Huawei Mate 20, 20 Pro, and 20 X hands-on review

Huawei Mate 20 Pro hands-on

The Huawei Mate 20 Pro aims to do what the P20 Pro did last spring - bring all the best bits from Huawei's labs in one device. It has an under-display fingerprint reader, advanced facial recognition tech, 40W super fast charging and a triple camera setup unlike anything else on the market.

The Mate 20 Pro employs a 6.39" AMOLED screen curved towards its long sides, in Samsung Galaxy style. It's of a higher 1440p resolution and has an amazing pixel density of 539ppi. There is HDR support, of course, and everything we saw on it looked gorgeous.

The high-res curved OLED hosts an iPhone-like large notch - in fact it's the biggest cutout in the Huawei portfolio. It houses the earpiece, the 24MP selfie snapper, and the infrared dot projector and camera for advanced 3D facial recognition.

Best thing is that unlike Apple, Huawei didn't just deliver the face unlock and proceed to call it quits. The fingerprint scanner is still here - residing under the display. It's Huawei second generation in-display sensor, actually, but you'd be forgiven for not remembering the Mate RS Porsche Design. The company claims the Mate 20 Pro's Dynamic Pressure Sensor is 30% quicker than the old one. In our short experience we found it quick and reliable although the fact that it requires a bit more pressure on the glass that what we are used to do was somewhat odd. It seems like something we can adjust to quickly, but we'll only know for sure once we get to spend more time with the phone and do a full review.

The Huawei Mate 20 Pro's square camera setup over at the back looks slightly different than the regular Mate 20 as the flash occupies the top left rather than the top right corner. The bigger change however are the cameras themselves - none of the three match the ones on the non-Pro Mate 20.

The main camera on the Pro model has a 40MP 1/1.7" sensor behind f/1.8 lens - the same module as on the P20 Pro. It employs a special quad-bayer filter, meaning that you are actually getting 10MP images from it and shooting at its native 40MP resolution is rather pointless.

The 8MP telephoto snapper with 80mm f/2.4 optically-stabilized lens is also coming from the P20 Pro. The new addition is a 20MP cam with 16mm f/2.2 wide-angle lens that replaces the monochrome shooter.

There is no fingerprint scanner on the back and, which along with the LED flash position, lets you tell the Mate 20 from the Pro if both are lying on their screens.

The Mate 20 Pro lacks an audio jack, but is IP68-rated for dust and water resistance. The protection is a step above the IP67 of the Mate 10 Pro from last Fall and this time around the Pro has also gained expandable storage to match the non-Pro model.

Unfortunately, just like the Mate 20, the Mate 20 Pro hybrid slot supports only the new nano cards.

In other not so great news the Huawei Mate 20 Pro boasts stereo speakers. Which is great on its own, but the bottom one is embedded in the USB-C port as there is no grille down there. While the port itself would act as a chamber and thus boost the sound, we are pretty sure we will deafen it once we plug a charger in. Talk about hybrid things.

Underneath that beautiful OLED screen lies a beefy 4,200 mAh battery which now supports Huawei's latest 40W SuperCharge solution. The maker promises it should refill 70% of a dead battery in about half an hour - the only other phone to offer that kind of speed is the Oppo Find X Lamborghini Edition with its 50W charger, but that's rather hard to find.

In other cool charging related news, the Mate 20 Pro supports 15W wireless charging, and it can even wirelessly charge other devices. We'd imagine the best case scenario to use this is to lend power to your smartwatch that's running out of power . After all wireless charging is hardly very power-efficient so charging another phone would be too wasteful.

You've probably noticed the new colors on the pictured Mate 20 Pro here. Huawei calls those hyper optical and they will make it to the regular Mate 20, too. The glass has this vinyl-like texture, which is a great grip booster and we liked it a lot. Handling the hyper-optical Mate 20 Pro is a very unique experience with a pinch of retro vibe.

The blue and green colors beneath the texture are uniform, unlike the gradient paintjobs on the glossy models (minus the non-Pro's mirror black finish). But the grippy surface is more fingerprint resistant and you can tell it immediately. Smudges are less likely to stick and the whole thing is easier to clean.

Huawei Mate 20 Pro is shaping to be not only Huawei's ultimate smartphone, but one of the most powerful phones in the market as the holiday season approaches.

Mate 20 Pro and Mate 20

The one thing the Mate 20 Pro has lost to the Mate 20 is the tiny notch, but we can't have both a small notch and a 3D face scanning, not this year at least. But the Pro makes up for that with a trendily curved screen, which makes the phone look and feel smaller than it actually is.