Huawei is an extremely popular phone brand at the moment. A day doesn’t go by that they aren’t mentioned on the news for some reason. I recently had an opportunity to try the newest Huawei flagship phone, the Mate 20 Pro! It’s the first available phone that has a fingerprint reader built into the screen.

Fingerprint Reader Inside The Screen

All new technology is basically magic. And the same thing can also be said about the Huawei Mate 20 Pro. I mean there’s no visible physical fingerprint reader. You just place your finger onto the screen and it somehow scans it. Magic.

Well okay the technology used isn’t really that complicated. There’s a tiny sensor embedded behind the AMOLED screen. It analyses all of the lines and microscopical gaps on your finger. And when you place your finger to the right spot, then the pixels underneath your finger light up. This makes your fingerprint more visible for the sensor.

The sensor is deep inside the phone and it uses the reflecting light to measure your fingerprint. And somehow it works. It takes around a minute to register your finger and the sensor will only recognize that finger. I tried using my other fingers as well and none of them worked. So yes, it works.

Is it as fast as a regular fingerprint sensor? Well based on my experience, no. The issue isn’t that the sensor isn’t as fast. The problem is with the reader. You need to place your finger to the correct spot on the screen. Sure there’s an icon there that shows the spot, but there aren’t any physical boundaries. So that’s really the limiting factor.

3D Facial Recognition System

Huawei isn’t exactly the first company that added a sensor into the screen. There was the Vivo X21 and the Xiaomi Mi 8. But the Huawei Mate 20 Pro is the first widely available consumer phone that has this type of hardware.

And phone companies are working hard to find the next piece of technology that will be approved by the masses. That’s why the new Mate 20 Pro has also got a 3D facial recognition system now. The same one that was first shown on the iPhone X.

The top of the screen has the standard selfie camera and a proximity sensor. But besides that, there’s also a small projector and an infrared camera. The infrared camera creates dots onto your face and then scans them in and creates a 3D model that it then reads. This is a step ahead from the simple 2D facial scanner. The 3D system doesn’t get fooled by a beard, glasses or a hat.

The facial recognition system is fast and it’s practically impossible to use the fingerprint scanner if you have it activated. That’s because your phone will be opened before you can even place your finger onto the screen. But you can still test it by not looking directly at the phone. This is the only way that the facial recognition doesn’t work.

Three Cameras

The Mate 20 Pro has a real arsenal of cameras. It’s quite obvious that they want to compete with other companies. Samsung recently came out with a phone that had 3 cameras. This Huawei one has “only” three. But let’s be honest, it doesn’t matter how many cameras you got. What matters is the quality of the photo.

Up until now, all of the Huawei flagship phones have had one “black and white” Leica sensor and no one really knows what it’s good for. Now, all 3 of the cameras have their own purpose.

• Wide angle camera ( 20 MP sensor, F/2.2, 17mm focus length)
• Regular camera (40 MP sensor, F/1.8, 27mm focus length)
• Portrait camera (8MP sensor, F/2.4, 80mm focus length)

Let’s be honest, the typical buyer doesn’t care about these technological differences. And that’s why Huawei has made the camera app much easier to use. All you have to do is pick the zoom level (0.8x, 1x, 3x and 5x) when taking a picture and the phone will automatically choose the type of camera it will use.

I’m personally a huge fan of the wide angle camera. It’s great for taking everyday photos. It does distort the image but surprisingly not by much.

It’s obvious that most of the development work was already done last year, when they were developing the P20 Pro. And its powerful 40 MP sensor and camera quality was what amazed people. Some of these good things have also been transferred to the Mate 20 Pro. One of such is the nighttime mode. It enables you to easily capture beautiful photos at night, without much light around you!

Familiar Design

The Huawei Mate 20 Pro is far from a small phone. It has a 6.4” screen after all and it barely fits in my hand. There’s exactly 100 square cm of area on the screen.

That said, when I first took the phone out of the box, I had a bit of a déjà vu moment. It just felt so familiar. And then I remembered, this phone looks just like the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge! The edges of the screen round backwards and it’s framed by a strong aluminum case.

Only that the side of the phone has a small red button. Other than that, it looks just like a regular black rectangle.

Like most new phones, the Mate 20 Pro doesn’t have a 3.5mm audio jack. Instead, Huawei has included a USB-C adapter in the box. And there’s also a pair of USB-C headphones included. Everything comes with an IP68 waterproof rating.

Wireless Charging

The Huawei engineers have finally found a way to add the Qi wireless charging standard to their phones! About time! But that’s not all. It supports the 15W Qi standard, which is much faster than the 9W that Samsung supports. Or the 7.5W that the iPhone XS has.

In addition, the Huawei engineers have taken a step further and turned the Mate 20 Pro into a power bank. Yes you read that tight. You can make the phone wirelessly charge other devices as well that support Qi charging.

Battery Life

You’d imagine that all of this technology would eat up the battery really fast. Surprisingly, that’s not the case. Huawei has been incredibly strict with the power consumption and it’s really conservative with the 4200 mAh battery.

I began the day with 100% and decided to use it normally like any other day. Mostly browsing Instagram and chrome. No heavy GPS usage. By the end of the day, the battery was at 72%. I also played a graphic heavy game for around half an hour and that brought the battery level down to 65%. The next day, I decided to keep using it but this time I also used GPS, WiFi hotspot and YouTube. By 8 pm, the battery was at 15%.

So that’s pretty impressive. You can easily go a whole day without once charging it. Even if you use it the entire day and use it heavily. And if you use it lightly, then two days easily.

Conclusion

I was honestly amazed that Huawei still managed to surprise me. The 3D facial recognition system, a new fingerprint sensor, 3 fantastic cameras and the long battery life is what really makes the Huawei Mate 20 Pro so good. Plus it’s not just a marketing scheme to you get you to buy it, these features are actually real and work.

The downside is the price. It seems like all of the flagship models keep getting more and more expensive. I guess that Huawei has also learned this from Apple and it seems to work. But personally speaking, the $1000 price tag is still a lot to spend for a phone. But maybe I’m also not its targeted customer. And that’s fine. But if I wanted to own the newest technology and didn’t care about the price, then I’d definitely get the Huawei Mate 20 Pro.

Author Bio

Sven Von Fawkes is a journalism student at USC. He enjoys writing tech reviews about smartphones and he has previous experience from being a Product Manager at BestBuy.