Huawei P20 Review: A Good Smartphone With An Improved Camera and Amazing Design Finish.
Given the recent P20’s beautiful design concept and fancy AI-improved camera system, our hands-on with it leaves us chilled. Our initial evaluation was largely accurate after extensively testing it and its larger and more costly twin of the Huawei P20 Pro.
The Huawei P20 ($800) is the less expensive brother of the Huawei P20 Pro, which is a great device that can compete with flagship models like the Samsung Galaxy S9. Like P20 Pro, it comes up with a similar Kirin 970 chipset and a great look. But has a smaller display and less effective camera as compared to its sibling.
The Huawei P20 is an amazing handset in its own freedom, but it hasn’t progressed that much from the P10 to have become a truly compelling purchase. This is particularly when all of the functionalities we desired were included on the Huawei P20 Pro but not on the smaller device’s specs. Sure, the Huawei P20 lacks the Huawei P20 Pro’s many remarkable features, but still, it promises a compelling combination of performance and cost in a small package.
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Huawei P20 Price and Availability
In the UK and Australia, the Huawei P20 price has fallen to about £400 in UK since releasing at £599, AU$999 SIM-free. We’ve also seen it for under AU$700 in Australia, but it’s becoming harder to come by.
Based on price, it competes with the LG V30 and is significantly less expensive than that of the Samsung Galaxy S9 and Google Pixel 2 XL. The slightly bigger, more strong Mate 10 Pro, on the other hand, is about the same amount, so you’ll have to think about it.
Huawei P20 Review: Design
The body of the P20 such as the P20 Pro is made of metal with pearlescent paint and mirror coating. But apart from Huawei’s signature Twilight purple-and-blue variation, there are metallic sparkling gold and pink gold variants with mother-of-pearl soap bubble textures, as well as more traditional blue and black models.
The Huawei logo and odd pieces of rubbish that manufacturers are expected to provide (logos, model numbers, and so on) are printed in landscape mode, which seems to be the Leica label and camera detail. This gives the rear the appearance of a typical landscape camera, with the cameras on the right taking the place of the viewfinder. Only a Sony-style hardware trigger switch, which might have been perfect to be on the left, is absent. However, the volume keys can be used as toggle controls.
The bottom of the device has a home button or fingerprint reader. We’re not sure why Huawei isn’t putting the sensor on the rear like it did on the Mate 10 Pro, that could have helped it to completely eliminate the lower part bezel.
The P20 Pro, like most modern high-end smartphones, lacks a 3.5mm headphone socket, something we find irritating. The USB-C port, on the other hand, can be used with the connector that comes in the box. Alternatively, you can simply use buds that support USB-C or also wireless versions. Sadly, replacing any one of these SIMs with a microSD card isn’t a choice.
Display
There is a nice balance between a smaller device and a phablet with 5.8-inches, while the thin bezels and notch prevent it from looking heavy in the hand.
The P20’s 5.8-inches LCD display panel has an 18.7:9 aspect ratio, a resolution of 2,244*1,080 pixels and a total display panel measures 13.14 square inches, which is identical to the 6.1-inch screen panel on the Huawei P20 Pro. No doubt the screen’s visual experience of Huawei P20 is amazing, but due to the absence of an OLED display, it isn’t able to deliver the higher levels of contrast that are in the P20 Pro handset.
Before everyone gets all worked up, the notch on the P20 is probably the least bothersome we’ve encountered. Huawei also included a system that essentially eliminates the notch by blacking out the entire screen from all sides. So if you want more display space or a more consistent appearance, this device has you accompanied, and you may not make that choice you anticipated. This phone convinced us to change our minds about the notch: all we needed was the ability to turn it in and out before we found out which we preferred. It’s always nice to have choices, no matter what way you tend.
You can customize the display on the P20 in a variety of ways, including turning on ‘natural tone,’ which changes colors depending on your surroundings; switching amongst Standard and Vibrant colors; selecting Default, Hot, or Cool color schemes; turning on Eye Relief feature, and more. From ‘insanely dark’ to ‘very light,’ you may adjust the brightness level or you can even give this right to your device to pick its own brightness depending on your spot. If you’d like to conserve battery, you can reduce the resolution.
Battery
You can use the Huawei P20 throughout the day and overnight without caring about it running out of fuel, which is admirable. Video streaming over LTE with the display on maximum brightness consumed 9, hours and 21 minutes to absorb the P20’s 3,400mAh capacity battery. That’s still lower than the P20 Pro’s 11 hours and 18 minutes, but it’s worth noting that the P20 Pro has a larger battery (4,000mAh).
We barely managed till going to bed with far less than half of the battery level remaining while using this mobile like our only smartphone such as calls, social media apps, gaming, news, and whatever else you may want a leading device for.
You can also save a few percent by using auto-brightness mode. There are a Power-Saving Feature and Super Power-Saving Mode, each of which will prolong the battery life of your P20 by days. Using the included super-fast charger (5V/4.5A), you are allowed to level up the battery from zero to about 30% in thirty minutes, and to 60% in an hour. This pace doesn’t last much longer as it takes approximately two hours to reach 100%.
Huawei P20 Review: Camera
You can imagine that the Huawei P20 is a smartphone for photography. It is the leading creator of Huawei’s collaboration with camera giants Leica. The Huawei P20 Pro, on the other hand, has a triple camera setup, while the P20 only has two on the rear with one on the front.
The Huawei P20 has a dual-lens 12+20MP camera on the back with a low-light feature that utilizes long intervals and anti-shake to capture cleaner nighttime pictures. You have a Bayer lens (12MP, f/1.4) for colors and a monochromatic camera (20MP, f/1.6) for reflectance, as with so many Huawei double camera models.
The inclusion of AI, which observes what you’re doing in order to facilitate you. It’s similar to the Microsoft Word strap for photography, but it’s a lot less obnoxious. The camera system has the normal Huawei slew of modes, however this way the device can toggle between them depending on what it feels you’re attempting to achieve.
Performance
The hardware with which Huawei P20 comes into action is a HiSilicon Kirin 970 octa-core Processor (4*1.8GHz Cortex A53s and 4*2.4GHz Cortex A73s), as well as Huawei’s trademark NPU. This is the same chipset that powered the Mate 10 series and the P20 Pro. You get 4GB of RAM (vs. 6GB on the P20 Pro), which is more than enough for most tasks, but we did notice some minor lag when streaming and recording HD videos. The performance is good, but it regularly falls short of the Apple iPhone X and the Samsung Galaxy S9.
Despite some heavy use as well as app juggling, P20 is considered to be a very smooth device to use. It got a little hot at moments, but that was about it. An average of three Geekbench 4 scores yielded a single-core result of 1,885 and a multi-core output of 6,681 on the testing.
Huawei P20 Review: Final Words
The Huawei P20 isn’t really the Huawei P10 replacement we hoped for, it’s just not quite deserving of the P20 moniker. There are several defining moments, including a stunning display, excellent results, long battery life, and that fantastic camera, but the Huawei P20 Pro outperforms the P20 anyway.
The Huawei P20 is equivalent to its bigger brother, the Huawei P20 Pro, in terms of processing and picture efficiency. While it lacks the Pro’s 5x lossy zoom, it effectively simulates many of its camera effects, and the 2x zoom allows you to get nearer to your subjects while keeping clarity. If you don’t like to spend the cash on the P20 Pro or Mate 20 Pro, and it won’t annoy you for the rest of your life that there is also a bigger leader of your handset available, then P20 is the device you should definitely buy a one for you and give it a chance.
