Huawei recently launched their Mate 20 series in Qatar and they handed over their Mate 20 to us to find out what all the hype is about. We've been using the device for 2 weeks now and we think this might just be your next smartphone!
Keep on scrolling to know more about this new kid in D-Town!
It’s 2018 so it’s to be expected that this phone comes packed with the latest and most advanced hardware. The unit we got was a 128GB ROM and 6GB Ram version. The phone comes with Huawei’s in-house Kirin 980 SoC (System on a Chip), the world’s first 7nm chipset packing 6.9 billion transistors resulting in 32% power efficiency and about 40% better performance compared to the competition in the market. The SoC also comes equipped with dual NPU. Meaning it is essentially packed with dual brains to perform the AI magic making this phone 182% power efficient and 226% faster.
Huawei Mate 20 sports a beautiful glass design on front and back with an aluminum frame on the sides. The phone is slightly curved from the back making it easy to hold it in the hands.
Huawei Mate 20 has a IPS Display panel with the resolution of 1080 x 2244 pixels sporting a size 6.53 inch with 88% screen to body ratio. The phone has edge to edge display from the sides with a tear drop notch on the top making it the smallest notch on a phone to house the selfie-camera. The display while on paper might seem not very flashy given 2018 display standards but it does the job and is pretty bright outdoors making it the perfect fit. Plus it’s HDR10 compliant which means viewing HDR content on this phone will be an eye pleasing experience.
Huawei Mate 20 comes packed with a whopping 4,000 mAh battery easily lasting one day during heavy usage and 1.5 to 2 days during normal usage. The phone also comes with reverse charge, meaning you can charge another phone using this phone essentially acting like a power bank. Just plug one end of the wire to this phone and plug the other end to second phone and select reverse charge. Neat, right?
One very little but subtle touch that we personally liked was the colored and textured power button. It’s textured thus making it easy to feel the power button and the red color just adds more colors to the already very colorful phone!
Remember Infrared? Yeah, this phone comes equipped with Infrared but not to transfer files, instead you can use it to control your home appliances like AC, TV, Home Theater etc using the built in remote app.
Most flagship phones don’t have headphone jack but this phone is one of the very few in flagship territory still keeping the headphone jack. It’s a deal breaker for some people. I personally don’t mind not having a headphone jack because I usually use bluetooth headphones (I am all about that wireless life.
You cannot talk about this phone without mentioning about the camera, this phone comes equipped with three Leica certified lenses: 12 MP wide, 16 MP ultrawide and 8 MP telephoto lens, which means every moment you capture will almost always result in crisp shots. Below are some of the shots that I took while using the phone.
The video recording on this phone is amazing as well. It uses some sort of AI trickery to stabilize the video.
In addition to the speaker at the bottom (which sounds really good), It also has a secondary speaker right above the selfie camera making it a stereo speaker setup. Now who doesn’t like that, right?
Moving on, let’s talk about the software on this phone. This phone comes with Android 9 out of the box which means you don’t have to worry about missing out on latest Android Operating System after buying your new shiny Mate 20.
The phone comes equipped with the latest EMUI 9, Huawei’s skin on top of Android 9. The best thing about the skin is that it looks similar to iPhone which means iPhone users will feel at home.
Huawei is going big with AI and this phone certainly shows that in a lot of ways. The camera for example uses AI to recognize the scenes. Too dark? No problem the phone intelligently kicks in the night mode to capture the photos better. Greenery? The phone will adjust the colors of the camera accordingly and help to take some beautiful, grass, flower or garden shots.
The AI in EMUI 9.0 learns your usage patterns over time and optimizes the phone so that it runs snappy just like the first day it did when you bought it. During our 2 weeks usage, the phone remained snappy and speedy.
These days smartphones are used less for calling but instead used more for social media. You’ll be happy to know that this phone comes installed with one of the most popular keyboards swift key installed out of the box. Another great addition that we noticed while calling was that the software incorporates a feature called Omni directional loudspeaker. This feature helps to make the calls on loudspeaker sound more richer and 360 degree directional thus giving a rich calling experience.
If that little tear drop notch annoys you, you’ll be happy to know that in settings you can easily hide it. Hiding the notch would mean it will black out the notch area thus technically making it notchless. We wish the screen was AMOLED as it would've made hiding the notch less intrusive as currently the screen has to still power black pixels through that part. I personally didn’t care thus didn’t hide the notch it’s not that big of a deal for us.
Huawei’s AI magic just doesn’t stop there. It constantly scans and analyzes and the standby time is phenomenal. Normally overnight phones will easily lose around 10 to 20% of their battery but we found out that this phone just drops around 3 to 5% of battery.
If you want a great camera phone on a bargain then this phone is perfect. It combines great camera with great hardware and becomes a very good bargain package. We’ll happily recommend this phone to our family and friends.
When are you planning to purchase the new Huawei Mate 20? Drop us a line in the comments and also, don't forget to like and share this article—it keeps us going!
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