By Tobias Isakeit • Difficulty: Moderate
Right in the middle of the grand finale of this year’s flagship smartphone season, Huawei throws their last big fighter into the ring: the Mate 20 Pro! On paper, it looks more powerful than ever—but only a teardown will tell if it’s a true champion or just a poser.
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- Here's what the Mate 20 Pro brings to the ring:
- 6.39" AMOLED display with a resolution of 3120 × 1440 (~538 ppi)
- Huawei Kirin 980 chipset: Mali-G76 MP10 GPU and an octa-core CPU (2x 2.6 GHz Cortex-A76 cores, 2x 1.92 GHz Cortex-A76 cores, and 4x 1.8 GHz Cortex-A55 cores)
- Triple rear cameras: 40 MP ƒ/1.8, 20 MP ƒ/2.2, and 8 MP ƒ/2.4 lens with 5x optical zoom
- 24 MP ƒ/2.0 selfie cam
- IP68 dust/water ingress rating
- Android 9.0 (PIE)
- Facial recognition hardware, and an under-display fingerprint sensor
- Face to face with Huawei's champion from last season, the Mate 20 Pro sports a newly notched, curved display.
- The Mate 20 Pro swaps out the rear fingerprint sensor for a third camera. But is three enough to keep up with the competition?
- Our Mate 20 Pro is dressed up in the industry-standard glass sandwich, but the rear glass isn't quite as standard as it looks. Huawei applied a non-slip, fingerprint-resistant coating to help prevent slippery accidents.
- The Mate 10 Pro's loudspeaker holes give way to the the SIM and NM card tray in the Mate 20 Pro.
- Undaunted by a fragile rear glass panel thanks to recent teardowns of glue-filled competitors, we grab our heat gun and get to work.
- Some heat helps the Mate 20 Pro to relax before our standard tools finish the job!
- Thanks to the relocated fingerprint reader, there's no danger of tearing delicate flex cables while removing the rear cover.
- We just got here and we're already facing one of the Mate 20 Pro's new features—the bi-directional wireless charging coil.
- Eight screws later, we remove the midframe assembly, which is home to the wireless charging coil, the NFC antenna and the dual-LED dual-tone flash.
- At first glance, the motherboard looks free to jump right out, but a closer look reveals nine flex cables holding it in place, plus an antenna cable.
- Like the P20 Pro, the Mate 20 Pro sticks to a relatively small motherboard, leaving room for a wider battery.
- With the 3D face unlock hardware and the triple rear camera taking up more motherboard space than usual, Huawei had to cut some camera holes and change the layout a bit.
- After prying away some
loving armsflex cables, we manage to remove the motherboard along with the rear cameras.
- ...which are easily removed after disconnecting two additional flex cables. Praise our good old friend the spudger!
- The Mate 20 Pro has three rear cameras:
- Top right: 40 MP, ƒ/1.8, 27 mm-equivalent wide angle lens
- Bottom right: 20 MP, ƒ/2.2, 16 mm-equivalent ultra wide angle lens
- Bottom left: 8 MP, ƒ/2.4, 80 mm-equivalent telephoto lens with 5x optical zoom
- The P20 Pro's monochromatic camera is ditched for an ultra wide angle lens, ideal for landscape and macro shots (at a minimum focal distance of 2.5 cm).
- With the cameras out of the way, the motherboard takes center stage. Here's what it has to offer:
- Toshiba THGAF8T0T43BAIR 128 GB Universal Flash Storage
- HiSilicon Hi6421 power management IC
- Skyworks SKY78130-21 front-end module for WCDMA/LTE bands 8/12/13/20/26/27
- Skyworks SKY78132-52 front-end module for WCDMA/LTE bands 7/30/40/41
- Skyworks SKY78131-21 front-end module for WCDMA/LTE bands 1/2/3/4/25/34/39
- Skyworks 7360-2A 04115.1 1821 MX RF module
- HiSilicon Hi6422 envelope tracker
- On the backside we found:
- SKhynix H9HKNNNEBMBUDR-NEH LPDDR4 (likely with Huawei Kirin 980 layered underneath)
- NXP Semiconductor PN80T NFC controller w/ secure element
- HiSilicon Hi1103 Wi-Fi chipset
- HiSilicon Hi6363 RF transceiver
- Texas Instruments TPS1879C1 display power management (likely)
- ON Semiconductor FSA4476 USB type-C analog switch
- ON Semiconductor NLAS2750 dual DPDT analog switch
- We snoop around the notch area and pull out the familiar-looking front camera / 3D face unlock assembly. It doesn't seem to completely mate up with what Huawei showed during their launch event, but our best guesses include:
- Dot projector
- 24 MP, ƒ/2.0, 26 mm-equivalent lens, borrowed from the P20 series
- Rangefinder / proximity sensor
- Flood illuminator
- Ambient light sensor
- IR camera
- Rectangle of mystery
- We use a pair of tweezers to dig out the last bits behind the motherboard.
- The missing piece: a small interconnect board for the power and volume buttons. We find the following chips:
- IDT P9221 wireless power receiver
- Lattice Semiconductor iCE40LM1K-CM36 iCE40 FPGA
- Cirrus Logic CS35L35A audio amplifier
- Texas Instruments LM3644 1.5 A camera flash LED driver
- With the Mate's brains dissected, it's time to head towards the other end of the phone and check out its fancy footwork.
- SIM trays aren't ordinarily exciting, but this tray happens to support a new memory card format called nano memory (NM).
- The new NM cards are nano-SIM sized expandable memory (45% smaller than a normal SD card) and can offer a maximum read speed of 95 MB/s.
- The smaller format also allows this SIM/NM tray to be smaller than a traditional dual-card tray.
- Just like in the P20 Pro, the USB-C charging port is mounted to a large flex cable. This means if the charging port fails, you'll only have to replace the main cable—instead of a more expensive daughterboard, as in the Google Pixel 3 XL.
- Another similarity to the P-Series: no 3.5 mm headphone jack. USB-C headphones are included along with a 3.5 mm adapter.
- The other port, a SIM reader, is mounted to a small board, and planted near the coin-style vibration motor.
- Moving swiftly along, we take a closer look at the Mate's power plant.
- To our surprise, we find some orange pull tabs on the left side of the battery, containing a short guide how to remove it—we love guides!
- We're happy whenever we can extract a battery without having to break out our iFixit Adhesive Remover—in this case, we just needed a little help from an iOpener to unseat it.
- The battery weighs in at an unprecedented 16.04 Wh (4,200 mAh at 3.82 V).
- We unleash a multi-headed heat-gun serpent—we named it Pat—which blasts through the curved display's IP68-rated adhesive.
- There is one last big secret we need to explore to give Huawei's newest fighter a ranking—the 3120 x 1440 pixel, 19.5:9 ratio (~538 ppi density) display!
- An opening pick or eleven dramatically improves this smartphone's aerodynamics, and helps us pry up the display.
- Thought we were done already? Not yet! Last, but certainly not least, let's take a closer look at Huawei's new finger-reading tech.
- The fingerprint sensor is made by Goodix and sits under the AMOLED panel, though Goodix markets the tech as an "in-display fingerprint sensor™".
- The fingerprint flex cable contains a Goodix GM181 fingerprint controller.
- The sensor isn't capacitive (like most familiar sensors such as Touch ID), but optical. This is reportedly similar to the sensor found in the new OnePlus 6T.
- And underneath the display: a Synaptics S3718 touchscreen controller.
- That's it! The fight is finished, and we retreat to our corner. There will always be new challengers in the smartphone market, but this round is now at an end.
- If you would like a nifty wallpaper as a souvenir, you can find one here!
- The Huawei Mate 20 Pro earns a 4 out of 10 on our repairability scale (10 is the easiest to repair):
- Many components are modular and can be replaced independently.
- Battery replacement requires removing only the back panel and midframe.
- Only standard Phillips screws are used along with an average amount of adhesive.
- Because of the sandwich build around the motherboard, there are more flex connectors than average and repairs will consume more time.
- Glued-down front and back glass means greater risk of breakage while making repairs difficult to start.
- Screen repairs require a lot of disassembly while battling tough adhesive.
- A broken screen probably means you need to replace the fingerprint reader as well, or vice versa.