Huawei Mate 20 Pro

From a distance, you may mistake the Huawei Mate 20 Pro for Samsung's flagships. That's because the handset not only comes with a dual-curved display on the fascia, but the rear surface is also symmetrically curved. We're not complaining, considering this design choice lends the handset a premium appeal. Look closely however, and you'll notice that unlike the Korean behemoth's offerings, the Huawei phone has a notch up top and the back has an attention-catching gradient hue.

Huawei's P20 Pro was the world's first handset with triple rear cameras. However, since then a lot of phones have launched that boast three snappers on their back, and there's even a smartphone that has four rear shooters! So to match up to the competition, the Mate 20 Pro has slightly changed camera configuration as compared to the P20 Pro. You do get a 40-megapixel primary camera, but instead of a monochrome sensor, there's a 10-megapixel wide-angle lens, while the third one continues to be a telephoto sensor rated at 8-megapixel. The Leica-certified camera setup is combined with AI goodness to make a potent pocket shooter. In terms of videos, the device is capable of shooting 4K videos at 60fps, while the super slow-mo mode can be recorded at 720p at 960fps.

Huawei has always prided itself on using its in-house silicon in its smartphones, however till now, the brand was always lagging behind the rivals (like Qualcomm and Apple). But this year, the Chinese titan was the first company to introduce a 7nm chipset in the form of the Kirin 980 SoC at IFA (it's a different matter that Apple actually became the first company to launch smartphones utilising 7nm chips).

It was only last year that Android flagships used to have a battery capacities ranging between 3,000mAh and 3,500mAh. But this year, we've seen quite a few premium offerings with a 4,000mAh cell. One-upping them is the Huawei Mate 20 Pro as it draws power from a beefy 4,200mAh unit. The capacity ensures that the phone can last a day and then some more even with a heavy usage. Charged fully in the morning, the smartphone was able to have some juice left in the tank by the time I went to the bed with my usage comprising streaming podcasts or watching videos via Bluetooth, using Wi-Fi hotspot, making use of GPS, gaming for 15 to 20 minutes along with calls and messages and being connected to the internet through 4G or Wi-Fi. In our 91mobiles battery test, the phone was able to playback a 720p video on loop for 17 hours and 45 minutes with both brightness and volume set at 50 percent. While this might not be the best result we've seen, it's certainly quite impressive.