Huawei’s Mate 20 Pro is a thing of beauty. The emerald green variant we received for review has a stunning back with a hyper-optical pattern on top of a blue-green shade that makes you want to keep looking. The pattern is supposed to make it just that little bit harder to lose one’s grip on this glassy phone. It’s slim and narrow, but it’s so exquisite that it’s impossible to be blasé about dropping it, so immediate use of the provided back cover is recommended.

Keep looking

The twilight variant with its shading subtly changing from green to blue to purple is also really pretty, though it doesn’t include the hyper-optical pattern. The power button on the emerald version is in a brick-red accent colour and tells you this device has been designed with a lot of thought and attention to detail.

A bigger-than-usual camera assembly is immediately noticeable on the back. Three cameras are what that’s made up of, a result of Huawei’s partnership with Leica. The overall look of the smartphone reminds practically everyone of Samsung’s flagship phones of recent times, especially because the glass curves in on the sides in a similar manner. Turn the device on and you’re again reminded of Samsung because the 6.3-inch OLED screen is as good, doing a great job with colours. The phone doesn’t feel as large as you would imagine with that display size. But speaking of the display, it sports a fairly wide notch. For a change though, the notch is there for the same sort of reason the iPhone’s notch exists — there’s a camera for 3D face recognition. It did its job of ‘face enrolment’ very fast, but even faster was unlocking the phone with face recognition subsequently.

It probably wasn’t needed but there’s also a fingerprint unlock on the Mate 20 Pro — and it’s an in-display sensor. It’s a little slower than the face unlock, which I found was the fastest way to get into the phone in merely a blink.

Blazing speed

All the speed immediately evident is thanks to Huawei’s own 7-nm Kirin 980 chipset, which puts the Mate 20 Pro up there with the iPhone XS and Max as being the fastest phones on the plant — for now. Huawei was the first to announce this kind of chipset, though Apple was the first to market with it. But that aside, the chip fuels the phone as it zips through everything you want it to. And not for a moment does it even warm up.

The phone has 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB internal storage. A new type of storage card they call Nano-Memory will be usable on the device. The phone runs on Android 9 Pie with its own EMUI on top of that. With a performance as fast as this, any gripes about Huawei’s interface are pretty much redundant.

The entire battery experience on the Mate 20 Pro is superlative. First, it’s a huge 4,200 mAh battery and sits in the phone without making it bulky. Second, it supports fast charging that gives you 60 to 70 per cent in a mere half hour with a 40 W charger. Third, the new processor and Android 9 Pie ensure the battery lasts really long. And four, there are a number of power saving measures including scaling down screen resolution that keep the battery going even more. An average user can be assured of two days of clear battery life. The Mate 20 Pro can not only charge itself wirelessly, but charge (very slowly) other devices that support the Qi standard.

A complex of cameras

The camera set-up on this phone has won quite a few shotouts online including one blind comparison with a bunch of other phones, coming out on top. It includes a standard 40 MP lens with f/1.8 aperture, a 20 MP ultra-wide lens with f/2.2 aperture, and an 8 MP telephoto lens with f/2.4 aperture. When you open up the camera app, you can toggle between these with an on-screen button. There are a ton of modes and shooting aids and features. Clearly, the way the cameras have been put together, they’re meant for users who really like phone photography and know a thing or two about it.

Using the standard camera, I found the light and colours tend to shift around a lot as I move. The camera was trying to recognise scenes and light conditions and adapt. I often found this disconcerting as it made me wonder when the camera had finally ‘settled’ on what it thought was the best way to take the shot. A little bit of light here and there can make the biggest difference between a drastically dark photo with some noise and a pretty good one. This is especially the case indoors where lighting is more uneven. More than once, I found myself wishing the camera would let me take the photo the way I wanted, but even with the AI turned off, the camera seemed to do its own thing a lot. In the end, I found it’s probably better to turn the ‘Master AI’ back on and avoid getting strange photos. Although this often got me photos with boosted light in places I didn’t want it to be, I found it was better to give in to the AI.

The lenses and modes lead to some very good macro images, nice expansive wide angle photos and portrait shots that weren’t bad at all. There’s plenty you can do even after shooting a photo, including using a Splash feature to highlight one colour and turn everything else into greyscale. Video can be shot like that as well.

Night photography on phone cameras is making some great strides and on the Mate 20 Pro too, the trick of taking multiple exposures to make one image is used to great effect.

The front camera is really good and though I dislike taking selfies, I ended up enjoying a lot on this phone. The cameras are actually a complex feature-rich assembly that needs a review of its own.

With the amount of technology crammed into this one phone, an exorbitant price was expected, but didn’t turn up. The Mate 20 Pro is actually competitively priced when pitted against other flagships like the iPhones and the new Google Pixel 3. It cleverly stays below the psychological cut off into the 70,000’s by being a rupee short. All the same, this phone isn’t for everyone. It’s quickly become a favourite with geeks for a reason. If you want to make the most — or even something — of all the capabilities and features, there’s no point coming at it with a lack of tech savvy-ness. It’s a powerful power user’s phone.

Price: ₹69,990

Pros: Beautiful design, blazing fast, advanced three-lens Leica camera set, fast charging with great battery life, reverse charging, new 7-nm chip

Cons: Overly aggressive AI on camera, dangerously slippery, camera assembly protrudes a bit, headphone jack banished

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