Like the majority of people living in Hong Kong, I own a portable battery pack that resides in my bag full time, ready to be called upon whenever my phone is low on power. For years, that meant Saturday and Sunday evenings — times when I’ve usually been out and about all day. In Hong Kong — and safe to assume other big cities — it becomes almost like instinct: sit down for coffee or dinner in the late afternoon or evening? Pull out the portable battery pack unless you want the phone to die before you call it a night. Looking around, I often see others do the same thing.
But in 2018, I kicked that habit. That's because I've spent a chunk of the year using a Huawei phone (either the P20 Pro or Mate 20 Pro) as my "daily driver" (aka main phone), and those phones have such tremendous battery life that I didn't need to top up during the day to keep it going through the night.
Huawei's current top phone, the Mate 20 Pro, in particular, has epic battery life. I can throw around stats such as average screen-on time or standby discharge rate, but the best praise I can give the Mate 20 Pro is that in the combined 40 or so days I've used the phone full-time, only once has the phone failed to last an entire day on a single charge.
Chinese phones, in general, all have great battery life. Oppo and Xiaomi’s phones can usually last me a full day, too, but the Mate 20 Pro, with its industry-best 4,200 mAh battery and software optimization, can do it with more certainty. There have been Saturdays when I begin my day at 10 a.m., stay out all day, and at 2 a.m., still see over 25% of juice left in the Mate 20 Pro. There's just something satisfying -- for a tech geek like me, anyway -- about seeing such power in a device so sleek. The photo below is a collage of screenshots showing the Mate 20 Pro's battery prowess, notice how in the first screenshot, I used the phone for 55 minutes and the battery remained at 100%. The second and third screenshots show that after a heavy 11-hour day, in which I had the screen on for nearly three hours, the Mate 20 Pro still had 47% battery life left. Other phones in that spot would be barely hovering above 20%.
And I suppose this is human nature, but once I stopped feeling battery anxiety when I'm using a Huawei device, I stopped up-keeping my once indispensable portable battery pack. I charged it less frequently; there've been days when I left it at home.
This wouldn't be an issue if I was still a normal consumer who chose a phone and stuck with it for a year or two, but I switch phones regularly; and now I find myself taken by surprise when a non-Huawei phone is in dire need of a charge hours before I call it a night. I recently swapped back to the LG V40 as my main phone, and though there’s plenty to like about that device, that phone’s battery life is putrid, almost always dipping below 25% by dinner time.
Even the iPhone XS Max, which has been praised for having “great battery life,” pales in comparison. On a recent trip to Tokyo, I used both the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and iPhone XS Max equally, with two SIM cards from the same service provider, and the XS Max would give out usually give out around 11 p.m., while the Mate 20 Pro would still have over 30% charge at that same time.
The Mate 20 Pro isn't perfect by any means, and other phones top it in other areas: both the iPhone XS and LG V40 can capture more stabilized video; the OnePlus 6T has cleaner, more customizable software, among others. But no other phone can ease battery anxiety -- and make the portable battery pack redundant -- like Huawei's 2018 offerings.
