Huawei has finally announced their latest flagships in their Mate series of phones, the Mate 20 and the Mate 20 Pro and they quite stand out.
The new phone has a new design with a glass front and back like other flagships but now houses a square-ish location at the back that houses the new 3 camera sensors.
The Mate 20 Pro has a 6.39 inch 1440 x 3120 pixel curved OLED screen while the Mate 20 has a 6.53 inch 1080 x 2244 pixel screen. Both screens have HDR and the Pro one has a 19.5:9 ratio while the Mate 20 has a 18.7:9 ratio.
2018’s theme has been to notchify everything and the Mate 20 and the Pro version have them. The Mate 20 Pro has a bigger notch than the Mate 20 and they both feature facial recognition hardware which is quite cool. The Mate 20’s notch looks like a teardrop and looks better than the Mate 20 Pros at first glance.
They both run the incredibly powerful Kirin 980 SoC which is the first Android system on a chip on the 7nm process so you would expect great performance with these phones. The Mate 20 Pro gets the 6GB RAM/128GB internal storage as standard and 8GB RAM/ 512GB storage on the more expensive model. The regular Mate 20 base model has a 4GB RAM/64GB combo and a 8GB RAM/512GB internal storage option. Both phones can support MicroSD cards with upto 256GB of nano memory cards, which are new storage media that are shaped like nano SIMs.
Now the cameras. Starting off with the selfie cameras, both sport the 24MP sensor with an f/2.0 lens which we saw with the P20 series.
However, the Leica branded rear camera situation is the star of the show here on the Mate 20 Pro. We have a 40MP sensor with a f/1.8 lens, probably the same one on the P20 Pro. They swapped the monochrome sensor for a 20MP sensor with an ultra wide lens (16mm) with a f/2.2 aperture which is fantastic and gave it a 8MP sensor with a 80mm f/2.4 telephoto lens with OIS for that telephoto goodness.
The Mate 20 features a 12MP main sensor with an f/1.8 lens, a 16MP wide angle camera (17mm) with an f/2.2 aperture and a 8MP telephoto camera (52mm) with an f/2.4 aperture.
The P20 Pro has proven to be a leader when it comes to imaging this year and judging by this hardware and the inclusion of that sweet ultra wide angle lens, this system looks killer. There is also Huawei’s Master AI 2.0 image processing in the new phones which will be able to segment photos in to sections and treat them independently. Also in video, there ia a monochrome colour pop mode where people in it will be in colour.
Other cool features from the Mate 20 Pro include wireless charging which is a first for the series and also the fact that there is reverse wireless charging which you can use to charge other phones. These phones have huge batteries (4200mAh for the Pro and 4000mah for the Mate 20) so they can comfortable charge other phones with smaller batteries.
The Mate 20 series of phone also support really fast networking. They can go upto Cat 21 LTE (1.4Gbps) and also really fast Wi-Fi where they claim a 2GB file can be downloaded in only 10 seconds. It also has dual band GPS which improves the positioning accuracy, which can be great for a number of scenarios.
It also has IP68 water and dust resistance and has a massive 40W charging brick included for fast charging and 15W fast wireless charging. That 40W charging brick can charge the Mate 20 Pro to 70% in half an hour which is downright incredible. The Mate 20 Pro also features an in-display optical fingerprint sensor which is pretty cool while the Mate 20 has a normal fingerprint scanner at the back. The not so cool part is the fact that there is no headphone jack in the Mate 20 Pro but the Mate 20 has one. The phones also feature stereo speakers.
The phone ships in quite stunning colours: Pink Gold, Midnight Blue, Emerald Green and Twilight Black. The Mate 20 series phones run on EMUI 9.0 which is based on Android 9 Pie which is great as a start.
