Mate 20 Pro: King of android
It has a bunch of features, including wide angle and telephoto lenses, wireless and reverse charging and biometric options
Huawei’s new Mate 20 Pro has a new design language with curved glass, blended into the aluminium on the sides, and resembles Samsung S9 Plus at a glance.
The phone has a notch, similar to the iPhone X, which can be turned off in the settings if you don’t like it.
Already, the Huawei P20 Pro has been rated as one of the best smartphones of 2018 and with the Mate 20 Pro, the Chinese firm has raised the bar and pushed the boundaries of smartphone photography.
The triple rear Leica cameras steal the limelight again and take photography to a new level not seen in the current breed of mobiles. The phone weighs 189 grams.
DISPLAY
The 6.39-inch OLED display (3120x1440 pixels) with 19.5:9 screen ratio houses 6GB of RAM and 128GB storage capacity. The device supports either two nano SIMs or one nano SIM and Huawei’s 256GB nano-memory card. It runs on Android 9 Pie out of the box with EMUI skin 9.0 on top with plenty of customisation and features.
Huawei has improved its new skin without much bloatware but it still needs to be polished.
You cannot use the normal microSD card but a proprietary and expensive SD card similar to a nano SIM.
According to DXoMark camera tests, P20 Pro is still rated as the top phone with a camera at 109 while Apple’s iPhone XS Max is at 105 and Samsung Note 9 at 103.
The Mate 20 Pro has 537 pixels per inch (ppi) screen density compared to Samsung Galaxy Note 9 at 514ppi, iPhone XS MAX 458ppi and Samsung Note 9’s 516ppi while P20 Pro had 408 ppi.
NEW CHIPSET
Huawei is the first Android smartphone manufacturer to produce the seven-nanometre chipset – 2.6GHz Kirin 980 octacore - on Mate 20 Pro. It has a new CPU, GPU and dual NPUs (brain behind artificial intelligence).
The two super big cores are used for graphics intensive apps, two big cores for social apps and four small cores for voice calls on the octa-core 980 chipset compared to four big and four small cores on octa-core Kirin 970 chipset.
Samsung and Qualcomm’s latest chipset are based on 10nm but Apple launched its A12 chipset based on 7nm on its new iPhones.
BIOMETRIC FEATURES
The3D face unlock facial recognition technology on this device, similar to the iPhone, is super fast, works even in low light conditions and opens the device in less than one second, much faster than the iPhone X and Galaxy S9.
Apart from that, Huawei has incorporated the pressure sensing in-screen fingerprint sensor that is excellent but they have placed it a bit higher.
There are no speaker grilles at the bottom but the sound comes from inside the USB Type-C port. Even when it is plugged, its output is not muffled. The other speaker is in the notch.
CAMERAS
Coming to cameras, it sports a square format similar to Porsche car’s headlight. The camera is almost similar to P20 Pro. Next to the flash sits the 40MP wide angle lens (27mm) with f/1.8 aperture, below the flash sits the 8MP 3 x telephoto lens (80mm) with f/2.4 aperture and OIS, and next to it sits the 20MP ultra-wide angle lens (16nm) with f/2.2 aperture.
Even though the camera has a 40MP sensor, the default is 10MP. The device uses the data captured by both the lenses to create sharp images, balanced colours and details.
The automatic mode uses artificial intelligencedriven scene recognition modes to recognise the scene in order to optimise settings.
With dual NPUs, it can recognise up to 4,500 images per minute, up 120 per cent compared to Kirin 970 chipset while the Snapdragon 845 chipset recognises up to 2,371 images per minute.
Low light is where the phone excels the most and it is the best of the breed I have seen. Even at pitch dark, the images are captured well.