Huawei P20 Pro Hands-on Review

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Huawei P20 Pro

Bezel-less designs may be all the rage, but cameras continue to be the most talked about feature on modern smartphones. Apple touted Face ID and Animoji thanks to its TrueDepth Camera on the iPhone X; Google’s Pixel 2 is widely-accepted as the best camera phone; and Samsung made a splash about its “reimagined camera” on the Galaxy S9. Huawei has distinguished itself over the past few years with a monochrome lens, tuned by photography experts Leica, but the Chinese company is ready to ramp things up with its latest smartphone.

The Huawei P20 Pro, just announced in Paris, has four cameras: One selfie camera on the front, and three on the back. It’s something we haven’t really seen before, and Huawei is going a step further and adding a ton of AI (artificial intelligence) smarts to improve the camera experience. We’ve spent some time with the P20 Pro, and although the camera is fascinating, technically adept, and creatively exciting, the design is going to split opinion.

Huawei also announced the regular P20, which only has a dual-camera system on the rear, and some other minor specification changes. Let’s take a deeper look.

Notched design

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Huawei’s P20 and P20 Pro have screens with notches, a trend popularized by Apple on the iPhone X, and now adopted by many, many device manufacturers. Apple’s excuse is the TrueDepth Camera system housed in the notch, which helps make Face ID incredibly secure, while providing highly-accurate motion tracking.

Why is the notch there on the P20? There’s no purpose. The notification center comes down just as usual, and the camera simply has a high megapixel count. While you can unlock the phone with your face, it’s not as secure as Apple’s implementation, and it can’t be used to unlock apps like you can with Face ID. The notch is a design decision, and it’s an unfortunate one.

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends
Andy Boxall/Digital Trends

Not because it’s ugly — it’s a neat implementation — but it’s a decision that will be mired in controversy for being derivative, without offering anything new. Huawei should be prepared to hear it. We’d have preferred a Galaxy S9 or LG V30 approach with a super minimal top bezel, and thankfully you can have this by adding black bars on the sides of the notch (in the phone’s settings) so that it looks like a full bezel.

The notch is a design decision, and it’s an unfortunate one.

With that out of the way, the rest of the P20 is a delight. The body is curvy, and the P20 Pro is perfectly-sized and weighted to fit into your hand. Unusually, Huawei has opted for a fingerprint sensor below the screen, rather than on the back of the P20 and P20 Pro. It’s our least favorite implementation of fingerprint sensors; while it’s slim and easy to press, it detracts from the beauty of the front panel.

Turn the phone over, however, and you’ll thank Huawei for not slapping it on the phone’s rear cover. On the Pro model, two camera lenses are set inside a camera bump, with the third underneath it with the flash and color temperature unit. That’s about it. It’s super minimalist, and instantly recognizable as a P20. It’s a shame the individuality didn’t continue around the front.

There are several different colors, but it’ll be the new twilight color scheme you’ll want. In an industry first, Huawei has applied a gradient finish to the glass, where the deep twilight blue changes to green depending on how it catches the light. It’s wonderful, and proves again how competent Huawei is when creating eye-catching smartphones.

Pro or not to Pro

The difference between the 5.8-inch RGBW LCD P20 and 6.1-inch OLED P20 Pro is more clear cut than the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro. The Pro version is clearly the superior model, and the one you’ll want to buy. It’s the only one with IP67 water resistance (the P20 makes do with IP53), and it’s the only one with the new triple-lens camera system. The battery is larger too — 4000mAh compared to 3400mAh — but the 2,240 x 1,080 pixel screen resolution remains the same. It has 6GB of RAM rather than 4GB, but both have 128GB of storage space and the Kirin 970 processor.

Put simply, buy the P20 Pro.

Huawei P20 Pro Compared To

Nokia 6 (2018)

Nokia 1

Sony Xperia XZ2

Nokia 8 Sirocco

Motorola MOTORIZR Z3

Jitterbug Dial

Samsung SCH-u620

LG VX9400

Sony Ericsson K790a

Nokia N93

Blackberry 8700c

Blackberry 8700g

Nokia N90

Palm Treo 650

Motorola RAZR V3c

Camera

We’ll talk about the P20 Pro and its triple-lens Leica camera here. The camera bump contains a 40-megapixel RGB color lens below an 8-megapixel telephoto lens, while outside is a 20-megapixel monochrome lens. Also inside the camera bump is the laser transmitter and receiver for the auto focus system, while the flash until contains a brand new color temperature sensor.

What does all this mean? First up, the telephoto lens has a 5x hybrid zoom capacity, and it really works. The optical zoom goes to 3x, and then it’s further enhanced digitally to 5x. The results are very impressive. Compared to the iPhone X on 5x zoom, the P20 Pro’s shots are detailed and accurate, rather than pixelated and noisy. We zoomed in on a sign and could read the text clearly, and it was impossible to tell it was shot on anything greater than a 2x zoom. We’ll need more time to test this out, but initial impressions are excellent.

Shots are also much brighter using a technology called Pixel Fusion, which lets in 4x the amount of light into a pixel, and by using all three lenses at once, sharpness is greatly improved. However, all three lenses will never work at full capacity together, so a magical 68-megapixel photo won’t be possible. The 40-megapixel lens something we haven’t seen in a phone in some time, and taking pictures in a test environment with the P20 Pro, the images it produced looked super. The color temperature skewed on the warm side, producing accurate, attractive pictures. The detail was clearly there too, but we could only view the end results on the phone’s screen at the time.

Another benefit of the three lenses is how much more natural portrait and people shots look. The longer focal length flattens features, avoiding pictures where some facial features are unnaturally highlighted. As is the fashion at the moment, the P20 can shoot 960fps slow motion video at 720p just like the Galaxy S9, which we demoed during a fencing match. The results looked good on the phone screen, and were shot with plenty of light; but capturing slow motion video is very hard, and timing it right is a bit of a challenge.

We’ve yet to put the three lens setup to a real test, but it certainly appears to increase versatility, which in turn boosts creativity, and we’re all for that in a smartphone camera. It’s also only then that we’ll know the true benefit of three lenses, which at first glance could be viewed as literal “one-upmanship.” Huawei’s aim is to create professional level camera equipment combined with ease of use on the P20 Pro, and it certainly appears to be well on the way to achieving this.

AI and software

The Kirin 970 processor is accompanied by the Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which specifically deals with artificial intelligence tasks. It’s successful, if a little underused, on the Mate 10 Pro. The P20 uses AI in more situations, primarily in the camera, and begins to better utilize the NPU’s ability.

For example, there are now 19 different scene recognition modes in the camera, up from 13 on the Mate 10 Pro, including close-ups, waterfalls, dogs, cats, and text. What’s really clever here is that it can switch modes depending on what it sees. Point the camera at a person and it will activate portrait mode, or at a close-up object to switch to macro mode. Additionally, the AI now helps with shot composition, providing visual advice on framing group shots, or a level for keeping the horizon straight.

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends
Andy Boxall/Digital Trends

It also goes much deeper than this. Rather than using optical image stabilization (OIS) or electronic image stabilization (EIS), Huawei has introduced artificially intelligent stabilization (AIS) on the P20. AIS is so effective, the P20 can take long exposure night shots where the shutter is open for up to 8 seconds without the need for a tripod. This works on both stills and video. We tried it in a test environment and were pleased with the results using the P20’s Night Shot mode. Remarkably there was almost no blur, and very little noise. We look forward to trying this out more.

One thing we didn’t try is 4D predictive autofocus. Ever have trouble taking a photo of a flower on a windy day due to focusing problems? Huawei’s system recognizes and tracks the object, keeping it in focus regardless of how much it moves.

Elsewhere, AI powers a shopping mode which works with the camera, much like we’ve seen on the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S9. Plus, in the photo gallery app it powers a keyword search using image recognition, and organizes albums based on the best and most relevant images. This is part of Huawei’s EMUI 8.1 user interface, which also brings a few style changes, most notably to the camera app. The slide-in feature menu has been replaced by a pop-up drawer, making it easier to use with one hand. We spent only a short time using the software, which is based on Android 8.1 Oreo, but found it to be fluid.

Conclusion

The P20 Pro is unlike any Huawei phone before it. The design is all-new, the headline feature is unique, and the use of artificial intelligence is well ahead of the competition. The short time spent with the camera has seen us itching to try it out again, to see if the results really can live up to the promise. If they do, and everything slots into place as we expect, this could be the finest Huawei phone we’ve seen.

We’ll update this story when Huawei announces pricing and availability, but the company has confirmed it has no plans to launch the phone in the U.S.