It’s very rare that a piece of technology – a phone, tablet or game – bags the full five stars on most review sites. And yet, the Huawei P20 Pro manages to do just that – building a magnificent smartphone while at the same time upping its brand credentials.

Having started out as a value smartphone maker, in recent years, the Chinese company has started making inroads into the premium market, with the likes of the Mate 10 Pro and last year’s P10. The latter, especially, packed a good product with the kind of features that you would expect from an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy S.

With the P20 Pro, Huawei has achieved this and more – capturing that all elusive luxurious feel thanks to its light weight, thin form and the P20 Pro’s 6.1-inch full HD and OLED screen that is simultaneously bright and beautiful, and the game-chanting screen cutout that contains a 24-megapixel front-facing camera, earpiece speaker and a series of sensors. The fingerprint scanner is also on the front, squeezed into an oval shape at the bottom of the screen.

The back, which is made of glass, is curved with a metal band around the sides. The camera modules stick out, which means the phone doesn’t sit flush on a flat surface. 

In terms of processing power, the P20 Pro has the same processor and memory configuration as the Mate 10 Pro, with Huawei’s in-house Kirin 970 octo-core processor and neutral network processing unit. The battery has a generous charge thanks to various power-saving features – and even though the P20 Pro doesn’t have wireless charging, it charges pretty fast.

The P20 Pro also boasts an industry-first – it has three cameras on the back, all working simultaneously to provide a multi-layered camera experience.

The main camera is a large, 40-megapixel colour camera, with a secondary 20-megapixel monochrome camera and an eight-megapixel telephoto camera. The P20 Pro automatically uses a combination of these three cameras to produce each shot – the result is excellent details, low noise and clear colour capture. The built-in camera AI also packs real-time object recognition.

The final verdict on the P20 Pro is that in a very busy smartphone market, Huawei’s latest offering manages to stand out and set a benchmark which will be difficult for rivals to match up to.

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