Honor 20 is the flagship model of the Huawei sub-brand Honor. The smartphone is equipped with up-to-date hardware, a quadruple main camera module (plus a single front camera) and an excellent screen – and all this for 28 thousand rubles. The trade war with the United States did not prevent the smartphone from arriving in Russia, so the device finally came to our review. Let’s tell you more about it.
Appearance
By the glass back cover, you can immediately understand that we have a Chinese man in front of us. Semi-mirrored, it shimmers in the light in different shades of blue – the main trend of the last couple of years. In the reflection, you can see your distorted face with the effect of a volumetric curved mirror. It seems to us that this solution looks nice, but a little cheap. Although teenagers will love it – the line is aimed specifically at young people. In general, I was glad that the rear panel hardly collects fingerprints.
The camera is located in the upper left corner, it protrudes decently from the body. The fingerprint scanner is unexpectedly built into the lock button on the right side, so the key is slightly recessed into the body.
Screen
The display of the new Honor 20 is definitely pleasing. The frames are narrow along the entire perimeter, there are no monobrows or a drop-shaped cutout: the front camera is hidden in a hole in the upper left corner. This gives the 6.26-inch screen more than 90% of the bezel.
Resolution – Full HD + (2340×1080) – standard for mid-range and high-end smartphones, just right for movies and TV shows. The IPS matrix guarantees good viewing angles, although when viewed from some angles, the screen goes pinkish. Otherwise, the color rendition is in full order, and the brightness is almost always enough.
Filling
The device is equipped with a powerful eight-core Kirin 980 chipset (7 nm) and 6 GB of RAM. Synthetic tests have shown that the chipset suffers quite a bit from throttling. After just a couple of minutes, the performance of the device drops by as much as 40% – the result is disappointing.
However, tests do not always show the real picture of what is happening. With demanding games like PUBG and Dota Underlords, the device coped with a bang. Both started at maximum speed and did not slow down the rollers until the end.
The same can be said about smartphone performance in general. During all the tests, there were no lags, the animation worked smoothly. Applications open and close quickly, there is nothing to complain about. By the way, the device runs Android 9 with Magic UI shell version 2.1.0..
Battery capacity – 3750 mAh. This is enough to watch a movie at maximum brightness for about ten and a half hours. In addition, the battery supports SuperCharge fast charging technology – up to 50% in half an hour.
Cameras
“The more cameras, the better the phone can shoot.” This is what the average user thinks, so manufacturers have to install a whole set of modules. In our test Honor 20, there are five of them.
There is a main Sony IMX586 sensor with 48 megapixels (f / 1.8), 16 megapixel wide (f / 2.2, viewing angle 117 degrees), a 2 megapixel bokeh camera, a 2 megapixel macro camera and a 32 megapixel front camera.
The device shoots well during the day: the detail is quite high, but the colors in the photos sometimes turn out to be too vigorous. AI seems to get very carried away and tint details that initially had no problems with contrast (clearly visible on the too green branch). However, if you turn off support for machine learning technologies, the situation is improved for the better.
Macro photography was less pleasing: the subject in the photo is blurry, although we photographed from the recommended distance of 4 centimeters.
But the portrait mode did an excellent job. The software correctly blurred the entire background and left only the person in the foreground (even the hair is displayed correctly).
Minuses
So, a smartphone with flagship features costs only 27 thousand rubles. There must be some catch here? Indeed, there were some drawbacks here – manufacturers had to make compromises in order to save money.
For example, the phone is not at all protected from water and dust – if you drop it in water, you will most likely have to fork out for a new one. Only one speaker is used here, so don’t expect stereo sound. There is no support for microSD cards, and there is no standard headphone jack.
Will these moments spoil the smartphone experience? For most users it is unlikely. But it is necessary to talk about them: perhaps for some, the absence of a slot for a flash drive will be a decisive factor when choosing a device (the amount of built-in memory is 128 GB).
Outcome
The flagship Honor 20 is a great device for the money. For 28 thousand rubles, the user gets a nice smartphone with up-to-date hardware, fresh Android, a large bright screen and good cameras. Yes, it has a couple of disadvantages, but the advantages clearly overlap them.