Huawei Mate 20 Pro review: Huawei’s latest flagship is a contender for phone of the year
The Huawei Mate 20 Pro is easily the best and most premium phone the Chinese company has ever made. It is an extremely impressive, cutting-edge flagship, with a beautiful design that draws inspiration from the curviness of the Galaxy S9, as well as the edge-to-edge notchiness of an iPhone XS Max.
Inside it has specs to back up its flash exterior. The Mate 20 Pro boasts an unbeatable battery life, easily lasting a day and a half with regular use, and even longer if you don’t fiddle with it every ten minutes. So hench is the battery that you can wirelessly charge somebody else’s phone with it, which is the most futuristic way of asserting your dominance that I’ve yet seen.
The Mate 20 Pro ditches the mono-chrome sensor of the P20 in favour of an ultra-wide-angle lens, which forms the distinctive triple-camera array on the rear. Wide shots are dramatic, allowing you to get more into the frame without having to walk backwards into traffic or over cliff edges. The impressive low light mode seems to find photons where there are none, producing long-exposure shots in the dark that appear to be taken in broad daylight.
Some novelty camera features allow you to record video with live filters, intelligently detecting the outlines of bodies, and desaturating or blurring the background. But Huawei’s version of Google Lens, called HiVision, is hilariously useless. The object detection misidentified a bowl of soup as a pair of maternity pants.
Along with the just-announced OnePlus 6T, the Mate 20 Pro is the first phone to use an in-display fingerprint sensor – you unlock the phone by placing your thumb on the screen itself – as well as the more familiar 3D face unlock.
The EMUI 9 operating system has improved again, and while still rough-edged and wonky in places, it’s unrecognisable from its badly designed earlier incarnations.
Huawei has thown everything it’s got into the Mate 20 Pro and, for the first time, created a phone that’s a genuine contender for the best smartphone of the year.