‘Huawei Mate 20 Pro’ – The Best Flagship Smartphone in Nepal [Readers Choice Award 2018]

Flagship smartphones are shinier, faster, and better built than its cheaper cousins. Though most people don’t need these flagship smartphones, most people want to buy these devices. Naturally, most people want to read about them too. After all, this is where the innovation happens.

We wanted to know which flagship smartphone has won our readers’ hearts this year. So, we conducted a poll and the results are in. And I am going to tell you all about it.

About the poll

If you didn’t take part in this poll or didn’t know about it, I’ll tell you a little bit about it. We talk about smartphones all over the year here at TechLekh. And, with the end of 2018 in sight, we felt it was the right time to show some appreciation for the good ones. We divided the phones available in Nepal into 3 categories – budget, midrange, and flagship- based on their prices. We listed approximately 8 smartphones in each category and asked you people to vote for their favorite. And you guys responded enthusiastically. We met our goal of over 1000 votes for the flagship smartphones poll and we now have the results in our hands.

The list

An eligible ‘flagship smartphone’ was a phone that cost above Rs. 60K. The phones that we included in the list were:

1. Samsung Galaxy Note 9
2. Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus
3. Huawei Mate 20 Pro
4. iPhone X
5. iPhone X/XS max
6. iPhone XR
7. OnePlus 6
8. OnePlus 6T

The Results

As you can see, all of the phones on our list were the best of the best phones we saw in 2018. We tested some of them ourselves. And, naturally, we thought about how the result might turn out to be. Though you guys completely caught us off guard in the mid-range poll results, our predictions for the Readers Choice 2018 flagship smartphone poll wasn’t that far off.

Huawei Mate 20 Pro won the Readers Choice Award Best Flagship SmartPhone of 2018. It collected 328 (31.7%) votes out of the total 1035 that were cast. The Mate 20 Pro beat our 1st runner up Samsung Galaxy Note 9 by about 140 votes. The Note 9 amassed 188 (18.2%) votes from you guys. So, Huawei Mate 20 Pro didn’t get twice as much as votes as the Note 9, but it came pretty close. The third position went to the Android Community’s favorite phone – One Plus 6T. It gathered 157 votes (15.2%) of the total votes cast.iPhone XS/XS max bagged the consolation prize with 95 votes and iPhone X clinced the 5th position with 93 votes. This was a tighter race than we expected. Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus came 6th and the One Plus 6 became 7th. iPhone XR was the least favorite phone. We were thinking iPhone XR won’t get any votes considering its ridiculous sky-high price here in Nepal. But, good for iPhone XR.

My Opinion

As I said earlier, we weren’t as shocked to see this result as we were when we saw the midrange one. Huawei Mate 20 Pro winning the flagship smartphone race was something we already knew. And why not? It has got a beautiful sleek body. It looks gorgeous. Probably the best looking android phone out there. The square triple camera setup is an amazing design choice and so is the textured non-fingerprint glass back. It has an in-display fingerprint sensor, and iPhone like face recognition system, and the best damn battery life on any flagship smartphone you could name. Hell, it even has features like reverse wireless charging. Also, did I tell you about its cameras? To most people, Huawei nailed it with the Mate 20 Pro.

Note 9 coming in at second position was also not a surprise. It is the best from Samsung and possibly the best overall Android smartphone your money can buy. Huawei’s phone does look good and does have excellent cameras but so does the Note 9. Does mate 20 Pro have a good screen? The Note 9 has a slightly better one. The Experience UI on the Note 9 is a bit more polished than the EMUI. Does any other phone has an SPen? The Mate 20 Pro can’t match Note 9’s speakers. Huawei’s bold design and futuristic features won the heart of customers as predicted but for me, the Note 9 is still the phone I would choose because as a total package, no other phone can beat it, no even the iPhone XS Max.

The third position for OnePlus 6T was expected too. It looks cool, and it performs like a beast. It is probably the phone with the best performance on the Android land. It has decent set of cameras, the front one is actually quite good. If you want the best price to performance (and build quailty) ratio, you can’t find a better deal than the One Plus 6T.

In a nutshell, this list was nothing out of the ordinary. The iPhone XS/ XS Max were so tight with the iPhone X probably because of their ridiculous pricing in Nepal. Other than that, there’s nothing much to talk about here. But before going, I would like to say that Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus doesn’t deserve to be so down on the list because it is basically the Note 9 without an S-pen and a much comfier form factor. If you want the note 9, but don’t know if you’ll use the Spen much, you should definitely check out the Galaxy S9 Plus.