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Three cameras and a bonkers charging trick? Meet the Huawei Mate 20 Pro

It's easy on the eye as well.

Andrew Lanxon
Andrew is CNET's go-to guy for product coverage and lead photographer for Europe. When not testing the latest phones, he can normally be found with his camera in hand, behind his drums or eating his stash of home-cooked food. Sometimes all at once.
Andrew Lanxon
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The Huawei Mate 20 Pro is Huawei's answer to the Samsung Galaxy Note 9. It's a 6.39-inch phone packed with top tech, including three rear cameras and an in-screen fingerprint scanner.

Plus, it'll wirelessly charge other phones. You read that right. 

The Mate 20 Pro is joined by the standard Mate 20, which looks similar but lacks some of the Pro's exciting new tricks, such as the new fingerprint scanner and two-way charging. 

Pricing and availability hasn't been announced at the time of writing, but we expect to hear more in the coming days.

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The Mate 20 Pro has a 6.39-inch display with a 3,120x1,440-pixel resolution.

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There are three cameras in that square. A wide-angle 40-megapixel camera, a telephoto 8-megapixel camera and a super wide-angle one with a 20-megapixel resolution. 

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The screen stretches right to the edge of the phone and, of course, there's a notch at the top.

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At least there's not much of a chin on the bottom edge of the phone.

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The standard Mate 20, however, has a tiny teardrop notch and a larger (although less narrow) 6.53-inch, 2,224x1,080-pixel screen.

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An interesting new feature in the Mate 20 Pro is a fingerprint scanner built into the display itself. It worked well in our hands-on time, although how convenient it is to use in a hurry remains to be seen.

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Both phones charge with USB-C.

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As well as being able to charge the Pro with wireless charging, you can also use the Pro to wirelessly charge other phones. I tried it with an iPhone X and iPhone XS and it worked well.

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Both the Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro come in this neat bottle green colour.

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The camera has the same AI scene recognition we've seen on other recent Huawei phones such as the P20 Pro. It automatically applies what it thinks are the best settings to get the right shot in a given scene.

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It detects scenes very quickly.

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By default you can zoom in 3x or 5x, or you can crop into the image further, up to a ridiculous 10x -- although don't expect much detail out of the resulting image.

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The small notch on the Mate 20 is inoffensive enough. It's just big enough for the front-facing camera. The Pro's is larger to include the face-detection technology that it uses for face unlock, much like the iPhone X.

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Both phones are slim and comfortable to hold.

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The flash fills in the final corner of the camera square on the back.

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The phones are built from glass and glossy metal. 

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This deep blue colour looks great as well.

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Both the Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro run on Huawei's latest, highest performance Kirin 980 processor.

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The Mate 20 has a 4,000-mAh battery while the Pro has a 4,200 one. 

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Click or swipe through to see lots more of both phones.

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