Huawei Mate 20 Review: Camera Chops And Great Battery Life

Huawei released its Mate 20 series of smartphones late last year, consisting of the Mate 20 Pro, Mate 20, and Mate 20 Lite. The Lite and Pro versions are the base and flagship models, respectively, while the Mate 20 we're looking at here today is the middle child. When comparing the Mate 20 to the Mate 20 Pro you can see Huawei has omitted some of the high-end features, such as an in-screen finger print reader and OLED display. However, you still get a large 6.53" IPS display with a 88% screen to bezel ratio (thanks to its small teardrop top notch) a large 4000mAH battery, and a camera that's nearly as good as the one in the Mate 20 Pro. So, if you can live without all the bells-and-whistles, you can save yourself a cool $280 and still get a near flagship phone with the Mate 20 standard setup. 

The Mate 20 sports Huawei's HiSilicon Kirin 980 ARM-based CPU that integrates eight CPU cores into three clusters. There's a performance cluster that contains two Cortex-A76 cores with dynamic clocks up to 2.6 GHz, a balanced cluster that also contains two Cortex-A76 cores but only up to 1.92 GHz, and finally a power saving efficiency cluster that contains four small ARM Cortex-A53 cores with clock speeds up to 1.8 GHz. It's the same processor found in the high-end Huawei Mate 20 Pro, so while you're saving some scratch you aren't sacrificing any general compute performance.

Like the processor, the camera found in the Mate 20 has a similar setup to the Mate 20 Pro. You do lose some resolution with the sensor in the Mate 20 (12MP and 16MP compared to 40MP), but it still features a triple camera array - one ultrawide, one wide, and one telephoto lens. The camera also uses the same Leica lenses as the Mate 20 Pro and supports multiple autofocus types (laser focus, phase focus, contrast focus) and AIS (Huawei AI Image Stabilization). At 24MP the front facing camera is nothing to sneeze at either. Both cameras are the top selling points of this phone, so it's one area we're really going to put through the paces on the pages ahead.

We've already disclosed much of what makes this phone tick, but if you're adventures and would like to take the deep dive, the detailed specs are below...

The model we were sent comes with 6GB of memory and 128GB of storage. There's a 4GB version though, if you're trying to save even further, and the phone comes in three different colors: Black, Midnight Blue, and Twilight. Unfortunately, the Mate 20 series isn't getting an official U.S. release, so if you reside in the states you'll have to get the international version, which comes with a funky charger and isn't supported by Verizon or Sprint. Which could actually be a pro and not a con, depending on your perspective.

Next, we're going to get up close and personal with the Mate 20 and dissect its industrial design chops and build quality...