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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tuxRoller - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
First, these phones are, at best, based on 4.14.Second, 4.20 is at least a month from release.
Third, what's Intel got to do with an article about a Huawei phone?
GreenReaper - Sunday, November 18, 2018 - link
They backported it to stable, too; but I agree, it's a little off-topic.tuxRoller - Monday, November 19, 2018 - link
OK. Not sure what happened to my comment...4.19 will, (very) likely, be the next base for aosp. So yes, currently that's stable. Of greater issue is that I see this patch being reverted (though something is going to get pulled). That was why I mentioned that 4.20 still has a month (or more) until it's released.
Beararam - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
https://threader(dot)app/thread/1051204370543648770?
Sanyogita - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
I know NOMU has been working on rugged phones for a long time, and this time the new product looks great and has a high level of protection.https://nomu.hk/
stanere - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
>also finally Huawei’s first phone to push beyond 1080phonor 8 pro and mate 9 pro had 2560x1440 screen
asfletch - Sunday, November 18, 2018 - link
Yep - and the Mate 10, which Andrei clearly has access to (official specs: https://consumer.huawei.com/au/phones/mate10/specs... Rest of the review was great, but odd oversight there.Incidentally, does Mate 20 not have the CABC issue? I remember the Mate 10 (LCD) suffering from it.... It's unfortunate about Huawei's CABC/calibration issues, because when I actually look at the Mate 20 in stores here, the screen is superficially very impressive. I don't know whether it's the lamination process or glass treatment or something, but IMHO icons/text really look 'printed on' in a way which eludes most other phone screens. M20 Pro has similar quality in this regard to my eyes, but I can't deal with curved screen edges.
(As an aside, a flat Galaxy S9 would have been my ideal phone and I was disappointed when the S9 Active was cancelled. These Mates and other top contenders are just huge).
Dan86 - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
Looks impressive, but, we shouldn't be buying Chinese crap, made by stealing intelectual property, cloning the note 9, and to make everything worst they will spy on you and store your data in a country were privacy doesnt exist due to the government power over companies, do you really want to buy this phone ???halcyon - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
Why shouldn't we? All companies steal IP (read Snowden's revelations, how NSA backdoors are used for industrial espionage). Chinese are not different. And USA/NSA read all your emails, SMS, listen on your phone doors and backdoor your Android phones.Just buy a phone that you are happy with. Leave the nationalistic politics for everybody else to decide (many nationalities, many points-of-view).
I'd buy Huawei Mate 20X, IF they allowed bootloader unlocking AND IF it was availabe in the 8GB/256GB model outside China (it is not).
The nano memory card is a proprietary joke at 128GB (current) max size, imho.
And lack of 3.5mm headphone on the Mate20Pro totally kills it for me.
Spying I couldn't care less about - there's nothing I can do abou it, whether on Samsung, Pixel, LG, Xiaomi or other device. Only if I buy a fully unlocked, rootable phone where I install LineageOS custom ROM (with crap camera drivers) can I *maybe* avoid some snooping. Even then, all the Google apps spy on me.
So, choose your poison, but don't expect that others are not poison too.
shompa - Sunday, November 18, 2018 - link
Dear Dan86. You are what's called a real racist. BTW: you know that every single phone is MADE in China? There are no fabs in US/EU. Intellectual property is a construct. You should ask why all this stuff is not made in your country (and I can give you a hint: it have nothing to do with the workforce like the politicians/companies says)