HONOR 20 Review: A Very Likeable Phone With a Great Camera and Price

When it comes to owning a smartphone for simple communicative and convenience purposes, choosing a flagship option is not necessary. At the same time, it has to be a device powerful enough to drive your daily tasks and needs without issues.

Meet Honor 20, the flagship option in Huawei’s sub-brand’s latest 20 series and the new successor to the Honor 10.

This phone sports a couple of desired hardware in a smart device such as a quad-camera set up that consists of a 48 MP lens, 8GB RAM, powerful Kirin 980 chipset and an almost bezel-less, 6.26-inch screen.

Although coming with a powerful camera, Honor 20 is actually very reasonable for its price. Aside from that; is there more to this shiny new toy than it meets the eye?

We also conducted a camera test on the Honor 20 below:

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Design & Screen

Phones today are just getting bigger than ever. Following that, most are also lighter, which would usually result in a higher price tag. Fortunately, that’s not the case with Honor 20. The phone is encased within a thin and lightweight glossy cover, with its surface feeling plasticky but is in fact, made of 3 layers of glass.

A drop test wasn’t done, but we can trust that the Honor 20 will not sustain scratches and other minor damages easily.

With an almost bezel-less screen, it can be surprising to know that the Honor 20 is made with a 6.3 inches LTPS screen and the dimensions of 154.25mm (L), 73.97mm (W), and 7.87mm (D). Moreover, the phone is comfortable to hold one-handedly even for small palms like mine. So not only do you get to enjoy a bigger screen, but handling difficulties or risks of slips are eliminated.

But, being made with an LTPS screen which is actually an LCD-type, we notice that the Honor 20’s screen isn’t as clear and vivid as we’d like it to be. If you aren’t used to screens like AMOLED, this isn’t a big issue.

Additionally, this time Honor 20 isn’t made with a headphone jack. Instead, users will get a headphone jack adapter.

Performance

The Honor 20 is powered by a Kirin 980 AI Chipset together with 8GB of RAM, which supports a boost in performance by 20% than the previous generation. Moreover, Honor 20 runs on OS Magic UI 2.1 which is made compatible with Android 9.0, so you can run most Android applications.

For gamers, you’ll be glad to hear that the Honor 20 utilises GPU turbo 3.0 to support the operation of smooth gaming and in full frame. This is especially extended to over 20 popular game titles including Fornite, PUBG and Vainglory.

During our testing period, we noticed minor delays and a few freeze moments. With 8GBs of RAM, we didn’t expect to experience anything like that but this might be due to OS issues instead of hardware.

When tried for gaming, we hardly encountered any overheating and lagging on the Honor 20 although we did see very minor frame stutters. Therefore, we’d recommend lowering down settings for longer and stable gaming sessions.

Camera

One of the most desired features in a smartphone is a great camera. Those who are looking to pick up the Honor 20 can enjoy its 32MP AI Selfie lens and 48MP main camera, which has an f/1.8 aperture to capture images with satisfactory depth of field. It helps that there is also a large ½ inch sensor, which allows for higher light intake.

Note: All of our sample shots are unedited apart from being watermarked.

While there is very little issue with quality in resolution, we did find the front camera to have below-average stabilisation.

Sample of aperture mode

The Honor 20 also boasts accurate detection of AI scenes and a fancy AIS Super Night mode which manages to deliver grain-less night shots without compromising on other aspects such as sharpness and colour.

Normal mode (left) versus night mode (right)

Not forgetting to mention, by equipping a 16MP telephoto lens that holds an f/2.4 aperture and an 80mm focal length, the Honor 20 is able to uphold its Huawei-quality of capturing vibrant landscape images whether via auto or pro (manual) mode.

Sample of a landscape photo

Being photography enthusiasts ourselves, we were excited to try the Honor 20’s 2MP Macro lens with a closeness of 4cm. Alas, we feel this could be better as the results appear to be a tad wonky in colour and face minor difficulty when focusing on small subjects. But, this is a start and we look forward to the development of better macros on Honor smartphones.

Macro mode (top) versus normal mode (bottom)

Battery life

Honor 20 comes with a battery life of 3,750 mAh. Being powered by Kirin 980, there is supposedly an improvement in power efficiency by 40% from previous generations.

Supporting fast charging, we are glad to see that Honor 20 ships with a fast, 22.5w HONOR SuperCharge charger which powers up the phone from 0% to 50% in just 30 minutes.

In terms of battery performance, there may have been a need for appropriate optimisation, as we experienced an ordinary battery drain (5% in 6-7 hours) during standby. With that, we expect the Honor 20 to last a whole day with a few web browsing sessions and perhaps a game or two.

Security

Honor 20 has included both a face unlock feature and an under-display fingerprint scanner which doubles as the power button (quite a nice design there). In our experiences, with just a light touch, there was hardly any delay unlocking the phone via fingerprint.

But, the same can’t be said for the face scanner. Half of the time, we struggled to unlock the phone during the first to third try. This may be a software issue instead of hardware.

Conclusion

The best reason for anyone to get the Honor 20 is its affordable price of RM 1,699 and its great camera performance for a mid-ranger.

We think that the Honor 20 would especially appeal to both photographers and casual gamers. Its triple camera setup offers one the option to shoot photos with great quality whereas its 8GB RAM and GPU Turbo 3.0 provides smooth and decent cooling experience when gaming.