Last month, Huawei gave me one of their Mate 20 Pro phones, and there was
a challenge with that gift... if I drop my iPhone and and switch to Huawei/Android
they will gift me this new phone. I've been using it for the last month,
I've made up my mind and I'm gonna tell you which phone when I picked and why.
So first let's let's start with The Good.
The battery of this phone is amazing! This phone has two full days worth of
battery, I can get to the second day with 20% battery still on the phone,
which is pretty impressive; that's something that I've never been able to achieve on any iPhone.
The second good feature is the camera. There are two sides to this.
Some features on the camera are better, some features are worse. But on the good...
side there's the wide-angle lens camera, which is truly amazing!
It lets you take fantastic photos, that you absolutely cannot replicate on a regular camera.
The telephoto lens is 3x magnification instead of 2x,
that's optical magnification which is also really appreciated.
It allows you to take pictures of distant objects with much better definition...
than what you can achieve on an iPhone. However, side to side comparison....
on cameras, the standard 24mm camera is supposed to be 40 megapixels
but if you compare that to the iPhone camera which is just at 12 megapixels,
you really don't see 4x or 3x the the definition; it's not there.
So it's advertised as 40 megapixel but in reality it's not three times the definition.
In general the look and feel of the phone is very nice,
it doesn't feel like a cheap phone by any means. The back alone is plastic,
the screen is curved and it is sort of sharp on the edges, so that provides a...
much better grip; I don't feel like its own and that would slip away.
The screen definition is really good, the size is really good, it's comfortable to hold in my pocket,
which is something that I not necessarily felt with the larger versions of iPhone.
Next up there are some Android features that are really appreciated,
now remember, I'm an iOS user, I've been an iOS users since iPhone 4,
and so I've never really owned an Android phone....
There are some Android features that were appreciated, for example apps like
Facebook Messenger have a bubble that lives inside other apps,
you can pick up a Facebook message and conversation where you left off, without having to switch
apps in the traditional manner. That extra flexibility in the interface is appreciated.
Next up, another feature that I really appreciated is the fingerprint sensor.
There's a fingerprint sensor that's hidden behind the screen...
so there's no physical button, there's no sensor behind the phone;
it literally just sits behind the screen, so unlocking the phone with that is very easy.
This phone has both a fingerprint sensor and a front-facing face recognition
camera, and you would ask why would you need both of those
features to unlock your phone.... and the reason for that is that face
recognition doesn't always work as expected. For example, isn't able to...
recognize me with glasses, so I've had to default to the fingerprint reader a couple times.
Now let's move into The Bad, I'm gonna start again with the camera.
Some stuff is clearly superior on iPhone.... like slow motion.
This phone shoots up to 960 frames per second, that's a super slow motion,
that is recorded on 720p regular HD, not full HD... but the quality of the video is very poor.
It seems out of focus ,the colors are very faded,
it doesn't look like a 720p video by any measure. You can have a regular 720p video,
and then switch to super slow-motion, and you would very well notice where the cut happens...
because the quality changes completely.
Now, iPhone doesn't have 960 frames per second, you would call that an advantage,
but if you compare side to side on 240 frames per second,
which is something that iPhone does support on full HD,
the iPhone is still superior.
Definition is much better, sharpness is much better, colors are much better,
so you're stretching the camera to its limits to be able to record 240fps,
and you can tell, the phone can't really handle it.
And then, there are a bunch of cool features on the camera, that I believe we're sort of useless,
so for example, the camera is able to recognize what you're taking a of,
whether it's food or landscape, or what not;
but I don't feel that it makes any difference in the results of the photo.
The problem, I think, is that overcomplicates the camera app,
so camera app is complicated to say the least.
For example, if you set your camera resolution to 40 megapixels,
for some reason it blocks out the zoom, or it blocks out switching to the other lenses*,
which doesn't make sense to me, I wouldn't expect to have to go and change it myself.
Some other annoyances... pre-installed software on Android.
It reminded me of old times when I purchased a PC, that had some...
trial software that you need to get rid of or pay; this phone came with...
booking.com and eBay... for some reason; which annoyed the hell out of me.
There's also some duplicate functions, Huawei has this EMUI system that they...
installed on top of Android, and it has duplicate functions for a lot of things.
So there's a mail, there's Gmail the actual Android-owned Gmail app,
which is what I ended up using; and there's another Huawei mail,
and there's no clarification on which is which.... and then for example the default is set to the Huawei.
So even though set up Gmail, moving from other apps into mail...
sometimes caused it to go to the default Huawei, which I had not set up.
So you need to create, you need to handle two separate IDs: we got your Huawei ID,
and you have your Google Play ID; which is probably going to be confusing for a lot of people.
So this EMUI thing doesn't work that well.
Some Android-specific annoyances, for example, having to accept multiple terms of service,
for some reason. Even though you accept your Terms of Service or
Terms of Use, when you connect the phone and set it up,
whenever you log into Chrome for the first time, you also need to accept Chrome Terms of Service,
and so on with some other apps, which again is rather annoying especially if...
they're the default Android/Google functions.
Another annoyance, another bad about the phone is,
it didn't really play well with my car.
So I'm able to connect my phone to my car, and you can stream music,
and then usually when I'm driving what I do is just ask Siri to play music;
that doesn't really work well with with this phone, first of all the car
didn't really recognize it. This is a rather new car, it's not this...
old stereo that that would be incompatible... So it won't recognize the phone,
it won't recognize the song ,and then 'OK Google' didn't work as well,
because I needed to unlock the phone for OK Google to play music,
which obviously is not feasible when you're driving.
Now moving into the Ugly, which is functionality that really annoyed the hell out of me,
that I would consider a deal-breaker. So first of all iMessage: I'm very used
to iMessage, I prefer iMessage over WhatsApp, I think it's much simpler
and responsive, cleaner interface. Most conversations with my family....
or my close friends are handled via iMessage. So without notifying them that I was
switching phones, I moved everything to WhatsApp, and then a lot of conversations met a dead end.
Another big annoyance was the lack of a Wallet/GPay functionality,
I use Apple wallet a lot, I have a bunch of my coupon cards, my Starbucks card is there,
and I use it for plane tickets.
I took a flight during this experiment... airline tickets land on passbook,
and they have this automatic ticket that you add to your wallet, just double tap,
and you show it at the door... but there's just nothing similar to that on this phone.
There is a wallet by Huawei, part of these EMUI interface, but you need to
create this Huawei ID, and I just didn't bother to set it up... I knew that many of
these airline tickets were not going to work here, so I I just didn't bother doing it.
And the phone doesn't really support GPay, at all,
it's not listed as a compatible device... so that's a shame.
Now another ugly, and this is really ugly, their very sad attempt at animoji,
I don't use animoji that much, but these guys tried to...
build this crappy animoji on top of this phone, but the face recognition was...
really poor, the characters are really creepy, and then the animation is just not smooth at all.
I think it just goes in detriment of the experience.
It's more like a copy, a bad a copycat... don't do it at all!
So one of the biggest issues was security...
so my phone is a big part of my productivity,
I'm connected to my Stripe account, which is the revenue
account for my business, and me and we invoice thousands people through Stripe...
and then I need to make sure that my phone is fully secure.
During the presentation, when they gave me the phone, they talked a lot about these...
security features, but I'm still not a hundred percent sure.
It is well known, that a bunch of apps in the Google Play Store have trojans or viruses in them,
I had to be extra careful, with the apps that I downloaded...
as a matter of fact, I only downloaded apps that I also use on my phone,
that are crucial to my productivity; but I didn't download any games,
just in that concern that something would get hacked.
And I know that there's this secure enclave chip on the phone, that's supposed to protect some of your
personal information, but I don't know if this chip protects
information stored on other apps, for example my logins to my Bank accounts,
that are stored in my Bank of America app. So I'm not really sure and I...
wasn't gonna risk.
And then that's extended to this whole issue with...
Huawei, where it's been banned from certain countries... could it be a political issue?
Yes; but you know Huawei was banned from New Zealand,
the government halted this process for Huawei to build cell phone towers in the country, always looking in the US and it might be
it's obviously banned in the US,
and it might be a political issue, but if it is grounded in some security concerns about ...
the Chinese spying via Huawei devices, I certainly didn't want to risk that.
So this is an annoyance that shouldn't have to worry about, to be honest.
And then finally, and this is probably the final reason that made me...
choose which from when I was keeping... incompatibility with my device environment!
So I own an Apple Watch which I had to stop using for these few months,
I own Apple TV's on both of the TVs in my apartment, I own a Mac,
and then this phone didn't really play well with neither of those devices.
One thing that I do often is I'm watching a video on YouTube, and then I want to watch it on the TV,
and then I just AirPlay that video to the TV.
I could do this with the Huawei if I had a Chromecast, but I don't have one,
I'm not gonna go and buy a new set of devices.
That is one that I think most people that are living on an Apple...
environment will find extremely annoying.
You can't send files easily from your computer to your phone,
I normally do that via AirDrop, but here you would probably have to send
an email, or an upload that file to Google Drive and then re-download,
which is certainly extra steps, and this stuff really hurt my productivity,
I post regularly on Instagram, there are a lot of things that..
I start on my computer and finish on the phone or vice versa,
those little things on productivity are what ended up making up my mind.
So I really appreciate and I really thank Huawei for giving me the chance to try this,
but it would seem that I'm gonna have to return it and keep my iPhone X.