Huawei Mate 20 Lite in for review

The Huawei Mate 20 Lite has a heavy burden on its shoulders – it needs to be good enough to be worthy of the “Mate 20” name, but at the same time it competes with Kirin 970-powered Honor phones and the Huawei nova 3.

A chipset isn’t everything and the Kirin 710 is certainly powerful enough to run all the AI tools that the phone packs, including the smart gallery search. For example, you can search for “2017 sea sunrise” and it will fish out the relevant photos from the internal storage – no Google Photos necessary.

Speaking of photography, the Mate 20 Lite has two dual cameras - 20+2MP on the back and 20+2MP on the front. The secondary modules are used for depth sensing in both cases and enable 3D portrait lighting with several presets.

Anyway, the 6.3” screen is larger than what previous Lite models got in both the P and Mate series. It has 1,080 x 2,340px resolution, so sharpness should be on the level of the P20 flagships (the premium Mate 20 duo may introduce a higher resolution).

The 3,750mAh battery is also larger than previous what Lite models packed and it’s paired with fast charging - “just” 18W rather than Huawei’s 22.5W solution, but that’s still better than what the €999+ iPhones are getting.

The Huawei Mate 20 Lite is already available at a cost of £380, the Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro will be unveiled in mid-October. But it’s not those two that the Lite needs to worry about, it’s the Kirin 970 crowd.