Hands on with Huawei's brand new smartphone, the Mate 20 Pro

2018 is the year of the notch. Screens without big black borders are becoming a common design feature on flagship phones, but phone makers haven't quite worked out how to achieve a full-screen display and house a front-facing camera. Hence the notch.

For anyone especially displeased by the notch on the Mate 20 Pro, Huawei lets you switch it off. That feature keeps the bezel running evenly across the top of the phone.

Huawei is promising super speedy performance, thanks to its Kirin 980 chipset, which also packs a neural processing unit (NPU) for clever artificial intelligence features.

There's also an upgrade to EMUI 9, Huawei's homegrown interface. The company said users should be able to open apps much faster and navigate around the phone quicker.

This isn't Huawei's first phone with on-screen fingerprint recognition, but it's one of the few major flagships this year with the feature. It's a step forward from earlier Huawei models, which housed a fingerprint sensor on the back. Android fans can be pleased that iPhones still haven't managed under-screen fingerprint recognition.

Anyone who wants to use the feature needs to set up both fingerprint recognition and a PIN code, which takes a couple of minutes. We ran into very few problems with fingerprint recognition and found it generally works pretty smoothly.

One slightly troubling caveat Huawei gives during setup: Your phone could be unlocked by "people or objects" that closely resemble you. We didn't put that to the test.

The front camera is accompanied by depth-scanning capabilities and a dot projector, which theoretically means the phone shouldn't be fooled by a 2D photograph. Some facial recognition settings — like not requiring full eye contact to unlock the phone — are also a little less secure.

As ever with Huawei, the camera is the feature to get truly excited about. The firm's ongoing partnership with camera company Leica means it is out front of the competition when it comes to amazing phone photography.

The Mate 20 Pro's triple lens camera ditches the monochrome sensor on Huawei's P models, in favour of an ultra-wide sensor that lets you take bigger, wider shots like cityscapes or landscapes, and impressively detailed macro shots.

That's a 24-megapixel front-facing camera with a dual lens. It also comes with additional sensors for facial recognition, but more on that later.

At the launch event for the Mate series, Huawei demonstrated 3D Live Object, an augmented reality feature that appeared to be built into the camera.

An exec scanned a real toy panda on-stage, which then rendered as a 3D object on the Mate 20 Pro's screen. The exec used various controls to make the panda wave, walk around, or stand next to a real-life person for a photo.

The feature wasn't available on our Mate 20 Pro, and a spokesman clarified that it would be available in an update from November 2018.

No one needs to spend close to €1,000 / $1,000 / £1,000 on a phone. There are so many excellent mid-range Android phones and earlier generation iPhones that offer everything you could want from a smartphone.

But if you are after a statement phone, the Mate 20 Pro comes out swinging as the premium choice for 2018. Huawei fans who already opted for the P20 Pro, which came out earlier this year, may well be disappointed that their flagship is already looking out of date.

For sure, some of the bells and whistles you'll be paying for look a little redundant. Why have both facial recognition and fingerprint unlock? What's the point of augmented reality object recognition?

For our part, the beautiful screen, the premium feel, and the powerful camera make it worth the money. And it's still at least a hundred pounds cheaper than a new iPhone.