Battery and camera — Huawei Mate 20 Pro review
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Battery
The Mate 20 Pro has a gigantic 4,200mAh battery, and you can probably guess how this section will go. Through our testing, it lasted through continuous media, browsing, location and audio crunch, though watching streaming video took decent bites out of its charge.
There are plenty of options to extend battery life, though you’ll have to plumb the extensive nest of Mate 20 Pro settings to finagle your ideal power-saving setup. The OS suggests actions like offering to stop some charge-hungry apps from operating in the background, but you can also manually toggle options like downgrading the resolution or setting the phone to monochrome.
We got more than a day-and-a-half battery life with normal use and our lab tests back up this claim. We ran an HD video for 90 minutes at the phone’s maximum resolution and brightness, and the Mate 20 Pro only lost 10% charge. That marginally outperforms every modern smartphone put through the same test except the iPhone X. Granted, the iPhone XS, Samsung Note 9 and Galaxy S9 Plus only lost a few more percent battery, but other notable phones did worse: the Google Pixel 3 lost 18% and the HTC U12 Plus lost 27%.
So long as you’re near a power outlet, you won’t have cause to worry about running out of juice. Each Mate 20 Pro comes with a 40W SuperCharger, which Huawei claims will juice up 70% charge in just 30 minutes – a lofty claim that does represent the blisteringly-fast charging we’ve experienced. (Okay, we only got around 68% charge, but who’s counting?)
The Mate 20 Pro supports Qi wireless charging, opening it up to a wide range of cradles and mats that promise slow yet cord-free charging.
That capability opens up the Mate 20 Pro to a world-first for smartphones: charge other devices.
Nestled inconveniently deep in the Mate 20 Pro settings is the option to turn on “reverse wireless charging” – aka, spewing out battery life to any other Qi-equipped device.
The process is admirably effortless: turn the feature on, place the Mate 20 Pro and the desired energy recipient back-to-back, and in less than a second, the latter is charging. It even works through cases.
It’s a cool effect, but I can’t see people using it that often – or without a fight. Rare is the smartphone user selfless enough to voluntarily part with that much precious battery life.
It’s not a terribly practical solution, either. Given how slow wireless charging is compared to juicing up through cables, you’d have to keep the Mate 20 Pro and recipient device sandwiched together for some time. That’s bad news for anyone who frequently checks their phone, which, these days, is everyone.
But all in all, it’s a neat party trick that minorly pushes the smartphone industry forward.
Just don’t expect other device makers to jump on this bandwagon – or, if you run into anyone packing a Mate 20 Pro, for them to donate some charge for a poor soul down on their battery life.
Camera
Let’s face it: if you’re considering a top-tier smartphone, you have high expectations for cameras – and little tolerance for underperformers. The good news is that the Mate 20 Pro will satisfy your thirst for great photos.
Credit where credit is due: the P20 Pro ushered in this era of great Huawei cameras, and the Mate 20 Pro inherits its 40MP wide-angle f/1.8 lens and 8MP, f/2.4 3x telephoto with OIS. Once again, the rear cameras all have Leica lenses, though unlike the P20, the front ones do not.
Rounding out that trio of rear-facing cameras is the new star, an ultra-wide 16MP, f/2.2 lens. It expands the phone’s toolbox, letting us take a wider array of photos from limited positions. Even for casual shooting, it made life easier when trying to fit a bunch of far-flung elements in the same photo.
Left to right: ultra-wide lens, 1x standard lens and 3x optical zoom lens
The ultra-wide-angle lens isn’t without drawbacks: the edges of shots can be slightly warped, and it doesn’t seem to benefit from the semi-HDR contrast effects that benefit shots taken with the other lenses. The LG V40 wide-angle lens largely lacked this distortion, had less noise and had a bit better color mix, though LG has had more experience with wide-angle lenses.
Otherwise, the Mate 20 Pro takes good-to-great photos. In a comparative test between half a dozen top smartphones, the Mate 20 Pro held its own, though its standard photo mode struggled with contrast, resulting in blown-out bright spots in the background.
Expect to lose a little light contrast and background nuance if you’re shooting in gray or low-light situations. In this niche, the Google Pixel 3 and iPhone XS are better. But the Mate 20 Pro’s overall low-light performance is superior to that of most other smartphones we tested, especially with its seconds-long-exposure Night Mode.
This isn’t too surprising given how much the P20 Pro’s monochrome sensor improved its low-light photos.
As with the P20 Pro, the cameras excel with depth-of-field. Forget portrait and go for the Aperture mode, which lets you dramatically shift focus around so long as your subject is within five or ten feet. As before, light contrasts between foreground and background probably won’t look great. It’s worth toying with focal length for a bit, especially up close: we found the camera can focus on objects even a few inches away (hint: use the manual focus in Pro Mode).
The phone’s 3x telephoto does a great job of snagging distant shots, and the hybrid 5x zoom adds a digital blend to give you a bit more reach. It’s not perfect, but in our comparative testing, it outdid some digital-only zooms like on the Google Pixel 3.
Optics aren’t the only thing helping out the Mate 20 Pro cameras. The new Kirin 980 chip has two neural processing units (NPUs) that use AI to help you when the camera app is open, like detecting objects and automatically applying filters.
This culminates in a toggle-on Master AI mode that automatically picks the best mode to shoot in, though we didn’t find that it improved our shots.
Otherwise, the camera suite has plenty of extra modes, including a document scanner and HiVision, the Google Lens-like feature that recognizes things in the real world. The Microsoft-powered mode takes a bit of time to function and, at this juncture, isn’t quick or accurate enough to do more than take a stab at an object’s identity — or where you can buy something like it. The translate function is clever but likewise unrefined.
Predictably, Huawei introduced its own Animoji-style animal overlay for faces (nestled in the camera app’s AR mode), which is fine but not nearly as precise as the real deal on iPhone X and XS.
The Mate 20 Pro has something even more novel in store, though it hasn’t been added to the device yet: on stage at the Mate 20 Pro launch event, Huawei used the phone’s cameras to scan an object and generate a 3D model of it to place in photos.
Not something terribly useful, but fun if you wanted to bring your neighbor’s lawn gnome with you on a world tour without, y’know, lugging around a real gnome.
Huawei Mate 20 Pro: Price Comparison
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Battery and camera
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David is now a mobile reporter at Cnet.
Formerly Mobile Editor, US for TechRadar, he covered phones, tablets, and wearables. He still thinks the iPhone 4 is the best-looking smartphone ever made. He’s most interested in technology, gaming and culture – and where they overlap and change our lives. His current beat explores how our on-the-go existence is affected by new gadgets, carrier coverage expansions, and corporate strategy shifts.
Battery Life — Contrasting Two Models
by Andrei Frumusanuon November 16, 2018 8:10 AM EST
- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Mobile
- Kirin 980
- Mate 20
- Mate 20 Pro
141 Comments
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141 Comments
Introduction & DesignThe Kirin 980 — A Recap OverviewFirst Cortex-A76 SoC — SPEC2006 Performance & EfficiencySecond Generation NPU — NNAPI TestedSystem PerformanceGPU Performance & PowerDisplay Measurement & PowerBattery Life — Contrasting Two ModelsCamera — Daylight EvaluationCamera — Daylight EvaluationCamera — Low Light EvaluationCamera Video RecordingConclusion & End Remarks
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.
Display Measurement & Power
Camera — Daylight Evaluation
Introduction & DesignThe Kirin 980 — A Recap OverviewFirst Cortex-A76 SoC — SPEC2006 Performance & EfficiencySecond Generation NPU — NNAPI TestedSystem PerformanceGPU Performance & PowerDisplay Measurement & PowerBattery Life — Contrasting Two ModelsCamera — Daylight EvaluationCamera — Daylight EvaluationCamera — Low Light EvaluationCamera Video RecordingConclusion & End Remarks
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Testing Huawei Mate 50 Pro.
The whole truth about the best camera phone
Testing Huawei Mate 50 Pro. The whole truth about the best camera phone
Gadgets
November 27, 2022
By: Marina Dianova
I wanted to support this next Huawei miracle in my hands.
In October, DxOMark labs announced the camera test result of the Huawei Mate 50 Pro smartphone, which took first place in the global ranking with a score of 149points. The second and third places are shared by the new smartphones Honor Magic4 Ultimate and Google Pixel 7 Pro, which scored 147 points each. The iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, which scored 146 each, tied for fourth and fifth place.
Decent design
Huawei Mate 50 Pro comes in two main options — leather, or rather eco-leather, and glass. Orange Mate , which came to our review, received a glass front panel and an eco-leather back panel. The black and silver models use glass panels on both sides.
I liked the color and style of the back. The only remark is that this orange color, in our opinion, does not harmonize with the gold edging along the contour of the smartphone. Agree that nothing better than a combination of gold and black has not yet been invented. nine0005
The smartphone has an IP68 rating and can survive in water at a depth of 2 m for 30 minutes. But wait, there is one twist. In the orange version (which we have), a special glass Kunlun is installed on the screen — this is the company’s own development. It is claimed to be very drop resistant, 10 times better than the glass used in other versions of the Mate 50 Pro . No less impressive is the improved water resistance — the orange Mate 50 Pro can dive into water to a depth of 6 meters and survive. So far, iPhones have been the only non-secure phones to make that kind of promise. Neither the first nor the second statement dared to check. nine0005
Mate 50 Pro The , like previous models, has an aluminum frame that you can see and feel on the sides.
The metal is impressively thin on the left and right sides at just 2mm, while the top and bottom are just as thick as the phone itself at around 8-9mm. The Huawei has been releasing curved flagships with a sleek design for some time now, and the new Mate 50 Pro doesn’t break that trend. In fact, the new Mate borrows many key elements from recent flagships — a curved front with a long screen cutout, a curved leather back and even a circular camera island
Decent autonomy
Huawei Mate 50 Pro is powered by a 4700 mAh battery. In our battery life test, the Mate 50 Pro achieved a score of 104 hours, making it an excellent flagship. Mate 50 Pro The performed admirably on screen tests, lasting over 15 hours of web browsing and over 17 hours of video playback.
Smartphone supports 66-watt wired charging and 50-watt wireless. From 15 to 100% the battery is fed through the wire in half an hour.
In 15 minutes, you can replenish about 45% of the battery charge. It takes a little over 40 minutes to fully restore energy to the gadget. The Smart Charge feature allows you to limit the recharge rate when it reaches 80% or any other mark. When the charge drops to 1%, the smartphone goes into a killer saving mode: it cuts off everything superfluous, but it will last another 3 hours in standby mode and give 12 minutes of emergency calls. nine0005
Unique chamber
Now about the main thing: about the cameras, because of which the Huawei Mate 50 Pro was named the best camera phone in the world. They, of course, deserve a separate review, but you will have to somehow get together and briefly talk about all the available features here and now.
Module set as follows:
• 50MP main lens (f/1.4 ~ f/4.0, OIS)
• 64MP telephoto lens (f/3.5, OIS)
• 13MP wide angle lens (f/2.2)
• 13 MP front camera (f/2.
2)
The main camera of the Mate 50 Pro is a 50-megapixel Sony IMX766 RYYB sensor with optical and electronic stabilization. The main feature of the module is a lens with a variable aperture, which changes from f/1.4 to f/4.0 (For comparison, the iPhone 14 Pro had f/1.78, the iPhone 13 Pro had f/1.5). In auto mode, the camera, depending on the shooting conditions, adjusts the aperture itself. For example, selecting f/1.4 produces natural bokeh, while increasing the setting to f/4.0 allows you to keep more objects in focus. nine0005
Although the Mate 50 Pro is not the first phone to offer variable aperture, it is the first to have such a complex implementation — previous solutions (Samsung Galaxy S9) used two fixed stops, while the Huawei offers ten stops, which should be enough even for the most demanding smartphone users.
The main camera can take pictures at a maximum resolution of 8192×6144.
In addition, it is possible to save photos in RAW format, which later gives more space for editing pictures without losing quality. I note that for this you will need to switch. The camera phone has a telephoto lens that allows you to zoom in on objects without losing quality. Zooming too close activates the digital zoom, but the results are still impressive. Just think — there’s a 100x digital zoom option here! It is clear that in this mode, this periscope produces a very blurry picture, but you can still read, for example, the name of a store or consider a bird on a tree. But we are talking about extremes, of course. A more adequate 10x approximation is much more rational and justified, and the image looks really good at the same time. nine0005
The third module is a 13-megapixel ultra-wide lens with a decent aperture of f/2.2. In addition to the 120-degree capture angle, it boasts autofocus. From here follows the macro mode: when you bring your smartphone 3-5 meters to the object, the macro turns on automatically.
Shooting in low light conditions is what the Huawei Mate 50 Pro makes you fall in love with. During continuous shooting, the smartphone does not “think”, it increases the clarity of the image using the XD Fusion Pro algorithm. Plus — XMAGE technology, which connects proprietary algorithms for adjusting optics and further color reproduction of the image. nine0005
And finally, all three modules can shoot video in 4K 60 fps. It feels like stabilization works smoother, there are no jerks between frames. In 4K 60fps mode, you can smoothly switch between main unit and zoom. The front camera also supports this frequency.
Of course, a cameraphone is not a camera. Yes, the smartphone can be tricky, twisting the saturation with HDR or giving out digital “blunders” in excessively dark areas of the image. But if this happened on the first frame, then on the second everything will be fine. nine0005
You can also turn the settings in the «pro» mode, even necessary.
The results may surprise you! But even an advanced user sometimes wants to press one button and get a masterpiece. Here it is possible.
Instead of totals
The advantages of the Huawei Mate 50 Pro include one of the best cameras on the market, a top-end screen, flagship hardware and IP68 water resistance. But the ideal model can not be called. In particular, the large notch design looks dated compared to the competition. The selfie module, which does not support portrait mode, is also puzzling. But the lack of Google services for someone can even be a plus. Too, perishing, gluttonous services
And about pleasant little things
The Huawei Mate 50 Pro paid great attention to the security of your data. In addition to the standard fingerprint scanner and face recognition, other cybersecurity methods have been added here. So, you can scan your smartphone for existing dangers, the smartphone automatically updates virus databases to quickly detect malware.
You can also choose to encrypt your data and organize hidden files and folders so that confidential information remains private no matter what. nine0005
A little more about face recognition: a 3D face scanner is used to unlock the phone. My heart sank when it disappeared in Huawei P50 Pro, but returned in Mate 50 Pro . Right now, only two companies have this technology: Apple and Huawei. The 3D face scanner is more reliable than the 2D one, it works in pitch darkness (there is an IR sensor) and does not blind the eyes with the backlight of the screen. Even wearing a mask recognizes.
How to Fix Bad Battery Life on Huawei Mate 8
The following is part of the deal on how to fix the poor battery life of the Huawei Mate 8 smartphone. It was released on November 26, 2015 in China and worldwide in the first quarter of 2016.
The phone has a smooth back that looks like it could be slippery, but I had no problems using it.
This is a surprise given the size — it measures 157 x 80 x 7.9mm, so it’s not a small phone. It’s supposed to fit a 6-inch display, but the bezels have been trimmed down enough that the phone isn’t much larger than the screen itself.
The accompanying documentation will reveal several ways to fix the terrible battery life of Huawei Mate 8:
Disable or control background sync Mate 8. The most ideal approach to fix a fast draining battery on Huawei Mate 8 is to close these apps when not in use. It should be possible by pulling down Quick Settings, swiping down with two fingers, and tapping Sync to loosen it. nine0012
Reduce Modem
Reduce the time of binding that is completed or in progress on your Huawei Mate 8. Yes, modem is unusual for connecting various gadgets to the Internet, but this item quickly drains the battery of Huawei Mate 8. The most ideal approach to drain the Huawei Mate 8 battery is to turn off the modem or reduce the time during which it is used.
Disable Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi kills Huawei Mate 8 battery if left on during the day. It’s a smart plan to turn Wi-Fi off when not in use. Also, during periods when 3G/4G/LTE is used for the Internet, turn off Wi-Fi on the grounds that there is no need to turn it on when not in use.
Disable LTE, Location, Bluetooth
Using the internet for things like location, LTE internet, and Bluetooth really drains your Huawei Mate 8 battery very quickly. At some point, you will need these administrative functions, but while they are not required, try disabling them and see how much it increases the battery life of your Huawei Mate 8. and also reduces the battery life. For those who have no desire to turn off the location function (GPS), put your smartphone in power saving mode. Bluetooth is another huge silent battery killer. nine0012
Replacement for TouchWiz Launcher
TouchWiz launcher not only drains the Huawei Mate 8 battery, but also takes up a lot of memory and is always hidden from view.