Make no mistake, Huawei’s going after the big dogs here. The company’s taken a Samsung-esque approach to the world of flagship smartphones with a beast of a handset that delivers everything and the kitchen sink.
The Mate 20 Pro is a 6.4 inch powerhouse with features and specs to spare. It’s a combination of the genuinely useful and the just sort of novel, but the hardware maker has clearly spared no expense getting itself on the global map with this thing.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but the most compelling feature of the set may well be the device’s wireless charging. While that’s not particularly exciting on the face of it, get this, the company is confident enough about the on-board battery that you can use it to wirelessly charge the competition.
I’m not sure how practical that will be for a majority of users, but as someone who has multiple phones on his person most days, I’ve found myself in a handful of scenarios where pulling a little extra juice from the phone’s massive 4,200mAh battery. The phone itself, naturally, has quick charging capabilities, hitting 70 percent battery after 30 minutes.
You’ve also got three cameras on the back, because Huawei. They’re all smushed together a square design, which the company says was inspired by sports cars. Sure, why not? There’s a 20-megapixel lens for super wide shots, a 40 megapixel standard shooter and an eight megapixel telephoto.
Oh, and those in-screen fingerprint readers everyone’s talking about? There’s one here, too, along with a depth-sensing face unlock for added security. The depth detecting front-facing cameras are also being put to use for things like image scanning and, yes, 3D selfies.
Inside is the proprietary Kirin 980 processor the company’s been talking up since way back at IFA. Huawei says its chip is able to eke out better performance than Qualcomm’s premium Snapdragon, but we’ll wait for the benchmarks for that one. And Huawei, like Apple, has been investing a lot in on-board AI processing, which is certainly on display here.