Excellent Phone
This is an excellent phone, and so it should be considering that it is pitched at the top end of the market.
Key points that make it excellent:-
1) Very fast at pretty much any task
2) Good display, although I’m not sure the OLED brings much over a decent IPS display
3) Good battery life, 6 days between charges is quite viable
4) Dual band GPS is fast to get lock and very accurate
5) Excellent main camera, quite viable for serious photography
6) The 21:9 aspect ratio makes it slimmer to fit in your pocket
Meh features
1) Curved edged display is all show and brings no substance or functionality
2) OLED display is no better than IPS display on Mate 20
3) Battery life is very slightly worse that Mate 20
4) Display based fingerprint scanner is slower and less consistent than dedicated rear mounted fingerprint scanner on Mate 20.
5) Daft decision to use NM (nano-memory) card instead of industry standard micro SD
I don’t really feel the Mate 20 Pro has any significant negatives. Maybe the lower performance of the display mounted fingerprint scanner is the closest it gets to a negative. I’ve found if my fingers are very cold it pretty much doesn’t recognise my fingerprint. I guess I could retrain it and add a cold finger as a second fingerprint if I could be bothered.
The camera really is very good. I’m a keen photographer and generally my requirement is to be able to make an A3 print from a photo. I’ve not tried that with this phone but I think it’s probably good enough to be able to do that with.
Personally, I would never have bought this phone for £700 or whatever it cost new because I think that’s too much to spend on a phone, I know many people will disagree with that and I can’t say I blame them considering that it makes a compact camera redundant. I actually bought it second-hand so it’s possible that’s why I see worse battery life then the Mate 20.
Having had experience of 2 Huawei phones I can recommend them wholeheartedly, I think they’re superb and let’s face if you’re going to be spied on would you rather have the Americans doing it or the Chinese? I wouldn’t buy a Huawei phone which didn’t have the Google Play store on it, for obvious reasons, something which seems to be almost completely random at the moment which phones sell new in the UK with the Play store and which do not.
Verified purchase: YesCondition: Pre-owned