Huawei has been on track for many years, but 2018 is rather less successful than what Huawei wants. After effectively closing the US smartphone market, he launched Mate 10 Pro as an unlocked device. Now, it's time for Huawei's flagship launch this second year, and this may not come to the US even in an unlocked capacity. The new Huawei P20 Pro has much in common with Mate 10 Pro, but there are some prominent upgrades or downgrade, depending on your perspective.
This phone is powered by the Kirin 970 SoC with a luxurious AI processing core, and other specifications are also impressive. Behind it, P20 Pro has a trio of cameras, each with different uses. That's the first for Huawei, just like the front-facing display. This design is inconsistent-in some cases it is beautiful, and the other is strange. Even if the P20 Pro increases Mate Mate Pro in some way, the older phones have a fun design and lower price tag.
Spec Huawei P20 Pro :
- SoC Kirin : 970
- RAM : 6GB
- Storage : 128GB
- Display : 6.1-inch 1080 x 2240 OLED
- Battery : 4,000mAh
- Camera : 40MP RGB, 20MP monochrome, 8MP 3x zoom; 24MP front-facing
- Software : Android 8.1 with EMUI 8.1
- Measurements : 155 x 73.9 x 7.8 mm, 180g
- Other : IP67, Type-C video-out.
Good Quality Huawei Product Huawei P20 :
- Design : Sleek glass chassis. The Twilight colorway is amazing.
- Display : The OLED panel looks fantastic with vibrant colors and perfect viewing angles.
- Camera Triple camera system takes excellent photos with the aid of AI and 3x zoom. Option to take 40MP shots is cool, too.
- Performance : The Kirin 970 makes this phone blazing fast.
- Battery life : You can easily make it through two days with the P20 Pro.
- Fingerprint sensor : It's incredibly fast and accurate.
- Cameras : Most photos come out looking great, and the 3x zoom is much appreciated.
- Software : Ships with Android 8.1 and has some neat AI tricks.
Design and display Huawei P20 Pro :
After using the P20 Pro for about two weeks, I am still uncertain of the design. Some things about this phone really make me fascinated, but other aspects are confusing. Huawei has shown industry-equivalent pieces of Samsung in recent years, especially with Mate 10 Pro and now P20 Pro. However, it made some mistakes honestly when designing P20 Pro. Let's start with good stuff.
The back of this phone is glass, which is very popular today. There is no wireless charging, so the glass is only an aesthetic choice. Curved panels on all four sides like Mate 10 Pro, wrap up to meet with a shiny aluminum tape that surrounds the center of the device. The main camera module causes a pronounced hump on top that breaks the sleekness, though. Glass has high-gloss finishes like the latest HTC phones. It's like a mirror, but a very beautiful mirror. The version of the phone that I use is the color of "Twilight", which is one of the most beautiful colors I've ever seen on a smartphone. Its color is purple at the top and shifts to the blue at the bottom with a colorful sparkle effect. I love brave colors, and this is right in my alley. If you prefer something simpler, the P20 Pro comes in some boring solid colors as well.
While I love the color, the P20 Pro finishing is also very slick. It slipped from my desk several times because it was not really flat, and it only slowly migrated until it dropped. No damage from four drops to hardwood floors, so bonus points for durability. This IP67 is also rated. The phone looks beautiful in the photo and sits on my desk / floor, but becomes dirty as you touch it. Glass phones always take fingerprints, but finishing the hyper-gloss on the P20 Pro makes it clearer.
The polished aluminum edge is a beautiful pale purple color on my unit, and the other version has the same rim. Above is IR blaster, which is quite wild. Huawei is the only big smartphone maker still doing this. The power and volume buttons are on the right. They are tight and have a satisfying click when pressed, and I actually dig the orange accents on the power button. At the bottom, you have a single port, USB Type-C. Yes, headphone jack is lost. There is also a speaker on the bottom, which works with a sound hole to offer stereo sound.
Front-facing cameras do face recognition for P20 Pro, and Huawei pushes this feature aloud. When you pick up the phone, he wakes up and immediately starts looking for a face. Often, opening the face is instant. In light of the light, it is unreliable. At least the fingerprint sensor is the fast-moving experience I usually expect from Huawei. I do not think there is a cell phone that has a fingerprint sensor that is faster and more accurate.
The front of this phone is the most controversial aspect of the design thanks to the notch. It is at the top and provides space for cameras, speakers, and LED notifications. It's shaped like an iPhone X notch but much smaller. This allows the screen to approach the top edge of the phone. Below the screen is a fingerprint reader, so the phone has a chin that makes the screen not reach the edge down there.
The top of this phone looks striking at first, even if you're not a fan of notch screens (and I know many of you do not). The bottom, however, is just ... lazy. If you will have a notch, you should not have a chin as well. I know, this is a engineering challenge that will increase the price, but half the size is wasteful. If you are stuck with an extra bezel at the bottom, why not focus the screen and lose the notch completely?
Even if you love the screen, I do not think Huawei does the best job with this one. There is a lot of space wasted around the speakers and the camera, and the bezel on the top of the device is not even symmetrical. The upper frame is a few millimeters larger than the left and right, which looks very silly once you realize it.
The OLED panel itself is a nice specimen with a resolution of 1080 x 2240 pixels. It works with a somewhat unusual ratio of 18.7: 9. At 6.1 inches, there's a bit of obscurity when you look closer because of the pentile matrix, but this is small, and most people will not realize it. The 1080p resolution is pretty good on the smartphone as long as you do not intend to use it for VR.
Bright and saturated colors, which seem to be the preference of most smartphone buyers. The default screen mode is on, but you can turn on a more natural color if you want. The color temperature can also be configured, and I will note that the color of the stock looks slightly warm in my eyes. No offshore color casting, and enough brightness for outdoor use. There were several times in a very bright light when I had to squint to make everything, but it was quite frequent.
Camera
There are a total of four cameras on this phone, which proves the number of cameras is a new megapixel race. Of course, Huawei also pushes the megapixel count with P20 Pro. At the back you have RGB 40MP sensor, 20MP monochrome sensor, and 8MP sensor with 3x optical zoom. At the front there is a 24MP selfie camera. This is almost too much detail for narcissism.
The standard shooting mode on P20 Pro generates a 10MP image, and that is probably where you want to leave it. Huawei uses the AI Kirin 970 processing core to do many things in the camera like stabilization and scene recognition, and you lose most of it if you run a resolution of up to 40 MP full. You can do it if you insist, but I will only consider it in a very bright environment. Even then, the details are not much improved (I have the example below from the same scene in both modes).
With a 40MP sensor, pixels need to be smaller. It's not good to collect light, so Huawei uses a binning pixel to treat four pixels as one in the final image. Monochrome sensor data is combined with RGB data to sharpen the resulting image (again, this is AI stuff). There is also a Huawei AI camera feature that faces the user. In addition to background processing and other behind the scenes, the camera app recognizes what you capture to immediately apply special settings. This feature debuted at Mate 10 Pro last year (there are more scenes this time), and I think it sometimes helps. For example, when taking snapshots of vista vista, the camera detects exposure and contrast to extract some details from the bright Arctic landscape. Some adjustments tend to make the photo look a bit "over-filtered," but I suspect most people would prefer a sharper color.
I like the option to take a 3x zoom shot on this phone-most phones with zoom cameras are only 2x. P20 Pro also seems to remain with zoom cameras in darker conditions as many phones turn to digital plants from the main sensors. I really appreciate that. Some lenses also assist with P20 Pro portrait mode. I did not notice many unknown borders, and the blur effect was not too heavy. Huawei says only optical telephones are optically stabilized, but teardown shows all possible cameras. However, the camera uses AI to handle electronic stabilization, and I have not seen any problems here.
Performance and battery HUawei P20 Pro :
P20 Pro has much in common with Mate 10 Pro in terms of hardware and software. It is powered by Kirin 970 and runs Android Oreo. However, I have to show me running a pre-release software on this phone. My experience may not be 100% like what you will experience. Before I do a battery test, remember that I use my phone for many emails and messages, but very few phone calls. I stream music through Bluetooth, take photos, and browse the internet while testing P20 Pro. I have three Google accounts synced to my phone as well.
Huawei phones tend to be above the average battery life in my experience, and it can be said about the P20 Pro. However, it was not pretty much above average as I expected. With moderate usage, I get more than two days of battery life with a little over five hours of screen time. I think with heavy use in one day, you can press about seven hours of screen time. However, the battery life of standby is not as seagreen as it is on Mate 10 Pro. Instead of losing 1% yesterday, it fell 6-7%. Again, this is a pre-release software, and any battery issues can be fixed on the end device. The P20 Pro has Huawei's Super Charge standard through the included plug, but will also charge fast on the USB-PD plug.
I have almost no negative about the performance of this phone. Mate 10 Pro is already a very fast device with the same hardware (or very similar), but I think Huawei has managed to smooth it all up, so the animation is not quite vulnerable to drop the frame transition app and scroll to the UI. smooth. There is one place where Mate 10 Pro shows unusual slowness, and it's exactly the same as P20 Pro. When you swipe the screen from scratch to Google feeds, stuttering animations like crazy. It's a weird thing to skip on QA on two phones in a row.
Software
Huawei's EMUI software layer is used to be a problem solver for me, but Huawei completely reverses the situation at Nougat. Oreo makes some improvements again, and I can use the P20 Pro without condemning the software every day. EMUI 8.1 still makes some silly mistakes.
The changes in this EMUI version compared to those posted on Mate 10 Pro appear to be limited. It mostly performs tweaks, some new camera modes (see above), and the Android nervous network API. Applications can utilize the Kirin 970 NPU through the API, but almost nothing is disturbing at this time. The only integration at launch is a special version of Prism that performs photo processing locally, not in the cloud.
Huawei has happily moved beyond clumsy and destructive features such as timeline notification UI and aggressive background management apps. The look and feel of EMUI as a whole is also better lately. However, Huawei still insists on making the lock screen almost useless. It only shows notifications once, so they disappear after you unlock your phone even if they are still in the notification shade. Even when notifications appear, you can not expand them. It makes playing media play a serious illness. From what I understand, regular P20 does indeed allow expanded notifications. Perhaps this will be part of the last software built in Pro.
Overall aesthetics begin to look a bit dated with quick black / blue settings and squirtle icons. This is much better than the Marshmallow version of EMUI, but the current software is not as clean or consistent as Android stocks or even Samsung Experience skins. I can live with that, but I do not like it. I really appreciate the inclusion of original dark themes in settings. Huawei also has a floating nav button from Mate 10 Pro here, but it's bad and you can not use it.
Home screen has a Google Feed integration on the far left panel, but this does not work when I first get a phone. I can finally make it work. I think this will not be a problem with retail devices.
The Huawei icon selections are very confusing - the app itself is squircles, but other apps look the defaults to round up the adaptive icon if they have it. Huawei also still uses buttons for the app drawer instead of the increasingly popular swipe up. I think I should be grateful to have the app drawer option at all. The default setting is to make all the apps plug in the home screen, which is very horrible. Huawei's search UI is accessible by sliding down, but I do not find this very useful, and I often trigger when I do not intend. Again, the main screen is not my favorite, but I can live with it.
You may be wondering how the position of the screen affects the UI, and let me tell you, it's strange. For all the notorious hatred out there, I can not wait for Google to release Android P and say, "this is how you make notes." OEMs do stupid things now, including Huawei. Your Signals and Wifi are on the left side of the notch, and other clocks and status icons (e.g. vibrate, battery, alarm) are on the right. The notification icon stacked to the left next to the signal, but you can only insert some. The situation becomes very strange when your status icon on the right becomes too much to adjust. Then, the phone moves some of them to the left with your notification icon. It's a confusing chaos.
Huawei has not come out to talk about it, but P20 Pro also has an Easy Projection mode that debuted in Mate 10 Pro. With Type-C to HDMI (not included) cable, you can get a desktop-like UI on your TV or monitor, or simply reflect your phone's interface. I do not think this feature would be profitable when I first reviewed Mate 10 Pro, but I ended up using it a couple of times, and it's really very useful. I also like the features of Huawei's twin apps, which lets you run multiple copies of apps with different accounts.
Huawei also included some bloatware apps in the form of unnecessary duplicate applications and pre-loading third parties. This is not as robust as charging software on mobile operators, but this is a lot for an expensive unlocked phone. Like Mate 10, some Huawei apps are optimized for landscape orientation with many panels. I did not find any app that was very interesting, but you can disable it in settings.
Overall, EMUI 8.1 on P20 Pro is fine. I do not like all UI decisions, and the lock screen causes me physical pain. However, it has some cool additional features like Easy Projection and twin apps. The custom version of Prism is also a cool demo of what you can do with the new Android NPU and API. By the way, it's good at Huawei to get the latest version of Android on this phone.
Conclusion
I'm torn to the P20 Pro hardware. The Twilight colorway is very cool, but the result of the mirror is smooth and fast. The OLED panels are sharp and have a pleasant color, but the notch is not necessary. The phone still has a chin with fingerprint sensor (fast), so why make the phone asymmetric with a notch? The way the Huawei software is handling tipping is also somewhat inclined. This software does many things in general but can be tolerated. EMUI has reached the point that I can overcome even if I prefer to use Android stocks.
The three camera system is one of the major selling points of this phone, and can do some cool stuff. The 3x telephoto lens is handy, and it's amazing that you can take a 40MP image with the phone. Although, the overall photographs are better in 10MP mode with all the AI processing features and enhanced brightness. However, lack of automatic HDR and some processing weaknesses make the P20 Pro shame only from top-class smartphone cameras. The Pixel is definitely better, and the Galaxy S9 + tip out, I think.
If I am going to buy Huawei phones now, it will not be a P20 Pro. This is not a bad phone, but I do not like it just like the same Mate 10 Pro. It's not far from € 900 (which works around $ 1,100) when you can get Mate 10 pro for hundreds less.
