Huawei Mate 20 Pro Review

These days, however, Huawei is no longer interested in selling just affordable devices: its latest Huawei Mate 20 Pro is an all-out premium phone packed with the latest technology including a futuristic in-screen finger scanner, a 3D face recognition system, an ambitious triple-camera, and a fast-charging battery, all encased in a beautiful body. And all of that does not come cheap: it’s right there at about the same price as the iPhone XS series, and it's more expensive than previous Android price champions like the Samsung Galaxy Note 9.

So… is Huawei ready for prime time with its new Mate 20 Pro? And should you buy one for yourself? Let’s dive in the review to find out.

• Huawei Mate 20 Pro
• 40-watt Huawei SuperCharge wall charger
• USB-C to standard USB cable
• USB-C to 3.5mm audio dongle
• Silicon Case
• SIM tool
• User manuals

Design

All the right curves in all the right places.

The Huawei Mate 20 Pro has a surprisingly thin and narrow body for a phone with a 6.4-inch screen. Both the screen and the back are curved at the edges, much like a Samsung Galaxy phone, and there is very little bezel around the side and the bottoms, which has allowed Huawei to make the Mate 20 Pro much narrower than, say, the iPhone XS Max or the Galaxy Note 9. Indeed, the Mate 20 Pro fits very nicely in the palm and is easier to operate with just one hand than the aforementioned two bigger phones. Still, the tall body is not small by any conventional means, and just like with other big phones, you won’t feel very comfortable walking with the Mate 20 Pro in the front pocket of your jeans.

Huawei offers a few different colors for this new Mate: we have the signature Twilight color gradient which looks stunning, but you also have a new “Midnight Blue Hyper Optical” finish that is glass, but treated in a special way so it is better at resisting fingerprint smudges and is not as slippery in the hand. You also have a black version, a Pink Gold one and an Emerald Green model.

All physical buttons on the Mate 20 Pro are located on the right side: you have a power key and volume buttons above it. The buttons are made of metal, just like the side of the phone, and have a good amount of travel and click.

Up at the top, you can find an infrared (IR) blaster, so you can use your Mate as a remote control for a TV, A/C unit, or whatever else you have in your home that uses infrared controls. This works best with the Smart Remote application that comes pre-installed on the phone.
There is no 3.5mm headphone jack on board here (Huawei does provide a USB-C to 3.5mm audio dongle in the box) and instead you are encouraged to use wireless buds or USB-C headphones.

The Mate 20 Pro also features dual speakers, but with a surprising, clever implementation: the secondary speaker is actually embedded in the USB-C port, so audio comes at you from the earpiece and the USB-C port. This means that when your phone is plugged in for a charge, audio will sound a bit muffled, in case you wondered.

One more thing: this phone is also IP68 water protected, which translates into an ability to survive drops in water of up to 6 feet deep for as long as 30 minutes.

In-screen Fingerprint Scanner

The Mate 20 Pro is one of the first phones out there to feature a brand new type of a fingerprint scanner: one embedded in the screen. This new in-screen fingerprint scanner is an optical one, rather than the ultrasonic one that Qualcomm is developing. And you can see how the screen of the phone lights up for a second when you tap your finger against it, so that the phone can get a proper, bright scan of the finger.
How does it work? Mostly well, but… it is not quite perfect. We have gotten used to traditional fingerprint scanners that are lightning quick, where you just tap your finger on the fingerprint area and the phone unlocks instantly. In the case of the Mate 20 Pro there are two things that get in the way: the first one is the fact that there is no physical boundary that would give a tactile indication of where the fingerprint scanner lies, so you need to look down at your phone to nail the exact position where your finger needs to be every time; the second thing is the actual force required to get a proper finger scan, as you need to press a lot firmer and longer than the gentle tap required from a traditional fingerprint reader. If you don’t press as hard, the phone will not unlock and you would need to try again. At the end of the day, you do get used to it, and sure, the accuracy is good enough, but even after hundreds of attempts, the in-screen fingerprint scanner still did not feel as fast and as effortless as a traditional one.

Face Recognition

Thankfully, there is one more way to securely unlock the Mate 20 Pro and it’s called 3D depth-sensing face recognition.

This system is basically a copy of Face ID, which Apple introduced last year on the iPhone X, and it uses a similar array of components: a dot projector, a flood illuminator, an infrared camera and the rest.

How does it work? Quite great, actually! We are happy to report that 3D face recognition on the Mate 20 Pro works at least as fast as Face ID on the iPhone X/XS and can accurately recognize your face as it changes from your puffy-eyed self in the early mornings to your 5 o’clock evening stubble self and to those times when you grow a beard; it’s able to recognize your face during the day and at pitch black conditions at night, with or without a hat, with glasses and so on. We set it up once and never had a problem with it. We also tried fooling it with a photograph and faces of other people, and it wasn’t fooled.

So… all is perfect, right? There is one tiny detail that we have to mention: the almost non-existant raise to wake functionality. While technically raise to wake is present on the Mate 20 Pro, it requires a very swift and well defined hand movement, which we almost never do in real life. This means that for all its worth, raise to wake does not work properly on the Mate 20 Pro and you need to first press the power key before the phone starts recognizing your face. This might sound like just one step, but it’s one step that you do tens, if not hundreds of times every day, and it adds unnecessary complication. Having a raise to wake feature would make using 3D face recognition truly a fluid and intuitive experience, and we hope Huawei listens and brings this to the phone in a future update.

Still, after using the Mate 20 Pro for more than a week now, we are convinced that face recognition is a more effortless security system than the in-screen fingerprint scanner and we have stopped using the in-screen fingerprint scanner completely. Of course, it’s nice having this choice, and it will be up to everyone to find what works best for them, but Huawei has really implemented face recognition in a nearly flawless manner.

Display

Excellent AMOLED screen.

Being a premium phone, it’s no surprise that the Mate 20 Pro sports a beautiful AMOLED screen with lively, rich colors. It’s a 6.4-inch display with a 19.5:9 aspect ratio, the same as on Apple’s iPhones, but with a higher, Quad HD+ resolution of 1440 x 3120 pixels.
The screen is slightly curved at the sides and has very thin bezel, which makes for an immersive experience and a screen-to-body ratio of nearly 88%, one of the highest in the industry.

And yes, there is a notch here as well, justified by the complex front camera system required for 3D face recognition. You can hide it via an option in settings (and when you do, system icons at the top still appear in the “ears”, but against a black background).
The screen also gets very bright during the day, and you have the Eye Comfort option for use at night. There is even a Natural Tone mode that adjusts the white balance to the surrounding conditions so you get more natural, warmer white colors at night when you are at home. The Always-on Screen mode is not enabled by default, but it is here and you can turn it on from Settings > Display.

Interface

EMUI 9.0 is cleaner and better, but the gesture navigation needs more polish

The Mate 20 Pro ships with its own interface, Emotion UI, also known as EMUI, in its most refined, 9.0 version on top of the latest Android 9 Pie.

EMUI is in many ways a copy of iOS: there is no app drawer, it uses the same swipe-down home for a quick search shortcut, it even uses copycat icons for apps like Phone, Health, Settings, Calendar, Weather, and others. And yes, that is just shameful, but if you are willing to overlook this, EMUI actually works fairly smoothly.Compared to earlier versions of the interface, there is now way less clutter, and controls for apps are conveniently located on the bottom of the screen, rather than the top, for easier reach.

The Mate 20 Pro is also an Android phone, which comes with the options to customize it fully to your liking (great!), but it also means that you don’t know when future updates will arrive and if they will arrive (not so great!).

There are a few particularities that we have also noted when using EMUI on the Mate 20 Pro: first, there is no way to quickly swipe down to reveal your notifications shortcut. You have to reach all the way to the top, which is definitely not very convenient on such a tall phone. Instead, a swipe down in EMUI brings up an iOS-like search menu. This is an interesting thing to have and makes searching for apps on an interface without an app drawer much easier. If we had to nit-pick, we’d say that we wish the keyboard for this search appeared with less of a delay, but that’s really a minor thing.

The Mate 20 Pro also comes with a brand new gesture navigation. You can either use the old, three-button Android navigation or use gestures and enjoy the full screen, without any buttons taking up space on it. The gestures are the following: swipe up from the bottom to go home, swipe up and hold to see multitasking cards, and swipe sideways from the edge of the screen to go back. This is basically the iOS way of doing gestures, so does it work as well?

It’s not quite perfectly polished, and here are a few examples why: first, bringing up the multitasking cards from home requires a very long gesture and is too hard to pull off. Second, the back gesture requires that you go from the very edge of the screen, and when you are in a hurry, you don’t always get it right. Often you have to repeat it again and again. Third, when you swipe up to go home, apps close with a very jittery animation. And lastly, we wish you did not have to wait for each animation to finish before you could move on to the next swipe or gesture that you are about to do. Those little things pile up, and while overall gesture navigation on the Mate 20 Pro definitely does work, it also definitely does not feel as polished as one would expect on a premium phone.

One thing that we appreciate on the Mate 20 Pro is the dark mode in the interface that you enable by going into Settings > Battery > and here you toggle the “Darken interface colors” option on. This will turn the background in the settings menu and notification shade to black, a color that’s easier on the eyes at night and that contributes to battery savings on phones with OLED screens.

Processor, Performance and Memory

Android’s fastest chip

The Mate 20 Pro is powered by Huawei’s newest in-house Kirin 980 chip. The Kirin 980 is a powerful chip that beats the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 in benchmarks and the first in an Android phone built on a 7nm manufacturing technology. Huawei says that it has spent years and big money on developing this chip, and it’s impressive how the company has outpaced Qualcomm in the 7nm race and has managed to be the first one to introduce a 7nm Android device.

The Kirin 980 works alongside 6GB of RAM and features the Mali G76 GPU, which is good news for gamers. Huawei, however, is most proud of its new dual neural-engine processor that helps with AI and machine learning, enabling features like the 1,500 different scenes that the Mate 20 Pro camera can recognize and a few cool new tricks in video.

Keep in mind, though, that by default the phone runs in a power-optimized manner, and you would need to enable the Performance mode (go to Settings > Battery > toggle Performance Mode on) in order to use the full power of the chip.

When you look at benchmark results, the Kirin 980 ranks better than the Snapdragon 845, but it is no match for Apple’s A12 chip, the world’s first 7nm chip.



You also have a generous 128GB of on-board storage here with support for a brand new type of memory card that Huawei calls nanoSD. This is done to optimize space as a nanoSD card is about the same size as a nanoSIM card. Here is how it works: you have a new SIM tray that has two slots, but rather than the two slots being one next to the other and take up a lot of space, the slot are one on top of the other. This also means that you can use the Mate 20 Pro as a dual SIM phone or use one nanoSD + one nanoSIM.Update: Read our Huawei Mate Xs 5G foldable phone review!