Hands on with Huawei's brand new smartphone, the Mate 20 Pro

Huawei Mate 20

Huawei's Mate 20 Pro is here. It's a high-end flagship phone to go up against the Google Pixel 3 XL and the iPhone XS Max, with a price tag of €1049 (priced at £899 in the UK and equivalent to $1,220).

The Chinese phone maker is a huge deal, even if it doesn't quite boast the brand recognition of Samsung or Apple. It is the second biggest smartphone maker in the world, behind Samsung, and has put major spend into crafting beautiful flagship devices.

You might already be familiar with Huawei's P series, an impressive range of Android phones updated earlier this year. Now there's the year-end Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro.

Here are the coolest new features on the Mate 20 Pro:

Qi-compatible phone-to-phone wireless charging which, in plain English, means you could wirelessly charge an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phone by placing it against a Mate 20 Pro.
Huawei lets you unlock your phone with your face through a facial recognition feature, similar to an iPhone.
There's also on-screen fingerprint recognition, which works smoothly on a first run.
A Leica-powered triple-lens camera intelligently tracks the subject of photos, has real-time video filters, and lets you take beautiful ultra-wide and close-up shots.
It launches with Android 9 Pie out of the box.
It's than the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max.

Business Insider spent a few days with the Mate 20 Pro. Here's what we took away from a first look.

The Mate 20 Pro is a jumbo phone with a curved, OLED, 6.39-inch screen.

We're firmly into phablet territory with this supersized phone. It isn't even the biggest of the updated range: Huawei, as its "one last thing," unexpectedly announced the Huawei Mate 20 X, a shameless copycat of the iPhone X branding and basically a tablet at 7.2 inches.

To someone who owns a comparatively modest 5.8-inch iPhone X (and happens to have an injured hand tendon), the size felt a little unwieldy. But if you spend your commutes glued to Netflix, the size, the screen's curved edges, and popping colours make this an excellent device.

Yes, there's a notch, but it's optional.

2018 is the year of the notch. Screens without big black borders are becoming a common design feature on flagship phones, but phone makers haven't quite worked out how to achieve a full-screen display and house a front-facing camera. Hence the notch.

For anyone especially displeased by the notch on the Mate 20 Pro, Huawei lets you switch it off. That feature keeps the bezel running evenly across the top of the phone.

An advanced chipset and interface update means the phone boasts impressive speed boosts.

Huawei is promising super speedy performance, thanks to its Kirin 980 chipset, which also packs a neural processing unit (NPU) for clever artificial intelligence features.

There's also an upgrade to EMUI 9, Huawei's homegrown interface. The company said users should be able to open apps much faster and navigate around the phone quicker.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider