Whether or not you like the Samsung-style curved display that flows over the edges of the phone, you can't deny the Mate20 Pro's screen is incredible. Feed it a 1440p, HDR, 60Hz video and it looks better than the bulk of high end TVs, but even just for general viewing it's always bright and vibrant. At 6.39 inches (16cm), it's a smidge smaller than the display on the iPhone XS Max, but then the Mate20 Pro is significantly shorter than Apple's device. This makes for a nicer balance between screen size and holdability overall, and yes theres' a wide but shallow notch up top. Huawei's "Magazine Unlock" feature, which shows a different random incredible photograph every time you see your unlock screen, is a smart way to constantly remind you how good this display looks.

And speaking of unlocking, the fingerprint scanner here is embedded under the display itself. It's fast and accurate, but I didn't find it as easy to use as the now-standard rear scanner. At the very least you need to press much more firmly and deliberately if you want a consistent unlock.

The phone has a set of stereo speakers that sound fine enough in a pinch, but certainly not exceptional, and the setup is less than ideal. The top speaker is just the tiny earpiece used for calls; it's shallow and fairly quiet. The lower, significantly louder speaker is, unusually, situated inside the USB-C charging port. For movies, games and music this works fine, unless you happen to cover the port with your hand. But if you charge your phone overnight, you might find your morning alarm very muffled by the cable being inside the port. After completely missing my alarm the first day this happened, I set the volume to maximum, which made it audible.

At the heart of a phone is the Kirin 980, a chip made by Huawei that's very different to the Qualcomm design favoured by most Android phones. In simple terms this is the fastest processor you'll get if you're not holding an iPhone, with the standard Geekbench score putting the Mate20 Pro between last year's iPhone X and Samsung's Galaxy Note9 for sheer multi-core grunt. Still, since the phone runs Android it's hard to come up with too many ways to put all that power to good use, and Huawei's chip still falls to the lower end of the pack when it comes to graphics performance. Huawei makes big claims about the efficiency of the new chip too. Paired with a massive 4200mAh battery I got around two days of usage, but with heavy use I'd still charge it every night. There's 128GB of storage built in, but no microSD card slot.

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It's when it comes to the cameras that Huawei's gone really nutso. One of the three modules on the back is a regular wide angle at a massive 40MP, the second is an ultrawide at a still-sizeable 20MP, and the third is an 8MP telephoto set at 5x zoom with optical image stabilisation. This combination of sizes, widths and distances means that, when you're using the camera app, you can pull back for a wide-angle shot (which Huawei calls 0.6x zoom), or you can zoom to something across the street and get a crystal clear shot.

The camera performance is honestly the most impressive aspect of this phone. Google's Pixel 3 and the new iPhones still rule when it comes to consistently good-looking and natural snaps with minimal effort from the user, but the Mate20 Pro has a set of tools you can't beat. You can focus on an object mere centimetres away for macro shots or, if your hands are steady, go out to 5x zoom free of the usual blur and digital artefacts. Even going to 10x can result in some great-looking snaps. By default the main snapper takes 10MP shots, but if you feel like it you can go for the full 40MP.

Most of the camera's software features are hit and miss. By default the phone will try to detect what you're looking at, for example boosting the blues in a photo of the sky or smoothing skin in a portrait, but I think it's a bit heavy-handed and turned it off. Similarly, night mode can potentially take some very impressive low-light pics, but you need to stay still for a good five second for it to work well. Around the front there is a 24MP selfie cam.

Given all of the above the Mate20 Pro is certainly one of the most impressive phones on the market, even if its value proposition isn't quite as clear at a steep $1599, but unfortunately it's far from the most usable.

The phone runs Android 9 Pie but, thanks to Huawei's EMUI software layered on top it actually feels like a mix between Apple's iPhone, Google's Pixel and a much older Android device. For example Huawei has rejected Pie's new gesture navigation in favour of its own, which has its pros and cons. Swiping up to go home, or swiping and pausing for recent apps, feels natural (just like on the iPhone). On the other hand pulling at the corner of the screen to trigger Android's back button is super awkward, and at times might as well not be there (again, like on the iPhone). If you don't like gestures you can go back to the old Android three-button nav.

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Another example is that you can choose between two extremes to organise your apps: let everything pile up on your home screens Apple-style, where you have to drag icons around to order them, or use the Android app drawer circa two years ago where you get a big grey button on your home screen, and apps are in alphabetical order. Other elements, like the dialogue that pops up when you try to share something, are blatanlty poor Apple rip-offs, and not as good as the basic Android stuff they replace.

It of course doesn't take too long to get the hang of things in EMUI, but the end result isn't nicer or more convenient than stock Android, isn't close enough to the way Apple does things to soothe those switching over, and is too much of a hodge-podge to feel like its own consistent design.

One other thing worth pointing out is that, like Samsung, Huawei tries really hard to push you towards its own services which require you to send data back to company HQ. Of course unlike Samsung Huawei has a pretty spotty standing with global governments at the moment.

My biggest pain point overall is with notifications. The cards and text are huge, no matter how I play with the display size settings, and you can't interact with them from the lock screen, making them annoying to manage if you have more than two at a time. Not that you'd know you had more than two, because the wide display notch means there's generally no room for notification icons at the top of the screen. All the random Android stuff still goes there — including carrier info, signal strength, Bluetooth indicator, a Wi-Fi bar, ringer status, battery level, clock, NFC and whatever else — but I would have ditched any of them for some notifiction space. Most notifications don't show up on the "always on" display either, just calls and SMS. It's like the worst parts of notifications on both Android and iPhone without any of the good.

One positive thing I'll say about the handling of the notch is that there's an option in settings to hide it on an app-by-app basis, which is the perfect way to do it. You get that bit of extra screen for general use, without any intrusion in video apps or games.

The Mate20 Pro is an impressive phone, and that it's strong enough to even enter the conversation alongside the likes of the Galaxy Note9 and Google Pixel 3 is an achievement. Its high price and muddled interpretation of Android software will be barriers for some, but if you're a sucker for hardware or like your phones with an excessive list of high-powered features this could be the one for you.