Phone: Huawei Mate 20 Pro

As I mentioned last week, I got a new phone, thanks to Kat: a Huawei Mate 20 Pro, pretty much the Huawei flagship, and strong contender for best phone in the world at the moment. I've been using it and customising it a bit for a couple of weeks, and it's really astonishingly good; I really like it. You can check the technical stats here, but I'd like to add a few comments below.

The good:

• Amazing cameras. It comes with four: a 40MP main, a 20MP wide-angle (which doubles as a macro lens), an 8MP 3x optical zoom, and a 24MP front-facing camera. They're all excellent, expecially the macro and zoom lenses. The camera app starts instantly (which has been a big problem on previous phones I've had), and has tons of features, including AI that identifies objects, a portrait mode, an aperture mode that works really well for small objects like models, a superb night mode, and more. The picture quality is exceptional.
• Excellent performance: it's apparently the fastest Andoid phone available, and has 6GB RAM and 128GB storage. Additional storage is available with a new type of memory card, Nano Memory, which is not available yet. The app management is quite aggressive, which does keep foreground apps nippy. There's no lag on anything.
• Battery: The 4200mAh battery is huge, and just goes on forever. The charger can recharge it fully in about  an hour, and we have a wireless charger at home which is quite handy.
• The EMUI Huawei interface is not bad at all, and I like the optional gesture interface, which works a lot like the BlackBerry 10 UI did (and the more recent iPhone X). There are lots of standard apps, and some are even useful. 
• The QHD screen is excellent, a pleasure to look at. There is a massive notch, but I just hide it.
• The sound is pretty decent, especvially considering that the bottom speaker is embedded in the USB-C charger port. The lack of a headphone socket doesn't bother me; I have bluetooth earphones for running, and the phone comes with a headphone adapter.
• This one is the Twilight model, and the colours of the back of the phone have to be seen to be believed - gorgeous! Covered up with a skin, sadly.

The not-so-good

• It's got an always-on dispay for when the phone is locked, but it doesn't display notifications. There is a notification LED (yay!) but it's not bright, and configuring it needs another app and some tinkering. 
• The EMUI interface doesn't like other launchers, and isn't that customisible, so some of the customisability offered by Nova is not available.
• It's a fairly big, heavy phone, especially compared to my old featherlight LG V30. It does fit my existing leather pouches, luckily.
• There's a fingerprint reader set in the screen itself, and it's a little slower and a little less conveniently located than the rear-mounted one in the V30. That said, the facial recognition is instantaneous, even in the dark.
• It comes with an IR blaster, for controlling TVs etc., but I couldn't get it to turn my TV on, so that's not much good.

I'm running my old favourite BlackBerry Hub mail/contacts/calendar software, and that's cool. All my other apps work as expected, except for ACR, my phone call recording software, but that's because Google has disallowed call recording in Android 9, the bastards. The upgrade from the LG was easy, but slow, because I have nearly 60GB of photos that needed to be transferred.

Here are some pics:

From the front:

Rear, first the Twilight back (sadly, you can't see the green shades in this shot), and then the leather-like protector I got: