Huawei P20 Pro Review | AI Powered Triple Camera Smartphone

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Huawei is one of the leading smartphone manufacturer company in the World. Each year Huawei releases a bunch of feature-rich phones which give tough competitions to the competitors. In this year, Huawei released the P20 Pro, its latest flagship device with triple camera unit on the back promising a superior camera performance. While the camera looks undefeatable on paper, the actual performance can only be tested in a complete review. So without waiting, let’s get to it.  

Dazzling Design

One of the best ways to describe Huawei P20 Pro is ‘Shiny’. Honestly, it is a super shiny device with Dual-Tone colors which looks aggressive. Huawei has gone for the Glass on the front as well as back with a polished aluminum frame. While the build appears to be flagship grade, as soon as you lay your fingers on the glass back, it gets dirty. Huawei P20 Pro is a super fingerprint magnet which makes it difficult to keep the device clean and flaunt the dazzling colors of the device.

Huawei P20 Pro is a sleek device at 7.8 mm thickness but it is surely not the lightest at 180 grams. Although the device is comfortable to hold with no sharp edges, it is quite slippery due to the glass back. P20 Pro is available in 4 different colors: Twilight, Black, Midnight Blue, and Pink Gold. Twilight is the one that caught my eye with its awesome transition from purple to blue depending upon the light. Huawei P20 Pro also has IP67 Dust and Water resistance, however, at such premium price Huawei should have gone for the IP68 rating.

Moving on to the front, the device embraces a notch which houses the front camera, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, and an earpiece. There is an 18.7:9 display on the front with a chin at the bottom which houses the fingerprint scanner. The aluminum frame on the side has the SIM tray on the left and volume keys along with the power button on the right. At the bottom are the Type-C charging port, microphone, and a speaker. P20 Pro is one of the devices who ditched the headphone jack. Moving to the back, there is a Dual Camera unit with a third camera placed right below it.

Huawei P20 Pro is surely a head turner with its shiny back and dual tone transitions with a solid build.

Vivid OLED Display

Huawei P20 Pro houses a 6.1-inch display with a small notch. P20 Pro is the only device in the P20 Series sporting an OLED display. The display has the Full HD+ 1080 x 2240 resolution and pixel density of 408 pixels per inch. Although, at such premium price, Huawei should have gone for a higher resolution panel.

The OLED display on the P20 Pro has vivid colors with punchy blacks and the immersive bezel-less design makes it astonishing. However, if you are not a fan of the notch, Huawei allows you to hide the notch by blacking the area around the notch through a software option. This will make the device look more like a Samsung smartphone. Also, you can change the color tone of the display by playing with the display settings.    

The Display on the P20 Pro supports the HDR10 standard, which means solid colors contrast and tones due to the wider color gamut. It can play HDR content on the services like Amazon Prime, Netflix etc. Also, the overall brightness of the display is high enough to be easily readable under direct sunlight. There is no trouble in reading messages or navigating through the interface in bright outdoor areas.

Superb Performance and Software

Huawei P20 Pro is powered by Hisilicon Kirin 970 which is Huawei own flagship grade chip. The Kirin 970 is an Octa-core chip with 4 x 2.4 GHz Cortex-A73 and 4 x 1.8 GHz Cortex-A53 cores coupled with Mali-G72 MP12 GPU. While the SoC is powerful, it falls behind the Snapdragon 845 in term of Geekbench score. Although, in terms of performance, there is no noticeable difference.

Playing intensive games like PUBG mobile, Asphalt 8 etc on the P20 Pro doesn’t seem to affect the performance at all. The gameplay was super smooth with mere frame drops which is common. Basic apps like Whatsapp, FaceBook, Instagram etc work smoothly without breaking a sweat. The Kirin 970 on the P20 Pro makes sure that the device performs smoothly consistently.

Huawei P20 Pro comes in 2 variants: 256GB/8GB RAM and 128GB/6GB RAM. Even the base storage version is more than enough for a hardcore user. Also, the base 6GB RAM version is enough to easily handle heavy multitasking making pretty clear what 8GB variant can do.

Huawei P20 Pro runs on Android 8.1 Oreo with Huawei’s own custom skin, the EMUI on top. EMUI has come a long way from being a clunky skin to being smoother, faster and better than ever. The UI feels smooth and responsive but comes preloaded with bloatware. EMUI now comes with an option to enable or disable the app drawer so the user has the flexibility to choose the one which suits better

EMUI has various features like App twins to run multiple instances of an app at the same time. There is also an option to disable the onscreen navigation keys as the fingerprint scanner allows navigation through gestures. It also has a theme center which allows you to change the whole theme, icon pack, transition animations and more. EMUI also comes with Memory cleaner and Virus scanner. Overall, the EMUI is better than ever but not close to the stock Android experience.

Extraordinary Camera

The main highlight of the Huawei P20 Pro is the triple camera unit on the back of the device. Out of the three, one is a gigantic 40 Mexapixel RGB sensor with f/1.8 aperture, the second one is an 8-megapixel telephoto sensor with f/2.4 aperture and the third one is a 20 Megapixel monochrome sensor with f/2.6 aperture. All the three sensors work in conjunction with the Neural engine inside the Kirin 970 to deliver outstanding camera performance.

Each sensor on the device has its own specific part to function. The 40MP RGB sensor capture the colors, the 20MP monochrome sensor captures additional and depth information when required, and the 8MP sensor is helpful for zooming purpose. Out of the three, only the 8 Megapixel sensor is optically stabilized, the rest depends upon the enhanced AI stabilization. Talking about the quality, the images have a high amount of details and sharpness. The colors are vibrant and the dynamic range is on point. Monochrome shots don’t miss any details either capturing perfectly balanced monochrome images. Portrait shots on the P20 Pro can be iffy but work perfectly most of the time. With advanced capabilities, the cameras on the P20 Pro can see in the dark too capturing clear and detail-rich images during the night. It can also record 4K videos @30Fps which come to me as a surprise as high-end flagships can now record 4K@60fps. Apart from that, there is a slo-mo mode which can record 0.2 burst slo-mo in 720p @ 960 fps.

The 24 Megapixel sensor on the front also captures perfect images with vibrant colors and details. Also, the night time images look eye-pleasing outmatching some of the higher level flagships easily. Overall, Huawei P20 Pro has one of the best camera available on the market.

Great Battery Life

Huawei P20 Pro comes with a 4000 mAh non-removable. Compared to the flagships like the Samsung S9+ or OnePlus 6, the battery size is significantly big. Also, the battery life on the P20 Pro is comparatively better than most of the flagships. It can easily last more than a day with heavy usage. During the review period, we played PUBG, took frequent phone calls, watched HD videos on Youtube and at the end of the day we still had around 40% juice left. This evaluates to more than 5 hours of screen-on-time.

However, if you found yourself in a situation when you are unable to charge your device, you can either use the inbuilt battery saver to limit the performance or drop the screen resolution to 720p. Yes, the difference is noticeable but you have to either compromise the resolution or performance. Huawei P20 Pro also comes with Huawei’s Supercharge feature which can recharge the battery from 0% to 50% in just half an hours and take around 90 minutes to completely recharge the battery. Hence with P20 Pro, there is no issue with the battery life.

Other Features

Huawei P20 Pro comes with Dual SIM and Dual standby feature with support for Nano SIM only. The device also supports LTE on both the SIM bay. Other connectivity features on the P20 Pro includes Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth v4.2, and A-GPS.

P20 Pro comes with a bunch of sensors including Fingerprint (front-mounted), accelerometer, proximity sensor, gyroscope, ambient light sensor, compass, and color spectrum. It also comes with NFC (a relief for people who uses Android Pay) and IR emitter.

Huawei P20 Pro houses a fingerprint scanner in the chin below the display. While some would prefer this placement, others will give more preference to the rear placed scanner. Nevertheless, the front mounted scanner is blazing fast and reliable too. It also doubles as the Home key and can be used for navigation by disabling the on-screen navigation keys. There is also a Face Unlock option which uses the front camera to scan your face and unlock the device and it is more secure than before.

The earpiece on the Huawei P20 Pro doubles as a speaker too providing the essence of stereo sound. Although the speaker at the bottom is not the best in class but gets the job done Overall, the sound quality is pretty clear with no distortion. Huawei P20 Pro has become another flagship ditching the headphone jack which means you have to plug in the dongle to use your old earphones.

Should You Buy?

Huawei P20 Pro is no doubt a solid flagship device with its Dazzling design and eye-catchy build quality. It comes with all the flagship grade features like powerful performance, vivid OLED display, trendy notch design, superb battery life, smooth software, and unmatched camera performance.

Although, Huawei P20 Pro has some minor tradeoffs too like IP67 certification while other flagships have IP68, no headphone jack, and heavily skinned EMUI. But if you can settle for these tradeoffs, make sure to go for the Twilight version. Huawei P20 Pro starts at $731 factory unlocked on Amazon.

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