Honor 20 Review: Camera, Performance and Beauty in one amazing package

Honor has made many big changes and put amazing technologies on its smartphone but the new Honor 20 surely brought some dope tech for its users, that Looks, Performs and Captures in the name of perfection.

Honor 20 is stacked with many new features and hardware specs, so we decided to make an in-depth review, which will try to cover every aspect of this new smartphone.

Tip: You can click on the images to see them in full size.

Display
Design
Software
Performance
Camera
Battery
Sound
Our Opinion

Display:

Honor 20 comes with a 6.26-inch FullHD+ (2340 x 1080) resolution display with 412 PPI. The all-view display reaches to a 91.6% screen-to-body ratio and achieved with the help of a 4.5mm punch hole, which helps the phone to retain its design aesthetics while providing you fantastic viewing angles to enjoy Youtube or Netflix videos, rich-graphics games and full-screen app interactions.

Sharpness and the color reproduction of the display are excellent, and if you want more vibrant colors, you have got an option inside the display settings, that let you choose between ‘Normal’ and ‘Vivid’ color schemes. Also, you can choose different temperature modes that suit better for your eye comforts. Speaking of “Eye Comfort”, the phone does have a feature associated with this name that you can turn on anytime from the notification panel to ease some tension out from eyes.

Moreover, if you’re not comfortable with Honor 20’s punch hole area, the feature to disable it is available at your service and will make a virtual bezel in the alignment to hide the front camera.

Design:

The back side, Honor 20 carries a beautiful design named ‘Dynamic Holographic Glassback’ that gives the phone an extra premium look, made of Triple 3D Mesh technique and includes 3D glass, color layer, and depth layer.

This composition can be seen when you tilt the phone and as the light passes through the prisms in the depth layer, it is reflected and diverted in all directions of the glass, which looks astounding.

We’ve got Honor 20 in Sapphire Blue color but it’s also available in Midnight Black, as both of these colors are blended with multiple colors and produces different hues according to lights.

Honor 20 is 73.97 mm wide, 7.87 mm thick and 154.25 mm tall, and weighs only 174, which gives phone perfect grip and makes it easy to interact with.

The phone’s design also excludes 3.5mm Jack but don’t worry the phone box has a USB Type-C adaptor to connect the phone with 3.5mm earphone.

Coming to the sides of Honor 20, another change you’ll find is the placement of physical fingerprint on the left side embedded right into the power button and on top of it there are volume adjustment keys.

Topside contains a secondary microphone and IR blaster, while the earpiece is sitting between the top side and the display. On the right side, there’s a sim card tray with two nano sim card slot, though, it’s not a hybrid one.

The primary microphone, speaker grills, and a USB Type-C port are placed at the bottom side.

Software:

Honor 20 runs on Magic UI 2.1 built on top of Android 9.0 Pie, with an approach towards Android customizations and rich user experience. As for its features, the Magic UI 2.1 is a forked version of Huawei EMUI 9.1 and reflects the same design from its icons to the Settings menu.

As a customized version of Android, Honor comes with a hefty amount of pre-installed apps on this smartphone including official and third-party applications. In addition, there’s also a set of Google apps and system utility tools that stays there for your help and productivity.

To be said, Honor 20’s UI is highly customizable and there are options to change Themes, Wallpapers, Widgets, App drawer animations, Home screen layouts, as well as system navigation.

Performance:

Honor 20 is powered by 7nm Kirin 980 Dual NPU processor and with 6GB of RAM, that’s can easily handle high-level multitasking and intense gaming sessions. In terms of space, the 128GB of internal storage is enough to hold your apps, games and multimedia contents at one place. Although, we expected an option to expand the storage via an sd card.

The GPU Turbo 3.0 is a part of Magic UI 2.1 and boosts gaming performance by focusing all of the system resources on a particular game while managing the power consumption. Games such as PUBG Mobile and Asphalt 9 Legends run smoothly without experiencing frame drops.

In addition, the phone ships with Fortnite installer that can be installed and there’s a free exclusive game skin for the buyers of Honor 20 and 20 Pro devices.

To test the phone benchmarks we reached on Geekbench with the result of 9281 points on multicore and 184240 on Antutu benchmark, which may seem little disappointing to you but it’s actually not.

Because there’s an option in the Settings named as ‘Performance Mode’ and when you trigger it on, the difference shown on Geekbench is 9936 in multi-core and 309637 on Antutu. This difference in performance is significant.

It’s reported that Huawei has customized EMUI to save battery life by restricts phones from using their full potential its processor on normal mode and automatically uses this mode while playing high-performance apps and games.

Camera:

With the launch of Honor 20 series, Honor announced its first smartphones equipped with a 48Mp AI Quad Camera, including the Honor 20’s rear camera setup that encompasses four lenses: 48MP Main Camera (Sony IMX586) F/1.8 aperture AI Ultra Clarity mode 1/2 inch large sensor 4-in-1 Light Fusion (effective 1.6μm pixels) AI Image Stabilization (AIS) AIS Super Night mode 16MP Super Wide Angle Camera F/2.2 aperture 117° super wide angle Supported by distortion correction 2MP Depth Assist Camera F/2.4 aperture, bokeh effect 2MP Macro Camera F/2.4 aperture, 4cm macro photography.

For selfies, it is equipped with a 32MP Selfie Camera F/2.0 aperture 3D Portrait Lighting.

With a camera combination like this, Honor 20 raised the bar of photography and allows users to take professional grade images through the smartphone.

To take the photography at a new level, the phone features heavily influenced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and algorithms. Whether we talk about the 48MP Clarity Mode, Super Night Mode, Image Stabilization, Light detection, Image composition, all of these features work perfectly on their respective use cases.

The main camera app offers you to capture AR emojis, Portraits, Video, Regular images, Videos recording up to 4k, Macro mode photography, Panorama, Slo-Mo, Time-lapse, HDR and more.

The photo samples below taken on 48MP Clarity Mode and show the capability of Honor 20’s AI Mode, Depth-Sensing and Super Macro, as well as super wide angle shot. By judging the camera we can say it’s truly an unprecedented experience of shooting pictures with Honor 20.

In addition, the camera also includes support for AI-powered HiVision that helps users to identify an object, real-time translations, shop an item, Check calories, QR code and more by just pointing the camera to the direction of a particular object.

Battery:

Honor 20 is packed with 3750mAh battery that supports 22.5W Huawei SuperFast charging and can charge 50% battery in 30 minutes.

In typical use, the battery of this flagship can last for a day without any problems and its performance may vary depending on use cases.

Sound:

Watching movies, playing games and most importantly listening music requires a holly-molly sound experience, that’s why Honor 20 keeps you covered with its Virtual 9.1 Surround sound feature that is powered by Huawei Histen 6.0 and provides you. Although it may not feel too premium but it’s something new that you may not find in the previous Honor phones.

One of the most useful hardware blessings that we found on this phone is its this is its dual microphone with noise reduction helps you to get rid of any pesky background noise. This provides you with an immersive experience while performing and audio related tasks.

Our Opinion:

Since the review above explains all of the features and details of this flagship phone, Honor 20 is surely a win-win deal for any smartphone enthusiast and consumers who’s seeking for a smartphone with pro-grade camera, premium design, and powerful performance packaged in a mid-range price that cannot be offered by any other smartphone maker at the moment.