The Mate 20 Pro’s 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage haven’t improved from the P20 Pro, though you can expand the storage via a new proprietary “nanoSD” format card to a maximum of 256GB. General images were very similar to the excellent P20 Pro, with a superb amount of detail and colour accuracy. Whatever else happened in 2018, phone innovation didn’t, which makes the Mate 20 Pro’s minor improvements and additions more impressive. This works similarly to Apple’s Face ID and is better than many other facial recognition solutions as it maps your face in 3D, rather than using a 2D image. This year has seen LG and HTC extend their fade from relevance, and the American consumer is increasingly picking between the Apple or Samsung flavor of flagship smartphone, with Google’s Pixels and maybe OnePlus devices showing up as outsider choices.

The thinner edges made it difficult to type or swipe around one-handed, and the sleek front-and-back surfaces combined with the very tall ratio (19. The Mate 20 Pro is the first device to use Huawei’s new Kirin 980 processor, which the company says is a significant improvement on last year’s Kirin 970, and is one of the first chips produced using 7nm processes.It's unquestionably one of the most powerful phones around and there's little you could throw at it to slow it down. The new Huawei Mate 20 Pro is undoubtedly leaps and bounds better than last year’s strong, but now thoroughly dated-looking Mate 10 Pro, packing in a dazzling new design along with loads of top-end tech. inch display, a headphone jack, a 5,000 mAh battery, vapour chamber cooling and support for an optional stylus. Its bezels are pretty thin, especially without a lower speaker grille: instead, sound comes out of the bottom-facing USB-C port. Keep the processor in the default mode and only go for that performance boost if you find your games looking a bit stuttery.

A fingerprint zone pops up when the screen activates, which means you’ll either have to tap the display ‘awake’ to find your target or guess where the sensor is. In situations where Google and Samsung’s phones were able to both expose a dark foreground and retain a blue sky, the Mate 20 Pro accurately judged I wanted a brighter foreground, but couldn’t restrain the sky from blowing out. The cameras were noted as having similar quality to the P20 Pro and a macro mode, but the removal of the monochrome sensor was lamented, and the cameras were panned for overly aggressive AI enhancements and a sometimes "crunchy" appearance due to excessive sharpness. While there’s not too much content that makes full use of this resolution – and, sadly, there’s no out-of-the-box option to split the screen between two windows – it’s still a sharp and vibrant display.Well, almost everything: battery life isn’t quite as overwhelming this time around, but it definitely does the job. The P20 is constructed with a metal chassis and glass backing, has a fingerprint reader on the front that can also be used for gesture navigation, and is available in various color finishes. I think had it not been for the sanctions, and if Huawei still made phones, they'd surpass Samsung at some point. The Pixel 3 made a few nice improvements over the already outstanding Pixel 2 camera, whereas I’m not entirely certain the Mate 20 Pro camera has improved much on the P20 Pro.