally feel that a good phone becomes “good” only when the software is at par with the hardware. What good is a spectacular looking phone with loaded features going to do if the software just doesn’t deliver? Zilch! When I found out I was going to be playing with the Mate 20 Pro, I knew one of the first apps I’d be installing would be Nova Launcher so that I wouldn’t be dealing with EMUI’s interface but boy did I have a surprise in store for me. I think the combination of Android Pie with EMUI 9.0 is silky smooth and not as intrusive as I’d thought it’d be. You know how I said that I always stayed away from Huawei phones? One of the main reasons, if not only, was the OS – I just could not stand EMUI, specially when you have minimal options like Oxygen OS (OnePlus) and Stock Android (Pixel). I’m not saying EMUI has developed to a state where it’s become better than either of those but it’s at least come to the point where it’s usable and doesn’t look all that bloated. The missing app drawer and those overly cartoonish icons are a buzzkill but thankfully I found a way around them; I made folders to maintain all my apps on another home screen page and all the icons I didn’t want to see were tucked in an untouched folder. Again, none of this would matter if you’re a launcher type of person but if you’re not, these could be a deal breaker.
The world’s first 7nm HiSilicon Kirin 980 chipset by Huawei works effortlessly with the 6GB of RAM onboard my testing device, you could also opt for the 256GB memory with 8 gigs of RAM which should be even faster but not exactly noticeable. Going with the right variation of the chipset plus CPU plus tweaks to EMUI makes this one a delight to use, extremely fast and smooth with no performance complaints at all.
“THIS CAMERA, HOW IS IT SO GOOD?”
Given that the younger brother, the P20 Pro, has a DXO mark of 109 I’m sure the Mate 20 Pro felt the pressure to deliver and it did. It matched the exact score of 109, it lost a few points on noise reduction but it definitely deserves that ranking for all the right reasons. The 40 MP, f/1.8, 27mm (wide), the 20 MP, f/2.2, 16mm (ultrawide), and the 8 MP, f/2.4, 80mm (telephoto) LEICA lenses bundled with a LOT of AI; the camera of the Mate 20 Pro is a complete joy to play with.
For starters it has a ton of options to begin with, you have you standard Night, Portrait, Pro and Normal mode but then it’s also packed cool stuff like 3D Panorama, Underwater mode and light painting, you can also download a few more modes. The photos are crisp in daylight, with the right details popping through with a great dynamic range. It’s one of those things where you gotta use it to believe it, it’s just too good to be true. The camera AI plays a huge part in this with proper scene detection, adjusting the ISO, Shutter Speed and Exposure to give you the best picture.
I personally enjoyed playing with the wide angle lens which gives you added control on setting the right frame and composition of your shot. It sports a 24MP selfie camera which does a decent job, combine it with the nifty AR lens feature (similar to Animoji) and you’ve got a great front facing shooter as well. It uses gyro electronic image stabilization for video and can shoot in 2160@30fps. Something that I’ll definitely miss is the camera when I switch over to my daily driver, it’s something that you know Huawei has put a lot of time and effort into making it this good. If you like clicking pictures or you’re a photographer by profession, this is a definite no-brainer.
“DUUUUDE, THIS IS A GEEK OVERDOSE!”
I figured it was only fair that I dedicated an entire section to talk about all the remaining fancy and probably nice to have features that Huawei has packed in, they don’t add value necessarily but once you start using them – you get used to them. But before I dive inside the phone, I’m going to talk a bit about the hardware this thing is encased in. You can’t get enough of the 6.39” AMOLED screen which boasts a 538ppi density, from games to your Netflix – everything is crispy. I did face a bit of issues when the screen had to adjust in the darkness, making the screen look overly saturated but something you can slip by. I think Huawei are one of the only companies to sport a stereo front facing camera as well as making the device IP68 dust and water resistant. Since it has NFC, it also supports wireless charging as well as something pretty cool termed, “Reverse Charging”. You can basically turn your Mate 20 Pro into a power bank by charging other phones with it, it’s not something you’d use on the daily but its a cool feature to have. The battery holds up when needed but I found it consuming too much power at a few instances but that can be easily overlooked with that extremely fast 40W fast charging, which can easily juice your phone from ~20% to 100% in under 45mins. Just before I talk about the software features, I wanna address a features that’s pretty much the amalgamation of both; that indisplay fingerprint reader. This is definitely going to be the way forward for 2019 phones and Huawei has definitely set the right benchmark in terms of the feature. You can hardly ever use the fingerprint sensor if you have the face detection enabled, cause its just that fast, but whenever you have to – it does a decent job. It has cool sci-fi animation that loads on touch and takes less than a second to unlock the device. Now, diving inside, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro has a plethora of features to offer. There’s an entire section in your setting which is called Smart Assistance that lets you have things like knuckle gestures to take screenshots and enable split screen, HiTouch which is closely similar to Samsung’s Bixby as well as the standard motion and voice controls. It also hosts screen time management that gives you either a daily or weekly breakdown of the time spent on your phone and lets you give additional controls to lock the apps once your “allocated” time runs out. You obviously have the usual stuff like dark mode, comes with SwiftKey as your default keyboard setting and also suggests smart actions to take on your settings when it notices something that can improve performance or increase battery life.
“I’M GOING TO BURN DOUGH ON THIS, OR SHOULD I?”
The Mate 20 Pro is still a superb phone with Huawei nailing almost everything, “almost” being the keyword here. My concern was the price tag which I sort of get given the top notch features but when you have phones like the OnePlus6T and S9 that covers all the essentials you need for 1000AED cheaper. Having said that, If you need that super wide camera, that nifty reverse charging and are willing to spend some cash on your next phone, it has to be the Huawei Mate 20 Pro.
