Mate 20 initial review - in the US on ATT

[DamianP]

After having the Mate 20(not pro!) I wanted to share my thoughts on the phone since there is very little in terms of reviews, and fewer still on a US carrier.

Build - Excellent - nice feel. Slightly shorter and wider than my Note 9. Compared to my old Mate 9, its almost identical to that in size, maybe a tiny bit narrower.

Screen - While not as punchy or vivid as an amoled, its a beautiful bright, vivid IPS LCD. The one thing I miss so far is AOD mode that an amoled can support, other than that I don't miss the Note 9's screen.

Speed - I have the 4GB version which concerned me a bit. I've spent the last 2 days loading up all my apps, including work stuff, work email, Okta, etc. No issues and damn its speedy and lag free from what I see so far.

Connectivity - No issues with ATT, I find I hit bands 2, 12, 17 with no issues. Comparing it to my Note 9 on ATT it has as good if not better antennas using the LTE discovery app to monitor signal strength. Wifi has been great, and so has bluetooth with my car, Plaintronics Legend connected at the same time.

Camera- Overall I like this camera. So much flexibility. Its certainly not in the same realm as the Pixel 2 XL(I have that as a comparison), but in most cases, I actually like the camera over the Note 9. (I find this to be subjective however). I'll do a more in depth comparison of the Mate 10 to the Note 9(and maybe Pixel 2XL) later on. Even the selfie camera is very good in my opinion.(especially compared to the old Mate 9 I had). Overall I like the color temp on the Mate 20 as it leans to the cooler side which I prefer.

Battery - OMG I love how this phone eliminates my battery anxiety! Blows away the Note 9 for SoT and standby time for MY typical usage. In the first 3 days, I was averaging 7-9 hours of SoT(projected). I couldn't kill the Mate 20 in a day for my usage which I could easily do with my Note 9, which was no slouch.

 

[Scienceguy Labs]

That's great. I'm good you're looking your phone. Huawei definitely upped their game with the new 20s.

 

[Tsepz_GP]

Great review!

Huawei definitely hit it out the park with these.

Absolutely agreed on the battery life, it's ludicrously good on these things, not to bash but it honestly makes me wonder what Samsung was doing wrong that they simply could not give us battery life like this on their phones even when they put larger batteries in them.

 

[DamianP]

I have found what I believe is a bug in chromecasting photos. When I cast a picture from google photos, first picture looks fine, if I scroll to more pics, the rest are low res. I tried this on 2 different chromecast target devices. Note 9 works fine in the same scenario.

 

[DamianP]

SoT and day where I tried to stress the battery and mimic a insanely busy day.

 

[DamianP]

Some further things I will comment about this phone:

Positive:
Camera continues to impress
Battery is still very good. 7-8 hours or SOT.

Negatives:
lock screen notifications still suck. seriously, what were they thinking.
memory management is very aggressive and sometimes affect app notifications.

Vibration motor seems week and no way to adjust.

theming engine is still a mess

Earpiece speaker for phone calls isn't as loud as other phones, it's noticable and I need to use it at Max volume to be acceptable.

LED notification light is kinda weak.