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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Lord of the Bored - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
It just looks like a piece of colored glass to me. I'm not convinced there's enough design to copy in the current pocket computer market.wheelman26 - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
"Huawei is the only Android manufacturer that is able to take advantage of full vertical integration of silicon and handsets." - There's also Samsung."Huawei’s first phone to push beyond 1080p" - In 2015 the Huawei-Google Nexus 6P had a 1440x250 display.
Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Samsung isn't vertically integrated, S.LSI has to compete with Qualcomm, and the mobile division doesn't seem to care much about what silicon is inside.As for the 6P, fair enough and true, but that wasn't by Huawei's decision to feature it.
Lolimaster - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Maybe because Huawei are only using in-house SOC vs Samsung with their fail Exynos line.s.yu - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
lol, Samsung should just license Andrei's scheduler already ;DQuantumz0d - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
"Imitation is the best form of flattery" well I still have to read up on the Kirin but this one. It really is bad statement from AT. Its like one doesn't care about how the uniqueness of anything matters its a shame tbh, free pass just like Pixels.Great times we live nowadays. Phones costing over $1000 planned obsolescence and lack of ownership (BL unlock) and lack of usefulness is best.
Speedfriend - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Am I reading it correctly that the A12 hits 5W+ at times versus the Kirin at 1.5-3.0 range. Does that mean that Apple is having to dissipate more heat. And in many benchmarks, the A12 has higher W than the A11 despite a move to 7nm, is this a trade off Apple is deciding to make in order to drive performance?Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Correct, yes, and yes.As long as the performance increase is bigger than the power increase, efficiency will still go up. Thermals in this case is just a secondary metric.
iwod - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
This is bad because A12 is using more power, and I cant imagine I can get any performance improvement next year. I guess there is only so much could be done?Lew Zealand - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
The A12 is using less power. It uses more instantaneous power but uses that higher power for a much shorter time to get the work done, so it uses less power overall for the same task and therefore the phone needs to dissipate less heat overall.