Should you buy… The Huawei Mate20 Pro?

Huawei has quickly become known as the smartphone brand for big statements and bold disruptive tactics, with each of its new handsets looking to make more waves than the last.

The latest phone to take a shot at Apple, Google and Samsung’s flagship devices is the Mate 20 Pro, a phone the Chinese manufacturer has loaded with artificial intelligence, processing power, battery life and powerful camera features.

Huawei believes the Mate 20 has enough about it to be the market-leading smartphone, but how does it perform in the real world?

The design

Huawei’s design has been the subject of steep improvement in recent years, from non-descript metal blocks to the curved, stylish pieces of glass the company produces today.

The Mate 20 Pro certainly fits that bill, and in the two-tone twilight finish, in particular, it looks like a stylish flagship smartphone.

But you can’t help but notice how much it looks like Samsung’s Galaxy S9, particularly the way the display curves into sides of the device.

It is also one of many, many 2018 smartphones to imitate the iPhone X’s notch at the top of the display, so while the Mate 20 Pro deserves praise for its looks – it is a gorgeous piece of design – not all of that is down to Huawei.

The camera array on the rear of the device is a statement design feature of the Mate 20 – purposely placed in a rectangle arrangement which Huawei says was inspired by the headlights on sports cars, and also creates an “iconic” look that will help identify the device to anyone who sees someone using it.

That’s the theory, but in reality, the set-up is ugly and jarring – badly standing out on what is otherwise a smart and sleek gadget.

Huawei is right that it makes the phone stand out, but in this instance it’s for the wrong reasons as a bizarre anomaly on an otherwise very good-looking device.

The experience

Many of the key experiences on the Mate 20 Pro revolve around the battery, because it is truly exceptional. It is firstly quite a feat to contain such a big battery (4200mAh) and still feel so light, but the battery life itself is also hugely impressive.

It lasts the day comfortably on a single charge, even with the heaviest of usage including games and video streaming.

Crucially, the Pro also rarely seems to drop any charge when left idle – meaning during lighter use periods the battery will go well into a second day.

As well as wireless and fast-charging capabilities – the latter of which is brilliantly fast should you forget to charge overnight and need a quick burst before work – there’s also the slightly gimmicky wireless reverse charging feature, which enables Mate 20 Pro users to wirelessly charge the compatible phones of others by having them hold their device against the Huawei.

It’s a fun trick for in the pub, but you’re unlikely to use it much otherwise.

The other area where Huawei is keen to press home its innovation in is artificial intelligence. The company’s messaging around it is loaded with references to AI, and how it is used to make the experience with the phone better.

In practice, there are several areas this is evident, especially in driving great performance – the 3D Face Unlock and in-screen fingerprint sensor are lightning quick at unlocking the device, and general movement through the UI is sharp and responsive.

Gaming too is a brilliant experience on the Pro, one of the best available on any Android device for smoothness and responsiveness.

However, there are patches of Huawei’s EMUI layered on top of the Android operating system that aren’t so smart. There are still too many pre-loaded “bloatware” apps that in some cases needlessly double up functionality and clutter the home screen.

And the Huawei shortcut menu that appears when swiping up from the bottom of the screen is often accidentally summoned when trying to reach the home screen from the lock screen, which is incredibly frustrating.

It is worth noting that the software used as part of this review is still pre-launch and so could be tweaked before mass rollout, but for now it’s far from perfect.

The camera

Having made the camera array stand out visually, it’s not surprising that some of the Mate 20 Pro’s best performance can also be found in its camera lenses.

The Leica-engineered triple rear camera system Huawei also used on the P20 earlier this year hasn’t just been laid out differently – it’s also been redesigned, with the monochrome lens swapped out for a 20-megapixel ultrawide-angle lens.

Shooting with the rear camera is very impressive, colours and detail are vibrantly recreated and the sharpness of images rivals that of the iPhone XS and the Samsung Galaxy Note 9.

Portrait mode images are also significantly better through the rear lenses than the front-facing camera – on the front it’s a pretty crude system where users have to go back to edit images and place a circle around the area of an image they want to focus on, with the surrounding area blurred.

Considering that the iPhone XS Max and the Pixel 3 XL both support a front-facing Portrait mode that is able to sense what’s in the foreground and blur around it accordingly, this is one area where the Mate falls surprisingly far short.

The Night mode for low-light photography also performs well, but falls short of what the new Pixel 3 XL offers.

Verdict

The Huawei Mate 20 Pro promises big things and in some areas it delivers – its battery life is industry-leading and the way it uses AI to speed up the performance of the phone make this a powerful device that is extremely productive to interact with.

But it hasn’t quite yet done enough to topple the heavyweight names of Apple, Samsung and Google it has in its sights. The design, hardware and software are all starting to come together, but at the edges and in the smaller details things are still a little frayed.

For a phone that is meant to sit in the premium bracket at the top of the market this means points off for the Mate 20 Pro.

The Mate 20 Pro proves Huawei is no longer the cheaper, smart alternative to a flagship Samsung or Apple device, but it hasn’t quite usurped them yet either.