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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Sam31840 - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
I m confused ! Most websites consider that the mate 20 is excellent for photography, but according to anandtech review the results are not that good and below Pixel 3, iPhone X, etc. Who is right !s.yu - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
There are too many amateurs posting BS out on the web, Andrei examines samples very carefully and writes responsibly, a very rare feat in this day.In fact for almost all the reviews out there who provide full samples, either they cannot completely endorse the Huawei flagships(caveats are always ugly sharpening and extremely excessive NR, sometimes other instabilities and artifacts), or if they can, their conclusions can be disputed by closer scrutiny of their own samples provided. In which case they're either paid ads(which Huawei does both openly and secretly, a lot) or they don't actually have the necessary experience and/or training to be evaluating image quality.
Not to mention the sea of digital crap on youtube which have no merit whatsoever and only serve to mislead people more ignorant than the uploaders are.
shompa - Sunday, November 18, 2018 - link
most reviewers dont even have screens with 10bit uncompresses P3 wide color gamut. I never understood how all these reviewers with wrong color screens can do any real test of digital photography. There is a huge difference between what "looks good" and what have correct colors. Heck; 99%+ of Win PCs have screens with compressed/wrong colors. 2017 I could not find a single PC laptop with a color correct screen, something Apple had since 2015.s.yu - Tuesday, November 20, 2018 - link
In terms of assessing color, that is. Many already make enough mistakes regarding detail retention/noise reduction, DR, that's hardly anything to do with the screen.Sam31840 - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
" The regular Mate 20’s camera is largely unimpressive and struggles to differentiate itself much from the competition. "melgross - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
I find that a lot of sites really understand so little about photography that their conclusions are useless. Anandtech is better than most. I prefer professional photo sites in this, but not all bother with smartphones, and if they do, it’s usually just the Apple, Google and Samsung models.s.yu - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
I fully agree. DPR stayed out of the whole business by only uploading a few samples without a full review or comparison, most other sites are only good for their full size samples for personal comparison. Those without full size sample are almost totally useless.Lolimaster - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
When the mate20X?Even the 5.8" screen of my S9 (actually 5.25"~ for 16:9, new wide phones only grew in vertical area) seems a bit on the small side.
Lolimaster - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Those screens of the Mate 20 should never leaved the factory and marked as defective.It's sad how people pay over $700 for a phone just to get a shitty screen. Companies are happy, people don't complain in mass from the main thing they will see everyday on their device.
mayankleoboy1 - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
OTlinux kernel 4.20 has a 30% hit on Intel CPU's due to the STIBP mitigation
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&...