Home Review Smartphone Review – Huawei P20: Major Improvements From Before

Review – Huawei P20: Major Improvements From Before

April 20, 2018

Here comes the major flagship smartphone from Huawei – the P20. It was launched at Paris at the end of March, and was launched in Malaysian market about a week after that. And a few days after, we actually got a hold of the brand new Huawei P20.

With Huawei’s brand new hardware and especially the AI camera, can the Huawei P20 actually stand out from what it can already do before? Let’s find out in this in-depth review where we take a look at everything from the box, the P20’s design, all the way till its camera and even battery charging and discharging curves.

Unboxing

Let’s start off with the unboxing here. The P20’s box is a lot more understated compared to its predecessor’s packaging. The new one just has a lid which slides open from the top and reveals the phone itself. Behind the box, there’s absolutely nothing.

The Huawei P20 comes with a screen protector pre-installed like its predecessor, by the way. That red tab only removes the protective film that protects the screen protector (if that makes sense), so make sure you don’t rip both of them apart.

Underneath the Huawei P20 is a pedestal made out of recyclable material – very eco-friendly. From my guess, even the cardboard box that holds the accessories and documentations are made out of recycled paper.

In terms of accessories, the Huawei P20 comes with a Huawei SuperCharge charger, a USB-C cable with purple connectors like last time, a USB-C to 3.5mm audio jack converter, and a USB-C earphone. Remember – the Huawei P20 doesn’t have an audio jack, and I praise Huawei for including a converter in the box.

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Now, the design itself. The Huawei P20 is a big step-up in terms of design. The P9 and P10 looks pretty much similar in some aspects – but the P20 takes a big leap compared to before. It looks familiar, yes.

Even though with this high screen to body ratio, Huawei retained the fingerprint scanner in front – which I personally prefer it to be at the back. The fingerprint scanner is squished at the bottom and it’s quite difficult to reach for. However, thanks to Huawei’s NPU and new algorithms, this issue can actually be mitigated. More on this later.

At the back of the Huawei P20, we can see the ultra-reflective glass back. I think many will find it nice to look at – myself included. Still waiting for that Twilight edition though. In whichever case, the Huawei P20 is difficult to maintain in terms of its aesthetics. The glass back is a fingerprint and dust magnet for sure. Slipperiness is another thing too, but getting a phone case will solve this issue.

As for the buttons, they’re all on the right side once again but now Huawei has removed the mesh texture on the power button and replaced it with a slit instead. Much more subtle in terms of aesthetics and feeling on the fingertip.

At the bottom we can see a symmetrical design here where the left side is for the microphone and the right side is the speaker. Unfortunately, Huawei still didn’t make the change to include stereo speakers.

[nextpage title=”Connectivity & Sensors”]

Back to the notch – that’s where all the necessities are. The light sensor, proximity sensor, the selfie camera, and also the earpiece. The P20 employs a circular earpiece design – it’s tiny but phone calls still sound okay.

What’s fantastic here is how all of the 4 sensors are packed together in such a small area and yet still function greatly. There is literally no compromise when it comes to the quality of these earpiece sound especially.

Interestingly, Huawei opted not to have a microSD card lot and opted for true dual nano SIM card slots. Hence, the P20 and P20 Pro only comes with 128GB in capacity. There are definitely pros and cons to doing this, but Huawei definitely weighed all of these options. I can foresee more pros than cons to not have microSD card slot – and we’ll talk more about it later.

Speaking of which, the brand new Huawei P20 has 802.11ac WiFi and NFC too. From what we can find out, the Huawei P20 still uses Bluetooth 4.2.

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Here we can see the P20’s main attraction – the new nearly-full screen display. The Huawei P20 comes with a 18.7:9 aspect ratio display with 5.8-inches diagonal. It has an LTPS IPS LCD display with 1080p resolution. With that aspect ratio, that means the screen is actually 2240×1080 in resolution.

First thing’s for sure – the color looks good on the P20. It’s not too vivid and definitely creates pleasing colors for the eyes. That’s because even though the white balance is slightly to the warm side. It’s great for everyday use.

However, as for the brightness, I can say for sure that it’s a bit too bright. Yes, the adjustment range is very huge here but the auto brightness option is a bit too aggressive. Make sure you set the brightness offset to prevent sudden light attack.

Though, with this display, I do realize that there are some software issues with buttons at the center. Take Instagram for example where there’s an auto-tune button around where the notch it. For some reason, the button didn’t reposition itself and the notch just ate away part of the button.

However, the notch can be “hidden” by having the entire strip at the top to become black. That way, the buttons can be shifted downwards.

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The camera is definitely a long one to talk about. Let’s first do a quick rundown of its specs. The Huawei P20 has dual-cameras with Leica optics once again, by the way:

Dual-rear facing camera
- 12MP 1.55µm, 1/2.3-inch RGB sensor with f/1.8 lens
- 20MP black/white sensor with f/1.6 lens
- Phase and laser autofocus
Selfie camera
- 24MP f/2.0

We have all of our sample pictures uploaded to the Flickr account here, so have a look at that if you’re interested. All of the metadata are included as well, so you know the settings that we used to take these pictures.

Full album of pictures taken by the Huawei P20 is here at our Flickr account.

Huawei didn’t learn from their mistake though, as all of the pictures’ metadata is filled with gibberish that describes what mode that picture is taken. Messing up with the description of the picture is indeed an issue for us who upload pictures to image hosts like Flickr.

Rear-facing camera

The dual-Leica cameras return once again, and it still uses the stereoscopic dual-camera system. In case you missed out on our post regarding the differences of dual-camera systems, you can check it out here.

The Huawei P20 has a little play room, actually. While Huawei listed the rear-facing camera to be 12MP + 20MP, it is defaulted to 12MP at 4:3 aspect ratio. We actually know why. Remember when Huawei advertised how well the P20 can take long exposure night shots without having to use a tripod and still appear sharp as ever? And also the lossless 2x zoom?

Thanks to some software magic, the P20 is able to downscale from 20MP to 12MP and use those leftover megapixels to create a sharp image. We noticed this while taking night shots as it locks down the image size to 12MP at 4:3 only and we cannot take 20MP night shots.

The picture quality in itself is surprisingly fantastic. I first realized its fantastic colors when I took a picture of a custom PC with full RGB lights. It looks fantastic. Colors are on point – and since we take all pictures in 12MP size, the images appear really sharp even with my super-shaky hands with a 4-second exposure shot.

For this picture, I selected night mode manually and its shutter speed to auto. The P20 automatically goes for a 4-second exposure shot with an ISO of 400 only. The picture turned out great while my hand is shaky.

Selfie camera

I’m not much of a selfie person. Taking a few quick shots reveals that the selfie camera isn’t particularly doing well. Taking a selfie in low-light conditions reveal that the image will appear blurry. The room is lit up by yellow light, so in terms of color accuracy, it’s done right.

I really do wish that Huawei will include an autofocusing selfie camera, actually.

AI?

The AI on the other hand, is useful when it does detect the image. Integrating real-time image recognition and changing scene modes instantly is not an easy feat, and Huawei actually makes use of the technology very well – but only when it detects the scene.

While the AI is a tad bit aggressive, for certain shots like a price tag, it changes between text and document scanning. Sometimes, it’ll go in close-up mode too – which is quite frustrating given that it’ll automatically zoom 2x for close-up but doesn’t zoom back out once it doesn’t detect close-up anymore.

Huawei P20 Camera AI — Close-up or text?

Speaking of the document scene, take a look at what the Huawei P20 does when it detected a bottle of chemical’s label!

Detects as document scan

Automatically frames up the label for me.

In portrait mode, there’s a new option to add 3D lighting mode. It detects all of your face’s contours and adds a virtual light that casts directional light and shadows. This feature is mostly used for professionals who want their images to stand out more – and I have to say, it really looks fantastic. Credits to Mr. RexTech for being such a great model.

Also, if you the AI detects a scene, it doesn’t ask you if you want to use that scene mode or not – it’ll force you to use that scene mode directly. You’ll have to manually tap the “x” button to quit the scene mode. Quite annoying sometimes as certain objects that I tried taking pictures with were detected as food and I had to manually tap the scene away.

Disabling AI will put an end to these little issues, but that means you’ll never have any of these scene mode optimizations at all. Navigating through the interface is easy, but slow. Changing between scenes manually requires a lot of swiping and tapping, which is not optimal at all – which leads us to the next part.

Camera app UI

While the app did get a cleanup, there’s quite a lot more left to be desired. For example, the scene mode selection is now hidden on the far right side of the carousel of modes. The wide-aperture mode that we spoke of here is now moved to the far left side of the carousel of modes.

Even switching between selfie and rear-facing camera is not that straightforward. That option is only available in certain modes – which means more screen tapping.

The camera UI in general does work – but has a learning curve due to its complexity and number of features available. Though if you don’t plan on using all of the manual modes and such, the UI works fine.

There’s actually 960fps slow-mo feature here on the Huawei P20 as well. It works slower than what Samsung has on their Galaxy S9 and S9+ but is a lot simpler to use.

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The new firmware that it’s running on is EMUI 8.1 – which surprisingly is actually more advanced variant of what the Honor 9 Lite is using, but we generally don’t mind much changes comparing the two of them.

If you’ve used the previous EMUI 5.0, then the EMUI 8 is pretty much similar in terms of user experience. Not much has changed since then.

For some reason though, even for a flagship phone like the Huawei P20, there are bloatware. 5 games are built-in to the phone itself, and there are a few more apps like Quik, Bookings.com, and Netflix pre-installed as well.

I do want to highlight that with the new face scanning technology and processing power that the Huawei P20 has, face unlock is exceptionally fast to the point that I can accidentally unlock my phone. In brighter conditions where my face isn’t in complete darkness, the P20 unlocks nearly instantaneously.

While in dark areas where it can’t see my face though, the P20 will bump up its screen’s brightness to illuminate my face and scan it. In most cases I’ve tried, it works way faster than what Samsung’s iris scanner and face detection has to offer.

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When it comes to performance, the flagship Huawei P20 comes with this list of specs:

Kirin 970 chipset fabricated with 10nm process
- Octa-core processor (4×2.4GHz Cortex-A73 + 4×1.8GHz Cortex-A53)
- Mali-G72 MP12 graphics
4GB RAM
128GB UFS 2.1 storage
2240×1080 resolution display
3,400mAh battery

These specs are not to be messed with – literally. The new flagship chipset now features 20% better power efficiency and 40% smaller die area due to the process shrinkage to 10nm. Learn more about why it matters here.

Now, let’s dive into the benchmarks.

Our data here is clear – comparing the Samsung Galaxy S9 and the Huawei P20, the Galaxy S9 wins in terms of pure computational power. However, the P20 wins when 3D graphics is involved.

Through my usage experience, the Huawei P20 is smooth sailing all the way. Without a doubt, it’s definitely a good chip. However, there is some heat issue that warmed the entire phone and makes it a little too hot to touch. The Huawei P20 can reach about 55°C while doing a few intense tasks all at once. That’s quite a rare case, but happened to me while updating lots of apps and playing games at once.

I played Honkai Impact 3 on the Huawei P20 and I’m glad to say that the P20 can indeed run the game at 60fps with all of the highest settings. The temperature is at a cool 45°C while playing on WiFi – so that’s a good sign.

Also, it seems that Huawei knew of their mistake from last year’s gamble. They even remove the microSD card slot in favor of a large and speedy internal storage only – which is good. You can run games and take 4K videos without any variance in video loading or saving speeds.

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I have to really praise Huawei for the fact that they’re actually bumping up the battery capacity each generation. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, so the phone can be thicker or thinner and there will still be someone complaining about it – but a larger battery is something that everyone loves.

With a 3,400mAh battery and 10nm process technology and a dedicated NPU to handle all of the intense image recognition algorithms, the Huawei P20 performed very well in our battery test. Lasting for more than 10 hours in the test, it has a commendable battery life.

Charger

Huawei’s SuperCharge using another standard of fast charging compared to the standard Qualcomm has. The SuperCharge is the same as the P10 – it outputs a maximum of 5V at 4.5A, a total of 22.5W. With such high amount of current, a thicker cable is surely needed. That’s why the Huawei P20 comes with this thick cable that has purple USB headers.

In terms of its charging speed, the SuperCharge does have a rather unique charging curve. The entire charging curve looks like a quadrant of a circle, and manages to charge to 100% in just 1 hour and 30 minutes!

[nextpage title=”Wrapping up the Huawei P20 review”]

Throughout my time spent with the Huawei P20, I can confirm one thing – it’s a fantastic phone for sure. The one thing that I didn’t particularly like is the software experience because of the EMUI’s skin and the way all the options are placed. The AI for the camera is too aggressive and needs a little UI adjustment to improve the quality of user experience.

Other than that, it’s pretty much smooth sailing. It’s a fantastic phone that I can recommend from others. If you’re using a Huawei P10 now, I can assure you the upgrade to the new P20 is a big leap forward in terms of camera, user experience, and battery life.

With the price of just RM2,699, I don’t think there are any flagship smartphones in the market that can fight with that price – until the OnePlus 6 comes out.