Huawei P20 is the newest addition to the Huawei’s P series. Since its launch at the beginning of April, the phone received outstanding reviews and notes worthy of a mathematician at a 4th grade math test. Let’s see if they are deserved.
The phone can be called an actual competitor for Samsung S9 for quality and as for the price, it’s about 50$ cheaper than the latter at 659$. We can safely say that it is one of the best phones you can buy this year.
There is a bit of a problem if you are an US wanna-buy-er because Huawei has some issues with the US market and it will not be available there so your only option is to import it, but we can safely say, it’s worth it.
DESIGN
At the design department, Huawei clearly improved from the last year’s P10 as you can see below. Left, the P10 and on the right, the P20.
The new case is a lot more stylish and pleasant for the eye in my opinion.
Unfortunately for some, the headphones jack is gone in favor of an USB-C but Huawei didn’t marginalize you because they put a USB-C headphones and a 3.5mm headphone jack adaptor in the box.
There is also the 5.84 inch display screen which does the phone justice, but I would have preferred the frontal camera to be in a bezel and not to poke the screen like that, just a personal issue I have, some may like it.
SPECIFICATIONS
The display is a 2244×1080 18.7:9 LCD and the slightly more expensive version of thies phone, the P20 Pro has OLED display.
The aspect ratio is great in the form factor being easy to hold in one hand but if you have to reach the top of the screen, you’ll need two hands.
Video displays great on the screen which means you can stream HD without a worry. It’s great to see LCD doing so well in the right hands, some producers are getting eve OLED wrong.
The Kirin 970 is back with the P20, the Kirin 970 being Huawei’s answer to Snapdragon 845. Huawei calls it a neutral processing unit, NPU for short, which performs AI feats.
The greatest improvement from the P10 is that now you get 128 GB of storage and even though it will have to make due with 4GB of RAM and no expandable storage, the phone comes with dual SIM as standard. I should mention that the P20 Pro comes with 6GB of RAM.
Even though the phone has only two lenses compared to the Pro version which has three, the camera is still impressive. There are 12Mp and 20Mp lenses colour and monochrome, f/1.8 and f/1.6 respectively. Photos in auto mode are amazingly sharp and saturated and even if sometimes images are sharp to the point of over-processing. The selfie camera is also improved to 24Mp .
The battery also comes with a little improvement from the 3,200mAh that the P10 had to the 3,400mAh battery the P20 has. The super-charger that comes in the box helps a lot if you use your phone constantly, it can charge your phone up to 60% in 30 minutes which is quite fast. Huawei claims that you can stretch the battery life to two days. Maybe, if you are using the phone just to watch the clock…
As for water resistance, it appears that the P20 Pro is a bit more resistant when it comes to getting wet then the P20 standard. The P20 is only IP53 water resistant and the Pro version is IP67.
CONCLUSION
So, in conclusion, the Huawei P20 is overall a great device but as every phone out there, there are some flaws even if some of them are for me personally. Do I recommend you to buy the Huawei P20 ? Sure, it’s one of the best phones out there this year.
