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Huawei offers a regular flow of new models, whether part of its flagship Mate or Honor brands, to suit a variety of taste and pockets of potential customers.  The latest Huawei model to come under my gaze is the company’s Mate 20 lite offering.

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With dimensions of 75.3 x 158.3 x 7.6 mm (W x H x D) and weighing approximately172 g, my review sample was decked out in black with highly polished and reflective front and rear panels.  Surrounded by an almost there bezel, the Mate 20 lite’s screen is a 6.3 inch TFT LCD model giving the user a FullView Display experience with its 16.7 million colours at a resolution of 2340 x 1080 pixels with a 409 PPI. 

Arranged around the edges of this handset is the fairly standard collection of features usually found on Huawei smartphones.  Positioned on the right side of the Mate 20 lite are the volume rocker and power on / off button while the left side of the handset houses the  now standard dual SIM or single SIM and micro SD memory card pop-out tray.  A pin-prick tool is provided to eject this feature when making changes to the tray’s content.  Arranged along the  bottom edge of the handset are a speaker outlet, type C USB port and a 3.5 mm jack socket for connecting a set of earphones.  You do get a set of earphones in the box. 

This being a Huawei handset, it should come as no surprise to hear that the company has pit a lot of effort into the Mate 20 lite’s photographic capabilities.  In this case, both the rear and front cameras consist of two lenses.  The rear mounted dual camera is made up of a colour 20MP lens and a 2MP colour lens with an f/1.8 aperture.  This camera offers a range of features that include autofocus, AI enhanced 22 categories of automatic subject and scene recognition so that settings are adjusted to suit the situation and give a more professional look to the image.  There is also support for  16x Slow-Mo capture at 480 frames per second.

Compulsive Selfie capturers need not worry as they are well catered for with a combination of the front mounted colour 24MP and colour 2MP lenses with an f/2.0 aperture.  This combination of lenses has support for fixed focus length and AI enhanced HDR technology allowing for real-time preview of HDR images and video recordings.  When it comes to organising your capture of photographic content, built-in AI technology will step in to help classify images by subject, composition, occasion or person to make then easier to find.

A fingerprint sensor is positioned on the rear of the handset just below the two lenses and flash unit..  Huawei has also built in sensors for gravity, ambient light, proximity, gyroscope and compass into this handset.

The Huawei Mate 20 lite is constructed around a 12 nm Kirin 710 Octo-core i7 microprocessor made up of 4x Cortex A73 2.2GHz and 4x Cortex A53 1.7GHz plus a Mali-G51 1GHz.  As standard my review sample had 4GB of RAM and 64GB of ROM.  The use of a micro SD memory card can increase storage up to 256GB.

Providing the operating system is the combination of Android 8.1 overlaid with EMUI 8.2.  This OS combination is powered by a 3750mAh that has support for Huawei Quick Charge facility.  As battery life will depend upon the actual type of usage which can vary considerably, I tend to test battery life using a continuous video playing situation.  In this case the videos were stored on a flash drive which connected to the Mate 20 lite via USB-To-Go connection.  I was able to get 7 hours 55 minutes of entertainment before a low battery 10% warning appeared on the handset.

Currently this handset is available with a free set of Huawei earphones on various plans from Vodafone.  With no upfront charge, you can get this product for £30 a month.  This has 1GB of data, unlimited minutes and text plus Vodafone Global Roaming and a three month trial of Secure net. The Huawei Mate 20 lite is a well-designed handset with a range of attractive features and is well worth considering

https://www.vodafone.co.uk/brands/huawei/mate-20-lite/#Black/64