I compared it extensively against the Pixel 3 XL and Galaxy Note 9, and I found that Huawei’s hardware just doesn’t have the dynamic range of the other two. Even with Huawei’s gaming mode active, which turns up the processor to maximum, battery consumption and heat weren’t much higher. Even if it doesn’t come with any interactive elements (like the squeeze-to-activate HTC U11 Edge Sense), the curved screen admittedly gives the Pro a classy, if unoriginal, look.

Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian View image in fullscreen The Mate 20 Pro is a smorgasbord of advanced features smushed into a beautiful, slim and light beast of a phone. That’s a fairly standard flagship spec these days, but it gives you some peace of mind that it can survive a splash. 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. You can't see the sensor with your naked eye, and there's absolutely no way of telling it's there when the screen's on.

Huawei’s system works swiftly and reliably, especially compared to Samsung’s combination of iris and face recognition, which I find is slower and more easily confused. Still, Huawei is ushering in the age of in-screen fingerprints, which deserves praise for keeping the front screen lean and clean. Both models utilise the Kirin 980 system-on-chip, an octa-core SoC featuring Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A55 CPU cores, Mali-G76 MP10 GPU, and a pair of AI accelerators. In sunny weather the phone captured rich blue skies, with plenty of detail remaining in the shadows.

That helps make for a more immersive screen experience, plus the curved glass sides are an alluring touch. Huawei claims image sensors have gotten so good that it no longer needs the help of the secondary sensor to deliver sharpness and detail in its photos from the main camera. Samsung’s simplified Android settings menu tends to end each section with a “Looking for something else? It's still great to have the fingerprint reader as a backup, especially for situations when it's inconvenient to hold the phone to your face. These include a standard Black, a cream-colored Pink Gold and the signature Huawei blue-fading-to-purple Twilight.A few tiny issues aside this phone is near perfect and should be your next handset if you're looking for an Android flagship. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. Huawei also has its own version of Google’s digital wellbeing tools showing you how long you use your phone, which apps, how many times you unlock it and with the ability to set limits.