The Mate 20 & Mate 20 Pro Review: Kirin 980 Powering Two Contrasting Devices
by Andrei Frumusanu on November 16, 2018 8:10 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Mobile
- Kirin 980
- Mate 20
- Mate 20 Pro
Battery Life - Contrasting Two Models
The Mate 20 comes with an LCD screen and a 4000mAh battery. The screen is slightly larger in area than that of the Mate 20 Pro, who in turn uses an OLED screen, but also features a slightly larger 4200mAh battery.
The Kirin 980 of both phones should provide great efficiency, although I have to note that my units of the Mate 20 Pro seemed to have a worse binned SoC, as active system power consumption (normalised for screen and idle) in SPEC was about 8-9% higher than on the Mate 20.
In the web browsing test, we see the regular Mate 20 post some new record battery life results, with a staggering runtime of 13.5h. Here we finally see Huawei replicate the results of the Mate 9, which similarly had a very efficient screen. The efficiency of the SoC also augments the phone above that of other devices.
On the Mate 20 Pro, we see the previously discovered screen panel issues come back to haunt it. Even though it has a larger battery and a smaller screen than the Mate 20, the more expensive phone fares worse off in the test. Unfortunately the large base power handicap of the phone along with slightly worse luminance efficiency is the main cause of the results.
In regards to the Mate 10 results: The actual battery life of devices on the stock firmware should be better, unfortunately I haven’t been able to get to get back to this version as my units have a variant that unlock the memory controller to its full speed (and reduces battery life).
In PCMark, we see a similar regression on the part of the Mate 20 Pro – the regular version is achieving excellent results. Here the test is favourable to OLED devices, as evidenced by the P20 Pro leading all our results, however again this increase base power consumption of the Mate 20 Pro costs it a lot of lifetime which ends up it having much reduced battery life compared to where the SoC and battery capacity should have been capable of.
Overall, there’s two conclusions here in regards to battery life:
The Mate 20 is just an outstanding device and is currently showcasing absolutely leading battery life. Most devices with such runtimes are lower or mid-range phones with large battery capacities. In the high end, the Mate 20 is essentially in a tier of its own as it achieves this excellent battery life result while also showcasing the best performance of an Android device.
The Mate 20 Pro’s result and conclusion is a bit more muted. Its battery life isn’t bad, but falls short of expectations. Here the 4200mAh battery serves as no more than to just compensate for the inefficient display.
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FunBunny2 - Sunday, November 18, 2018 - link
"the phone needs to dissipate less heat overall."not necessarily. IFF the following time period of lowered power draw is sufficient to dissipate that heat as well as the 'heat debt' from previous spike. the laws of thermodynamics can't be changed just because one wished them to.
melgross - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
I don’t know how the 980 is outstanding when it does edge past Android SoCs, most of the time, but it’s a really lousy performer compared to the A12. Again, Android devices, and even parts, are being rated on a curve. If you give the A12 a grade of 100 on each rating, the the 980 is no more than a 70, and often a 50, or even a 40. That’s not outstanding, even if it’s much better than the really bad 970 from last year.tuxRoller - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
In spec, the 980 has the best efficiency of all soc.Your statement would hold of we were only concerned with the greatest performance.
zanon - Monday, November 19, 2018 - link
What? Doesn't look like that. The SPEC graphs show total energy consumption in J on the left and performance on the right. To get efficiency you need to divide the two right? It's not just absolute energy it's how much energy it takes for each unit of performance. In those tests it's showing the A12 takes 212 J/perf in the first and 107 in the second. The 980 is 368 and 157 respectively. Watts is energy over time, if one SoC can finish a given task faster then the total energy is less even if the peak is more. On a desktop or even tablet there may be cases of more sustained performance (although a high burst chip could just down clock or simply flat out offer better performance and just suggest plugging in), but phone workloads tend to be pretty bursty. Race-to-sleep isn't a bad strategy.Wilco1 - Monday, November 19, 2018 - link
The graph is very clear - 980 beats all other SoCs on efficiency. The energy bar is the total energy in Joules, so power in Watts (J/s) multiplied by time to finish (s), giving total Joules.tuxRoller - Tuesday, November 20, 2018 - link
Int: 9480JFp: 5337J
s.yu - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
I don't really agree about using performance mode for benchmarks, unless battery tests were also run on performance mode.Obviously if you use performance mode your device will be more snappy, at the cost of battery life, but since they're not governed under the same mode, the battery and performance benefits are mutually exclusive, you can't have both, so you literally can't have the snappy experience under performance mode for the time length determined by a non-performance mode battery test, therefore testing it this way is not representative of real world experience.
Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Everything, including the battery tests, were in performance mode. Huawei pretty much recommended it to run it like this. It's actually more of an issue that it's not enabled out of the box, and many reviewers actually fell for this new behaviour.s.yu - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Oh! In that case it's not a problem. I saw another site testing everything in non-performance mode and some people were complaining..s.yu - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
...but I'm still curious if changing the app signature would make a difference.