(Silence)
[Scratching sounds]
Welcome to the teardown of my favorite musical phone, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro.
Also the winner of MKBHD's blind smartphone camera test.
The Mate 20 Pro is a powerful triple camera flagship that's not even sold in the United
States.
Today we're going to be taking apart this beast of a phone and reviewing it from the
inside.
It's packed with a quite a few unique little quirks.
Let's get started.
[Intro]
Huawei calls this back panel hyper optical, and it has a special textured musical glass
and a pretty vibrant psychedelic color scheme that stands out quite a bit.
You can always stealth mode the phone with a dbrand skin which sticks to the textured
glass panel just fine.
So if you need a little less vibrancy in your life, or just a more professional looking
design, the Mate 20 Pro might not be coming to the U.S., but dbrand ships internationally
and includes free shipping to India with orders over $20.00.
Check out the dbrand link in the description.
Thanks to dbrand for sponsoring this teardown.
Let's get inside.
If you remember from my durability test, the tolerance between the glass and the metal
frame is super tight, and that's true for even the back panel.
Using quite a bit of heat, it was still really hard to get my razor blade to slip between
the metal and the glass.
The super strong ip68 adhesive underneath didn't help much either.
Eventually I was able to use my suction cup and metal pry tools to completely separate
the back panel from the phone revealing the rather aesthetic insides of the Mate 20 Pro.
A clear version of this phone would be pretty phenomenal.
Metal is covering all the inside camera units, and the thick copper wires are also musical
and can receive and emit wireless charging.
Super impressive.
There are 8 screws surrounding the top metal plate.
I'll keep these organized as I set them off to the side.
Tool kits in the description.
There is one little ribbon cable attached to the camera LED that needs to be unplugged,
then the whole wireless charger is free.
It has some little gold contact pads on the back that allow the power to flow to and from
the internal battery for wireless charging.
Speaking of which, I'll unplug that battery, along with the 4 other ribbon connections
down on the bottom row of the motherboard.
They all unclip like a little Lego.
The top of the motherboard has another row of 4 Lego style ribbon connectors.
Once those are released, the whole motherboard can pull away from the phone body, revealing
some of that bubblegum style goopy thermal paste.
The Mate 20 Pro uses the metal frame of the phone as a heat sink.
There are no copper heat pipes.
One of the major selling points of the Mate 20 Pro is the triple camera set up on the
back.
It has the full menagerie of wide-angle telephoto zoom and normal camera lenses.
All of which are located in a single combined metal housing.
Only one of which though has optical image stabilization.
The 8 megapixel telephoto camera is the only camera that compensates for shakiness.
The 20 megapixel ultra wide and 40 megapixel main lens have no physical stabilization.
The top earpiece is pretty unique – it has one little screw holding it in place.
The interesting part is that the bulk of the speaker is placed far below the small grille
location, which is actually a good thing.
Bigger speakers allow for better sound, and Huawei is just utilizing that extra space
below the grille.
One thing that most smartphones don't come with these days is an IR blaster.
It's literally just a remote control built into your smartphone.
It's got an infrared LED built directly onto the motherboard.
This shines through the opaque plastic circle on top of the phone to communicate with your
TV, VCR, or DVD player.
Let's make our way down to the bottom of the phone.
Another 7 screws holding everything in place down here.
I'll pull out the unfortunate proprietary Huawei nano memory card tray, then I can pull
the bottom loudspeaker up and away from the phone.
The fascinating thing about this speaker is that it emits sound directly out of the USBC
charging port – literally injecting it's sound out through the watertight mesh into
the charging port canal itself.
Which is fine in theory, but what happens when you want to charge your phone and listen
to music?
The charging port literally plugs your speaker up and makes it sound like music is playing
out of a tin can.
Plus, there's no headphone jack.
The Mate 20 Pro is all kinds of musically stupid – except for the back panel of course.
[Scratching sounds]
The world's smallest coin style vibrator motor is over here on the left.
Let's take out the battery.
There are some gold colored pull tabs over here on the left, but I don't read Chinese.
I'm not really sure what they're for.
I do know number 1 and 2 make for lousy pull tabs.
It's the middle number 3 that's the only worthwhile pull, and the removal isn't too bad.
The Huawei Mate 20 Pro is using a massive 4200 milliamp hour battery – can't complain
about that.
The next cool thing to look at is the under screen fingerprint scanner.
Remember this little guy stopped working after my screen cracked during my durability test,
so let's see why.
It's a fairly large rectangle hidden under the display.
Now that the battery is removed and light can shine through, you can see the outline
of the rectangular fingerprint scanner hidden under the screen itself.
It cannot be pulled out or removed like on the OnePlus 6T's in-screen fingerprint scanner.
So the technology is definitely different with the two phones, and in this particular
case, the Mate 20 Pro is much more fragile and less resilient to damage.
OnePlus wins this round.
I'll put the battery back in over the fingerprint scanner.
Overall it's not a bad phone to take apart.
Yeah, the back glass is tight, but other than that, once I'm inside, most everything in
the phone like the battery, charging port and speakers, can be replaced with minimal
effort.
I'll make sure all the Lego style ribbon cables up top are lifted up and out of the way before
sliding the motherboard into place below them, and then clipping them all down into place.
The bottom ribbon cable highway gets the same treatment with the battery ribbon always getting
plugged in last.
The LED flash is plugged in, and the whole back panel and wireless charging pad can flop
over on top of the motherboard and battery with it's 8 screws up top holding everything
tight.
I'll slip our musical back panel over top of the components and press it down, and get
a little drum roll going before turning on the phone.
[Scratching sounds.]
I'm always a little nervous about this part, especially when there are a million people
watching, but luckily for me, everything still turns on and we have yet another successful
teardown.
Yeah, the screen cracked during the durability test, but technically it's still alive.
Would you buy this phone, or is the funky loudspeaker with no headphone jack situation
weird enough to turn you away?
Let me know down in the comments.
Hit that subscribe button if you haven't already.
And thanks a ton for watching.
I'll see you around.