| + | [title|Honor 20 Pro] |
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| + | [summary]OUR VERDICT |
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| + | The Honor 20 Pro looks, feels and runs like a premium smartphone, but without the polish or the hype - and, most importantly, without the price tag. It's a slick and powerful mid-range smartphone that will give its competitors a run for their money. |
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| + | FOR |
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| + | Fantastic four-camera array |
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| + | Easy-to-use fingerprint sensor |
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| + | Large, vibrant display |
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| + | AGAINST |
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| + | No headphone jack |
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| + | Magic UI looks rather childish |
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| + | Punch-hole camera steals screen real estate |
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| + | Update: after Google suspended Huawei's future access to Android Play Store and security updates, there are serious question marks over the future of Huawei and Honor phones. |
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| + | While Google, Huawei and Honor have promised to support phones currently on the market, it's not clear how long they'll receive Android updates or access to the Google Play Store, which would severely curtail their usefulness compared to the competition. |
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| + | Honor phones typically take tech from Huawei’s latest handsets, water down the specs in a few non-critical areas, and sell for a lower price tag – but the Honor 20 Pro throws this precedent out the window with specs that appear to make it an even more appealing prospect than the high-end Huawei P30 Pro. |
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| + | Like the P30 Pro the Honor 20 Pro has no less than four rear cameras, as well as the latest Kirin 980 chipset – but it’s also shaking things up with new features like a ‘punch-hole’ front-facing camera rather than a notch, and side-mounted fingerprint sensor built into the power button. Update: Honor has finally announced the launch date and price of the Honor 20 Pro in the UK, so if you've read this review and are impressed by the handset's relatively low price and great performance (and also are based in the UK), you can finally pick up the handset. |
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| + | The price in particular is something to bear in mind, as it's a lot lower than that of the Huawei P30 Pro, yet isn't completely dissimilar in terms of specs – in short, if the P30 Pro is too expensive but you need that camera power, this is the device for you.In many ways, then, the Honor 20 Pro doesn’t feel like an affordable cousin to the Huawei P30 range, but rather a powerful and impressively specced smartphone beast in its own right – and with a price tag that sits below what you’d expect. |
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| + | But Honor must have cut some corners to put out a phone with such cutting-edge features at a low price; the question is, which corners – and will you notice? |
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| + | Honor 20 Pro price and release date |
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| + | In the UK, the Honor 20 Pro costs £549.99 (around $670, AU$970) for 8GB RAM and 256GB storage. For a smartphone with as impressive specs and camera capabilities as these, that's a rather low price, and we were expecting it to cost a little more. |
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| + | In part, we've given the phone such a high score because it's providing many features of high-end phones, like a powerful chipset or four-camera rear array, at a price that makes it accessible to the everyday buyer. |
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| + | Huawei smartphones (including Honor, a subsidiary of Huawei) are currently not available through US carriers or major retailers, though it's still possible to buy them. This usually means a higher cost or relying on an unverified online retailers, and software may not be optimized for US networks. |
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| + | Huawei's other products, including laptops and tablets, are readily available in the US, and the firm is working to obtain clearance to market its phones, so we could see this handset officially launch in America in the future. |
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| + | That price tag is comfortably below the Huawei P30’s £699 / AU$1,099 (roughly $910) launch price, but a reasonable amount above the Honor 20 which costs £400 (roughly $490, AU$700). |
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| + | You can pick up the smartphone from August 1 in the UK, which was quite a while after Honor launched it, and even a few months after the Honor 20 released in May. |
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| + | Design |
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| + | On the surface, the Honor 20 Pro doesn’t look particularly different from any standard Android phone – but looks can be deceiving, and there are some quirks to the Honor 20 Pro’s design. |
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| + | The handset isn’t quite plus-sized, but it’s still large – with a body of roughly 154mm x 74mm x 9mm, some users may have trouble reaching the top of the screen, but it’s not exactly a burden to carry about. |
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| + | The Honor 20 Pro display is something we’ll get into later, but while the phone has an impressive 91.6% screen-to-body ratio, there’s still just enough bezel to house a speaker and notification light right at the top. |
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| + | On the right side of the handset you’ll find one of the Honor 20 Pro’s most useful features: the power button and fingerprint sensor are one and the same, so by the time you’ve picked up your phone and pressed the power button you’re in. |
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| + | An indent makes this button easy to find without looking, and it’s a snappy system, so we found ourselves unlocking and able to use the phone much more quickly with this side-mounted sensor than with the now-common in-screen scanner. The button’s also at the perfect height to make it natural to use for most hands. |
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| + | The volume rocker sits above the power button, and there’s a USB-C port on the bottom of the phone – sadly there’s no headphone jack, which was something the Honor View 20 did have, and it seems like a curious omission given that this is an affordable phone aimed at a younger audience. |
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| + | On the back of the handset is its quad-camera setup – this makes for quite a prominent bulge, and the phone won’t sit flat on a surface because of it, but that’s arguably a small a price to pay for all the tech within. |
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| + | The Honor 20 Pro is available in two colors – a purple shade and a green, both of which use, in the words of Honor, ‘Triple 3D Mesh’ and curved glass to create a bright, reflective pattern on the back. It’s certainly a more refined design than the Honor View 20, which was a little on the garish side, but the Honor 20 Pro is perhaps a little less eye-catching as a result. |
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| + | Still, it’s a good-looking phone, with a nice balance between functionality and slick design. |
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| + | Display |
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| + | One compromise you’re going to have to accept with this handset is the display, because the Honor 20 Pro screen is perhaps a little bit of a downgrade compared with competing devices. |
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| + | The 6.26-inch screen uses LCD Full HD+ tech, which isn’t quite as good as the OLED of the Huawei P30 phones, so perhaps won’t display colors quite as well, although it has a great brightness range, and holds up well when viewed in direct sunlight. |
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| + | Honor 20 Pro competitors like the Google Pixel 3a or OnePlus 6 do have better screens, with OLED and AMOLED displays respectively, so you’re not getting top-end specs here, and the screen quality is one of the main trade-offs for the low price.There’s no notch intruding on the Honor 20 Pro’s screen; instead Honor has decided to go for a ‘punch-hole’ camera which means the lens is cut out of the display – the Honor View 20 and Samsung Galaxy S10 have similar arrangements. |
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| + | Honor claims this is the smallest punch-hole camera on the market, at only 4.5mm, but between the hole in the screen and the edge of the display is a fair amount of real estate that isn’t used, so in effect the screen space lost is around the same amount as would be lost to a notch. |
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| + | This isn’t a huge issue, and having the ‘lost’ space in the corner of the display keeps it out of sight, out of mind. In general the screen is fine for everyday use, and you’ll only notice the lesser display when you directly compare it to a high-end phone.Battery life |
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| + | We almost forgot to test out the Honor 20 Pro battery life when we were testing the phone, and that’s because the battery was far from our mind – we never had cause to worry about the handset making it through a day of use, or finding time to charge it sufficiently. |
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| + | On paper the phone’s 4000mAh power back seems good, but not great; in practice, however, we found the handset could easily last for a day of moderate to heavy use, and we’d estimate it could last for up to two days under light use. |
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| + | This impressive battery life is likely thanks to the LCD screen tech, which is slightly less of a drain on power than LED displays, but the fair capacity doesn’t hurt either. |
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| + | When we put the Honor 20 Pro through our battery test, in which we play a 90-minute video at full brightness with Wi-Fi on and accounts syncing in the background, the battery lost 16% of its charge – that’s a reasonable performance, putting the Honor 20 Pro on par with the recent Google Pixel 3a, but it’s far behind the Huawei P30, which dropped just 7%. Charging the handset is a snappy affair, as the 22.5W fast charging fills up the battery in no time – there’s no wireless charging, which is one of the main distinctions between mid-range handsets and premium devices, but you can’t really expect such tech in an affordable phone. |
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| + | Camera |
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| + | The Honor 20 Pro’s camera setup is one of its biggest selling points – the impressive four-camera array is going to sway many people who may have thought the Huawei P30 Pro was the only option offering this kind of camera potential. |
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| + | The four cameras are as follows: a 48MP f/1.4 main snapper with optical image stabilization (OIS), a 16MP sensor with a wide-angle lens, an 8MP sensor with a telephoto lens and OIS, and a 2MP macro camera. |
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| + | We’ve seen all these types of shooter in on other phones save for the macro camera – this works in a similar way to a time-of-flight camera which senses depth in order to add background blur to far-off objects and backgrounds, and it’s used mainly to take close-up pictures of nearby subjects. |
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| + | Picture we took of nearby subjects that relied on this camera, looked amazing – not only did the laser autofocus quickly distinguish between the subject and its background, it picked out layers of background at different depths, and blurred them appropriately depending on how far away they were. These close-up pictures could easily pass for photos taken on a DSLR or other ‘proper' camera. |
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| + | While the macro camera helps, it’s the main 48MP camera that’s doing much of the work here – its half-inch sensor is bigger than those in most phone cameras, so the snapper ‘sees’ more light, and therefore picks up color and lighting better. Pictures looked great even without the various scene optimizations, which we’ll get into later. |
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| + | The telephoto lens goes the other way to the macro shooter, and specializes in long-distance pictures – you can zoom up to 3x optically, and 30x digitally, with mixed results. We found that when we took zoomed-in pictures in good lighting, the results were impressive, as depth was picked out well, but when the light wasn’t as good, such as on an overcast day, long-distance shots looked a bit grimy. |
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| + | Ultra-wide angle shots looked great as well, and unlike with some other phones that have this kind of lens, there wasn’t much of a drop in quality, lighting or color perception – in fact, you could only tell it was an ultra-wide lens shot, and not just a regular shot, when you put it side-by-side with the normal shot, as there was minimal distortion to the edges of the shot. |
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| + | While the camera hardware is impressive, the software isn’t too shabby either, particularly Huawei’s scene optimization tool. When this is enabled, the phone will recognize the subject from a range of options, including greenery, blue sky, and certain pets, and subtly adjust the colors and lighting to enhance images. |
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| + | It regularly turned a good picture into a great one – and sometimes it helped us take pictures that we wouldn’t dream of normally – the ‘moon’ optimization, when coupled with 30x zoom, picked up the intricate details of the face of the moon, creating breathtaking shots. |
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| + | The ‘punch-hole’ on the front of the display houses a 32MP selfie camera, which generally took high-quality pictures, although they did look a little pale at times. Because the punch-hole is off to one side, you do have to hold the phone at a slight angle if you want to be in the center of the frame, though, and before we got used to this we were taking selfies in which we were off-center. |
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| + | Using the camera is quick and easy thanks to the simple interface, but with a fast shutter speeds and snappy autofocus, it’s easy to take nice-looking pictures. All in all we found the camera phenomenal – it’s as good as something you’d find on a phone twice the Honor 20 Pro’s price, it’s one of the best camera phones you can get your hands on right now. |
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| + | Camera samples |
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| + | Interface and reliability |
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| + | The Honor 20 Pro runs Honor’s Magic OS, laid over Android 9 – and at this point alarm bells will be ringing for people who are familiar with Chinese companies’ own-brand UIs, which are typically rather garish. |
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| + | Magic OS doesn’t look terrible, and we’ve seen UIs with more garish colors and designs, but it looks rather babyish, like MIUI on the Xiaomi Mi 9. App icon designs and colors are bright and cartoonish, and most of the available wallpapers are a little lurid – the default live wallpaper is fish swimming among coral. Honor aims its phones at a younger audience, but it looks like it’s aimed a bit too young here. |
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| + | Other than its questionable UI, navigating the Honor 20 Pro is fairly easy – with simple mode, which makes app icons much bigger and simplifies the UI, and one-handed mode, which shrinks the usable screen area quite a bit, people with smaller or frail hands can use the phone just as easily as tech-savvy users.Behind Magic OS, the Honor 20 Pro runs standard Android 9, with its suite of features including adaptive brightness and adaptive battery use. |
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| + | The Honor 20 Pro has no app drawer, and uses three-key navigation, although you can change both of these if you want – we found ourselves gravitating towards gesture controls, as it’s very easy to navigate using simple swipes. |
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| + | Music, movies and gaming |
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| + | Thanks to its Kirin 980 chipset, the Honor 20 Pro is great for gaming – you can play games on high graphical settings at fast frame rates, and the phone loaded games up quicker than most, which was one of the most notable differences we found compared to other phones. |
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| + | Something intriguing we noticed is that the Honor 20 Pro comes with Fortnite installed, without Google Play Books, which is usually installed on Android handsets – if replacing books with games makes you want to shake a fist at the clouds, though, you’re probably not the phone’s target audience. |
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| + | Gaming and movie-watching are hindered by the display’s slightly lower screen specs, but you’re barely going to notice this if you’re wrapped up in an engrossing drama or frenetic game. |
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| + | The Honor 20 Pro’s speaker seemed fairly decent given the price of the handset, with some mid-range phones, like the Google Pixel 3a, have weaker speakers. Music played on the Honor 20 Pro was fairly loud, and decent-quality – it won’t compare to standalone speakers, or even high-end phone speakers, but that’s understandable for its price. |
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| + | One nice bonus audio-wise is that the Honor 20 Pro is compatible with Huawe’s excellent Freelace wireless earphones – all you need to do is plug the FreeLace into the Honor 20 Pro to pair them.Verdict |
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| + | The Honor 20 Pro is a high-end phone masquerading as a ‘premium’ mid-range handset, just like the OnePlus 7 Pro – except without quite as high a price tag. |
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| + | For sure, the Honor 20 Pro isn’t a high-end powerhouse – it’s got a side-mounted fingerprint sensor and weaker screen specs for example – but it blurs the lines between high-end phones and mid-range devices in terms of the features and performance we expect. |
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| + | The fingerprint sensor is the most easily-accessible we’ve seen on a smartphone, we found it far more preferable than the in-screen ID most phones have; the screen specs are far from a deal-breaker, as you’ll barely notice the difference without placing this phone side-by-side with a competitor; also we’re still not convinced a screen needs to be bezel- or camera-less, as it’s easy to ignore these intrusions. |
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| + | Add in the competitive camera array, perfect screen size and what we expect to be a low price tag, you’ve got a phone that can give flagships from the likes of Apple and Samsung a run for their money. |
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| + | Competition |
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| + | Don't think the Honor 20 Pro is for you? Try these instead... |
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| + | Google Pixel 3a |
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| + | For about the same price as the Honor 20 Pro you could get the Google Pixel 3a, which also offers a powerful camera and impressive image processing – it doesn’t have as good a chipset or battery life though, so if photography isn’t your thing you may find it lacking. |
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| + | Honor View 20 |
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| + | The Honor View 20 looks rather similar to the Honor 20 Pro, with a ‘punch-hole’ camera in its screen, but it’s nowhere near as powerful in terms of camera specs as the Honor 20 Pro, and it’ll set you back a similar amount. The Honor 20 Pro pretty much replaces the Honor View 20, although you may soon be able to pick the latter phone up for a lot less money |
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| + | Huawei P30 |
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| + | The Huawei P30 has one of the best camera setups we’ve seen in a smartphone, and while the Honor 20 Pro’s cameras could top it, it’s very close. While the P30 does have a better screen, and arguably a more ergonomic design than the new Honor phone, you’d be paying extra for a phone that might not actually give you that extra back.[/summary] |
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| + | [summary_image|2111318] |
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