Huawei Mate 20 Pro: Make Smartphones Exciting Again

Update on Jan 17th 2019: Huawei Kenya has announced that these series of Mate 20 Phones will launch in Kenya before end of month.

Huawei just unveiled a couple of new smartphones. But what’s most exciting from that launch is obviously the Mate 20 Pro. To me, this is a company that’s pushing the limits of what a smartphone can be while still being a normal affordable product to get your hands on.

The Mate 20 Pro comes with a a 6.4-inch curved OLED screen with 3120 x 1440 resolution, 19.5:9 aspect ratio and 86.90% screen-to-body ratio. There’s 6GB/8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and faster Wi-Fi. This isn’t even the exciting part about this device.

We’ve reached a point where most smartphones offer pretty much the same experience regardless of the different manufacturers, ideas, or designs. There’s little that would differentiate flagships. But Huawei is slowly, but surely changing that. When they launched the P20 Pro with 3 cameras at the back, even though some thought it was a gimmicky decision, that phone has remained on top of the DxOMark as the best smartphone camera all year.

With the Mate 20 Pro, Huawei continues with it’s triple lens setup with a few changes. First, the monochrome lens is gone. Now there’s an ultra-wide angle lens. Secondly, instead of the vertical setup, Huawei went with this square slab at the back with the lenses and the flash.

There’s a standard 40MP lens, a 20MP wide-angle lens, plus an 8MP 3x Zoom Lens. And that’s still not the exciting part.

In matters battery, Huawei has for a while now been packing huge batteries. With the Mate 20 Pro, consumers will now be getting a 4200mAh battery which should be the biggest battery we’ve seen on a high end flagship device. Still, this isn’t the most exciting part.

The all glass phone now supports wireless charging. And for the first time on any phone, we are having a phone that charges other phones wirelessly. Yes. If your iPhone, or Samsung, LG, headphones, etc. supports Qi-standard of Wireless Charging, you can place it on top, or close to, the Mate 20 Pro, and it will charge your phone. What’s a 4200mAh battery for if you can’t help iPhone users? Still, this isn’t the most exciting bit.

And if you’re wondering if this battery fast charges, yes it does. Plus for the first time on any phone, there’s support for 40W super charging. The charger included is rated 10V 4A and should give the phone about 70% in 30 mins. This still isn’t the most exciting bit.

Powering everything, is the Hisilicon Kirin 980 processor which is the first 7nm processor on an Android Phone. And for me, this is the most exciting part. Here’s why: this happens to be the world’s first 7nm system on a chip – a claim contested by Apple. It happens to be the world’s first cortex-A76 based CPU, and the world’s first chipset to support LTE Cat.21 offering upto 1.4Gbps speeds. It also happens to be the world’s first chipset with a dual Neural Processing Unit (NPU) design.

The phone has a notch cut-out at the top to accommodate the 24MP selfie camera, and the 3D scanning tech used in Face Unlock, 3D emoji, and object scanning.

There’s support for expandable storage even if with a twist, as this is the world’s first smartphone to support nano-SD cards, if that’s the name we’ll eventually go with.

Also, this is the first major brand to ship a phone with an in-display fingerprint scanner. Yes there’s a fingerprint scanner that’s under that OLED panel.

It is IP68 rated, so you can dip it in water if that’s a concern for you. Yep, finally, smartphones are getting more exciting! The Mate 20 Pro comes with Android 9.0 Pie and starts at $1,217.

The normal Mate 20 starts at $927. But there’s also a Mate 20x which will come with an incredibly huge 7.2 inch display. I hope they’ll be coming to Kenya.