Apple May Offer Two 6.1-Inch iPhone Models in 2018 With Price Tag as Low as $550

Apple’s upcoming lower-cost 6.1-inch iPhone could be available in two models, one that includes a single SIM and a second that offers dual-SIM dual standby (DSDS) functionality, aka two physical SIM card slots, according to an investor’s note from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Kuo believes that the 6.1-inch dual-SIM iPhone could be priced at $650 to $750, while a single SIM model could potentially be less expensive at $550 to $650. Prospective prices for the two OLED iPhones Apple plans to introduce in 2018 were not mentioned in today’s note, but those two devices are expected to be significantly more expensive.

6.1″ LCD iPhone may have model that supports DSDS. If the 6.1″ LCD iPhone comes with DSDS and single-SIM models, we believe it will result in two benefits: (1) more price segments would be created, significantly boosting shipments via the low-price single-SIM model. For instance, if the DSDS model sells for US$650-750, the single-SIM model may sell for US$550-650; and (2) the DSDS model will help increase market share in China and commercial markets.

Kuo has mentioned dual-SIM dual standby functionality in prior notes, where he said at least one of the three new iPhones expected in 2018 would offer the feature. In this note, Kuo clarifies that both the 6.1-inch and 6.5-inch devices will support DSDS, while the 5.8-inch iPhone will not.

Kuo also previously said that Apple will use Intel’s XMM 7560 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X20 modems for faster LTE speeds, and that the DSDS devices will support LTE+LTE connections to allow two SIM cards to be active simultaneously using one set of chips. A dual-SIM feature would make it easier for people to switch carriers when traveling by allowing and Kuo believes it would be highly popular in China.

Apple is rumored to be planning to introduce three iPhones in 2018, the 6.1-inch LCD model outlined here, a 5.8-inch OLED model positioned as a sort of second-generation iPhone X, and a 6.5-inch OLED model that can be thought of as an “iPhone X Plus.”

Kuo believes that mass production on the 6.1-inch LCD iPhone will start three to five weeks later than the two OLED models because of the recent decision to add a DSDS model. Apple’s supply chain will see strong growth in 4Q18-2Q19F, says Kuo, with the 6.1-inch iPhone’s low price and DSDS feature to “significantly boost shipment momentum.”

Kuo predicts the 6.1-inch LCD iPhone and the 6.5-inch OLED iPhone will be Apple’s most popular devices next year, with consumers less interested in the 5.8-inch model due to its smaller screen, higher price tag, and lack of DSDS functionality compared to the 6.1-inch LCD iPhone.

The 6.1-inch LCD model in particular could account for 65 to 75 percent of total iPhone shipments from 3Q 2018 to 3Q 2019.

Related Roundup: 2018 iPhones
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Amazon has 100 million Prime members

Amazon has just released its annual shareholder letter and it’s major one. For the first time since it launched Prime 13 years ago, the company has revealed how many paid subscribers it has: 100 million globally.

Developing…

Source: Amazon (SEC)

Tips on how to take jaw-dropping monochrome pictures with the Huawei P20 Pro

Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends

Black-and-white photographs have a very distinctive style, and can add a completely different look or considerable visual drama to an everyday scene, as well as help unclutter busy scenes and focus attention. Once you start experimenting with black-and-white photos, it’s easy to get addicted.

The Huawei P20 Pro, along with the Mate 10 Pro, the Huawei P10, and the Huawei P9, have a dedicated monochrome lens in the camera setup. Co-engineered by Leica, it produces glorious, true black-and-white photos. They are the only smartphones to offer this feature, but a black-and-white filter can be added to photos during or after taking them on most other phones.

What can you do with your monochrome pictures to make them look even more striking? We received some great tips from photographer Bobby Anwar on exactly this topic, using the P20 Pro. In particular, he showed us a technique that can make your monochrome shots even more striking, using both visual techniques while taking the shot, as well as some clever editing afterwards.

Anwar demonstrated these tips on the P20 Pro, but if you don’t have this or any other Huawei phone with a monochrome lens, you can achieve similar effects on any other device with an aforementioned filter.

Find your monochrome mode

Before taking black-and-white photos, you need to find the right mode. On the Huawei P20 Pro, open the camera app and swipe left on the mode selector above the shutter release until you find More. Tap this, and look for the Monochrome setting.

On the Apple iPhone, open the camera app and then tap the Filters option in the top right while in portrait orientation. A selection of filters appears above the shutter release. Scroll through them until you reach Mono, which re-creates a monochrome look.

If your phone doesn’t have Live Filters — where the filter effect is shown as you take the photo — try a third-party camera app, such as VSCO, Camera+, or even Instagram’s own camera feature. Alternatively, take the photo in color, and then alter the look using an editing app. We like Snapseed, a Google app, which we’ll also use later on for editing.

Taking your photo

Anwar is a monochrome photo advocate, so he uses a very specific technique for making some of his black=and-white photos look incredible. First, you’ve got to go out and find your subject. We shot a combination of street scenes, landscapes, portraits, and night shots. This technique really works well at night, with stark lighting.

If you’ve lined up your shot against a bright background, reduce the exposure value (EV) a little more, effectively darkening the shot. On the Huawei P20 Pro, this is done by tapping and dragging the little sun icon down, when it appears next to the area on which the camera is focused. On the iPhone, use the same method. On the Pixel 2 and the Samsung Galaxy S9, the EV slider appears at the bottom of the viewfinder.

Don’t worry if your photo looks dark, we’re going to fix that. Additionally, we recommend taking several photos with different EV values. It’s not always certain how the editing will go, and different photos will react differently. Plus, if it doesn’t work out for your shot, you won’t have missed the opportunity for a photo with an automatic exposure value.

To the editing suite

Now it’s time to craft your final image, and to do this you’ll need a photo-editing app. We’re going to explain how it’s done on the Huawei P20 Pro, which includes an excellent photo-editing suite as standard, and with Snapseed, an app available for Android and iOS.

Open the Gallery app on the Huawei P20 Pro and find the photo you’ve just taken. Hit the pencil icon along the bottom of the screen to enter the edit mode, and then choose the filter icon. From here, select the Impact filter. This gives the picture a very specific look, and you may not use it that often outside of creating the effect we’re demonstrating here.

Impact strips the light out even further, but by tweaking the Brightness and the Contrast sliders, it’s possible to adjust the photo in order to bring out incredible detail, while stripping away extraneous shades of gray and white, leaving a stark but effective black-and-white image. The key is to reveal enough detail to keep the image looking good, while balancing the black-and-white colors perfectly. It takes practice to do this, and to find the right shots that work in the first place. Anwar recommends looking for photo opportunities where the background is bright, so objects in front of it turn into silhouettes during the editing process.

The editing doesn’t stop there. Sometimes a photo can be further enhanced by changing Shadows and Highlights, which is done through the same editing platform on the P20 Pro. Once you’re happy with the look, it’s time to crop the image. Remove all the areas you don’t want using the free crop mode, before choosing a more standard format. This way, the photo will be usable in all situations, including as wallpaper on your phone, or for easy printing.

We experimented with this process many times, and managed to produce pictures we really liked that definitely stood out, and were usually more evocative and exciting to look at than the standard monochrome original. You can see examples of the before and after pictures throughout this article.

Editing in Snapseed

Snapseed doesn’t contain the same Impact filter as found in the P20 Pro’s editing app. Instead, we achieved similar results using the Contrast filter found under the Black and White collection. Open Snapseed and choose your photo. Next, tap Tools and find Black and White, then select Contrast. With a swipe upor down you can choose to adjust brightness and contrast, along with grain.

Once you’ve achieved the look you want, exit back to Snapseed’s menu and find Crop. From here, follow the process described above to change the photo’s size. Finally, don’t forget to save the photo using Export, and Save a Copy.

The photos above show the effect you can get with Snapseed.

Android iOS

Have more creative fun with your photos

While Anwar’s technique won’t be suitable for every photo you take, — and it shouldn’t be used on every photo you take — when it’s used effectively, the end result has the potential to be jaw-dropping. The takeaway here is to have fun, experiment, look for new photo opportunities, and play with the amazing cameras most modern flagship phones come with.

We’re huge fans of the Huawei P20 Pro and its fantastic monochrome mode, which undeniably produces the best results in this kind of situation. But no matter the phone in your pocket, go out, enjoy taking photos, and create something exciting.

Yahoo Mail is about to make RSVPing to an event a whole lot easier

Yahoo Mail is only getting better. A few months ago Mail made it a little easier for those that like to shop online to keep track of the latest deals and to keep a tab on their receipts. Now, Yahoo Mail is not only getting a little faster, but it’s also adding a few more features that should make the experience a little smoother.

First, the stability improvements. Yahoo says that it has been able to reduce latencies and improve overall performance for a number of different operations — including checking for new emails, reading messages, and more. Without getting into technicalities, the result is that Yahoo Mail should be faster, and you should get fewer error messages. In fact, Yahoo says that there should be a 10 percent improvement in page load performance.

Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that Yahoo Mail has also added a few new features — which the company says have been highly requested. For starters, Yahoo Mail now offers Photo Themes, which basically allow you to personalize your inbox’s theme with a new selection of custom-designed themes. These themes are in line with Yahoo’s recent redesign, which emphasizes vibrant colors and a simple look — and the custom photo themes should help make things even more customizable.

Next up are RSVP cards, which allow you to see calendar details and RSVP directly to events straight from an email. In other words, you will be able to accept or reject going to an event without hassle — simply hit the appropriate button to tell the event organizer whether you’re going or not.

Last but not least, you will be able to use much richer formatting for automatic responses. Now, if you’re going on vacation and need to set up an automatic response, you will be able to add things like GIFs or custom stationary to the email — making for a much more personalized response.

In general, these new features should help make Yahoo Mail stand out from the rest — which might be important for the company. It’s one of the few consumer-facing Yahoo products that are still widely used and it is features like this that could ensure that continues to happen.

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Amazon’s Internet is a new lightweight browser app for emerging markets

Mobile users in developing nations with slower internet connections don’t need to download Chrome or go onto Safari — instead, they can simply get on Internet. The aptly named app is the latest product to emerge from Amazon, and it’s an Android web browser meant specifically for emerging markets. On Google Play, the full name of the app is “Internet: Fast, lite and private,” and it promises to be “lighter than the competition.”

Currently, it’s available exclusively in India, and requires devices to be running Android 5.0 or later. Like many other “lite” apps (think Facebook Lite, YouTube Go, and others), Internet takes up very little space — less than 2MB. Compare that to Chrome, which takes up 21MB of space, or Firefox, which requires 19.9MB, according to a report from appFigures. The extremely pared down nature of the app gives users plenty of extra space to complete downloads, which might otherwise be costly and extremely time consuming.

Moreover, Internet claims to be private, which means that it doesn’t request additional permissions while you’re browsing, nor does it collect data like many other browsers do. Additionally, Internet allows users to open Private tabs, even further indicating its focus on user privacy (a good move, considering recent developments regarding Facebook and Cambridge Analytica).

While it’s no surprise that Amazon is offering a lighter version of a browser, it is rather curious that it opted to create a brand new browser instead of adapting its existing Silk browser to data-strapped markets. That said, Amazon has been extremely quiet about the launch of the app, so it could be the case that there is more to come in the near future.

It also remains to be seen whether Amazon will expand Internet to markets outside of India — as it stands, the browser is highly targeted to its audience. For example, the homepage not only shows general headlines, but also news about cricket, which is especially popular in the southeast Asian nation.

Amazon has not commented on reports of the new app, and will likely be staying mum on the subject awhile longer. All the same, we’ll update you as we learn more about what to expect from Internet moving forward.

The iPhone Do Not Disturb While Driving feature cut down on distracted driving

Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends

Despite the threat of fines, the emergence of ad campaigns, and even the introduction of new features, it would appear that we’re having quite a bit of trouble when it comes to cutting back on phone-related distracted driving. As per a new study based on data from Everdrive, an app from car insurance company Everquote, 37 percent of car trips include “at least some significant phone usage” while the car is in motion. In fact, during these trips, folks were apparently using their phones for as much as 11 percent of the time, which translates to about three minutes during a 29-minute average drive.

The Everdrive study, which was released on Wednesday, April 17, took into account 781 million miles of driving data collected from sensors like built-in GPS and accelerometers in your phone. And while the results are sobering, there does appear to be one potential fix — Apple recently released a “Do Not Disturb While Driving” feature in iOS 11, and this can apparently reduce phone usage on the road by up to 8 percent.

The feature detects when you’re in a moving vehicle, and automatically shuts off all notifications, and allows you to set an automatic response to incoming messages letting folks know that you’re temporarily out of commission because you’re operating heavy machinery.

Luckily, it would seem that folks are actively using the new feature. In its study, Everquote found that 70 percent of participants have kept the DND While Driving option turned on since it was released last September. Consequently, between September 19 and October 25, those who used DND on their iPhones used their mobile devices 8 percent less than those who did not have a similar feature.

Another great way to prevent distracted driving, of course, is to mandate it by law. The study found, unsurprisingly, that states with laws that forbid using a phone while driving also saw the least instances of phone use while driving — in fact, the states with the best non-distracted driving statistics included Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska, and Idaho.

On the other hand, the worst states for distracted driving were all in the East Coast or northeast — they were Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

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Strava’s ‘Relative Effort’ levels the playing field across a variety of sports

The eternal debate of who works out harder — runners, cyclists, or swimmers — may finally be over. A new premium feature that arrived for Strava looks to level the playing field in terms of how we measure the intensity of our activity while exercising, making it easier than ever to compare different types of workouts. Best of all, these new features will not only compare the different types of activities you do as part of your fitness regimen but can also compare results across workout groups to determine who was working the hardest.

Dubbed Relative Effort, the new feature is being called “the ultimate activity metric” by Strava. It is built upon the research of Dr. Marco Altini and uses heart-rate monitoring to offer a new take on how to compare different types of activities. According to Strava, the metric is highly accurate for running and cycling and has been shown to offer consistent measurements in other types of sports, too.

According to Strava, Relative Effort also works well for swimming, skiing, indoor rowing, and most other aerobic activities. Any data collected while using a heart-rate monitor while doing those types of workouts will work with this new system, providing users with insights on how all of their workouts compare with one another, even though they are completely different in terms of intensity, duration, and distance.

When they log in to their Strava accounts starting, premium users will see Relative Effort as a new option on their web dashboard or mobile app (iOS/Android). A simple chart will offer a visual display of an athletes weekly activity compared to their recent averages. Tapping on that graph will allow them to dig a bit deeper into their weekly numbers, providing weighted averages for the past 12 weeks. The data can then be used to offer suggestions on how to maintain current fitness levels, increase workouts, or to allow more recovery time.

But, the Relative Effort feature can be used in other ways. For instance, Strava says that participants in regular cycling and running groups can use the feature to compare their numbers, which provide a more accurate measurement of not who is the fastest, but who is working the hardest and putting more into their workout. In this way, it has the potential to completely change who has bragging rights among friends.

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Huawei P20 + P20 Pro review: Camera kings

Huawei’s latest flagships are the best Android phones you can’t buy in the U.S.

Smartphones — even shiny, expensive, high-end smartphones — are a commodity. And that means it’s hard to justify what makes them worthy of attention, and perhaps even your money, compared to all the competition. But with the Huawei P20 and P20 Pro, the value proposition is pretty simple: Gorgeous, iridescent glass construction, and two of the best phone cameras out there.

But beyond aesthetics and photography, a big reason for Android fans to pay attention to the P20s, as opposed to any other Huawei phone, is the software. Huawei’s EMUI, though not radically redesigned in its latest incarnation, has reached an important milestone in terms of maturity and stability. That’s not a sexy new feature you’ll find in any ads for these phones, but it’s just as important to the overall experience — and a big part of what makes these phones worth buying.

About this review

We’re publishing this review after a little over two weeks with the Huawei P20 and P20 Pro. I (Alex Dobie) have been using the P20 Pro (model CLT-L29) on the EE network in the UK, and the P20 (model EML-L29) on the Vodafone UK network, mainly in areas with average or above 4G LTE reception. Our phones were running software build 106, which Huawei tells us is not fully finalized.

Our review devices were dual-SIM models; the versions sold in most of Europe are single-SIM.

Moving pictures

Huawei P20 + P20 Pro Video Review

Oh so pretty

Huawei P20 Hardware

As in previous years, Huawei has two P-series flagships. You’ve got the P20 with a 5.8-inch display, and the P20 Pro with 6.1-inch screen. The aspect ratio is a slightly odd 18.7:9, because, as you can’t fail to have noticed, both have iPhone X-style screen notches up top. However, the notch is considerably smaller than the iPhone’s, since it just needs to house the earpiece, front-facing camera and a a couple of other sensors. If the notch bothers you, you can “disable” it in software, so you just see your status bar icons on a black background.

As we’ll note later, the notch does manage to trip up a few apps, including Android staples like Instagram. Outside of one or two bugs in a couple of apps, though, the notch really hasn’t bothered me at all. I’m not in love with it as a way to maximize screen real estate — there are some compromises there, like the way the split status bar can become cramped with lots of pending notifications. Overall, I don’t feel like it’s particularly a good thing or a bad thing… it’s just a thing. It’s there; I can deal with it.

If the front of the P20 is a demonstration of the design compromises necessary in a 2018 flagship, the back is a display of unrestrained spectacle.

From the front, a few necessary compromises. Around the back, unrestrained spectacle.

In other words, this is where the P20s quite literally shine.

The P20 Pro has a gorgeous curved glass panel that blends cleanly into the polished metal rim. There are a few different colors available including blue and black, but I’ve been using the “twilight” gradient color — and trust me, this is the one you want. It’s extremely shiny — a bit of a fingerprint magnet, too — but the twilight finish looks phenomenal, starting off as purple up top, and shifting through blue to a blue-green hue lower down. The effect is topped off by an iridescent transition between these three colors that’s most noticeable around the sides.

This is nothing like the generic, by-the-numbers phone designs we were seeing from Huawei just a couple of years ago.

For the first time, Huawei has built a phone that’s not only smart and well-built, but really beautiful.

Over on the standard P20, I’ve been using the “pink gold” color, the finish of which also has a slight color gradient, and some unique color-shifting properties of its own. The iridescent effect isn’t quite as overt as the twilight P20 Pro, but it still has an almost rainbow-like pearlescent sheen when it’s tilted through the light, and from the right angle, it’s stunning. The regular P20 doesn’t have the same curved glass on the back, though — unfortunately there’s a quite noticeable plastic join between the metal and the glass. That’s not a huge deal, but it does make it look just a bit less premium than the Pro, even if the in-hand feel is largely the same.

There’s also a pronounced camera hump around the back of both P20s, which I don’t particularly mind, despite the fact that this area quickly accumulates dust and lint when you take it out of your pocket.

On the inside, the hardware specs of P20 and P20 Pro also diverge a little. Both phones are powered by Huawei’s high-end Kirin 970 processor — a speedy, AI-focused chip last seen in the Mate 10 — and both have Full HD+ displays. However, the standard P20 uses an LCD panel, whereas the Pro goes with OLED, trading sharpness for a little extra daylight visibility. Neither screen is as good as the Galaxy S9’s SuperAMOLED, however, which remains the smartphone display champion.

The step up to the P20 Pro also gets you 6GB of RAM, up from 4GB in the smaller model, and full IP67-rated water and dust resistance. The standard P20, unfortunately, is only rated IP53 for splash resistance. Individually, these compromises aren’t a big deal. But overall, they clearly demonstrate why the Pro costs a couple hundred extra euros.

Operating System	Android 8.1, EMUI 8.1	Android 8.1, EMUI 8.1
Processor	Huawei Kirin 970	Huawei Kirin 970
RAM	4GB	6GB
Storage	128GB	128GB
microSD	No	No
Battery	3,400mAh non-removableHuawei SuperCharge	4,000mAh non-removableHuawei SuperCharge
Display	5.8-inch 2240×1080 RGBW LCD 18:9 aspect ratio	6.1-inch 2240×1080 OLED 18:9 aspect ratio
Front camera	24-megapixel f/2.0	24-megapixel f/2.0
Rear cameras	20MP (mono) f/1.6 + 12MP (RGB) f/1.8 1.55-micron pixels	40MP RGB (1/1.7-inch sensor) + 20MP mono 8MP f/2.4 OIS 3X telephoto
Headphone jack	No	No
Wireless charging	No	No
Fingerprint scanner	Front	Front
Face recognition	Yes	Yes
Water resistance	IP53 (splash resistant)	IP67 (water + dust-resistant)
Colors	Twilight, Black, Midnight Blue, Pink Gold	Twilight, Black, Midnight Blue, Pink Gold
Weight	165g	180g
Dimensions	149.1 mm x 70.8 mm x 7.65 mm	155.0 mm x 73.9 mm x 7.8 mm

There’s a radical new triple-camera setup in the P20 Pro too, compared to the P20’s dual-camera rig, which is basically an upgraded version of the cameras from the Huawei Mate 10. We’ll get to cameras a bit later in this review, but suffice to say the cameras are a big part of what makes the P20 Pro in particular so special.

Step up to the P20 Pro for extra RAM, a bigger screen, water resistance and sharper design.

A couple other caveats while we’re talking hardware: There’s no headphone jack on either P20 model, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise given Huawei’s track record with the Mate 10 Pro. You’ll need to use the flimsy type-C dongle provided for any wired audio needs. (Unless you have a pair of Type-C buds you’re particularly fond of. By now you probably know whether the dongle life is a deal-breaker for you personally. For me, it’s an inconvenience, but not unbearable.)

And to its credit, the built-in speaker system is solid, particularly in the P20 Pro. You’ll find a Dolby-tuned audio system in both models, and the sound produced by the Pro in particular is rich and voluminous, about matching the Galaxy S9’s dual-speaker combo.

Huawei takes after Apple with its display notch, and P20 has its own answer to the iPhone X’s Face ID technology too. Huawei’s face unlock system uses the 24-megapixel front-facing camera, as opposed to Apples infra-red sci-fi laser blaster, but the results are quick and reliable. I wasn’t able to fool it with a photo, and unlocking, even in low light, was pretty speedy. The only time I could reliably trip it up was in very dark conditions, with lots of motion thrown into the mix.

As a secondary unlock method, you’ve also got the tried-and-true fingerprint scanner down below, which has worked flawlessly for me. If you want to free up even more display realestate, you can also set this up to use gestures instead of the standard Android software keys. It’s worth at least trying this feature, which uses a tap for back, a long press for home and a swipe for recent apps, but after years of using Android soft keys I found I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around it.

The fact that a fingerprint scanner is here at all is undoubtedly a good thing. But it does seem a little out of place on the front of a device that’s so focused on maximizing screen space at all costs — not least because it’s flanked on either side by two big chunks of non-functional bezel. It’s an odd blemish on what’s otherwise a beautiful device. And it does make me a tad envious of the Porsche Design Mate RS, with its in-screen fingerprint scanner. (Though as we’ll discover in our review of that device, in-screen fingerprint comes with its own set of compromises.)

It doesn’t suck

Huawei P20 + P20 Pro Software

Next, we get to the part of a Huawei phone review where I have to balance all the praise I’ve just dished out with some cautionary words about the software… right?

Well in this case, not so much. EMUI 8.1 is only a point release up from what I’ve been using on other recent Huawei phones, but the extra polish and attention to detail is a welcome surprise. A huge number of small but annoying bugs have been cleared up: UI scaling works properly. You can expand notifications on the lock screen — finally. Huawei has also tuned up its software to feel more responsive. The new phone is 60 percent more responsive and 50 percent smoother, according to its own numbers — and side-by-side with a Mate 10 Pro, it turns out you can actually tell the difference.

The new EMUI bumps up to Android 8.1, and clears up a great many small but annoying bugs.

As a bonus, the P20s’ software based on Android 8.1 Oreo, so you can use Netflix picture-in-picture — the app still requires 8.1 for that, for some reason, to the exclusion of Galaxy S9 owners. Android 8.1 also lets AI-equipped apps take advantage of the NPU through Android’s neural networking APIs.

That’s a pretty obscure and nerdy thing on the face of it, but there’s an easy way to demo what this is all about. Huawei’s own app store has an NPU-enabled demo version of Prisma, the AI photo app that normally processes its images remotely, leading to lengthy delays when changing filters. The NPU-optimized version does everything locally, and an it’s an order of magnitude faster.

Uses cases for AI hardware are still few and far between, but that’ll surely change throughout the lifespan of these phones.

In places, this still feels more like iOS than Android.

The P20 has the most polished and least objectionable version of EMUI I’ve used to date, but it remains quite heavily customized, with many visuals and behaviours that are more iOS than Android. A particular pet hate of mine is the way the lock screen only shows you notifications that have arrived since you last unlocked. There are a few bizarre visual choices too, like the way music player notifications pull colors from the app icon, not the album art. Huawei’s continuing penchant for bad-looking text shadows in many of its home screen widgets is another small cosmetic complaint.

But really, these are minor gripes, and shouldn’t detract from what is a version polished, and dare I say it even enjoyable software experience. Don’t get me wrong, I’d still drop this for stock Android in a heartbeat. It’s just that basically all the roadblocks that stopped me using Huawei phones as a daily driver basically no longer exist anymore. That’s not something I could say even of the Mate 10 Pro

OOO

Huawei P20 + P20 Pro Cameras

The camera experience makes up the bulk of what’s new in the P20 and P20 Pro. The standard P20 goes with an iterative update to the dual-camera rig of the Mate 10 — another 12-megapixel-plus-20-megapixel setup. The big difference, aside from the lack of optical image stabilization (OIS), is the move to a new main sensor with 1.55-micron pixels, to absorb more light than earlier Huawei cameras. There’s also a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor (behind an f/1.6 lens) to add in more detail and enable 2X hybrid zoom.

The cameras: competent in the P20, exceptional in the P20 Pro.

The P20’s rear camera setup is highly capable in its own right, producing 12-megapixel photos with ample dynamic range and clear color detail even in low light. The lack of OIS means photos can appear softer in darker conditions. But Huawei’s AI stabilization — an electronic stabilization system that works with its Neural Processing Unit chip — steps in to clear things up. Overall image quality is, in my opinion, close to that of the Google Pixel 2, though not quite as simple to use. (More on that later.)

The P20 and P20 Pro also share a comprehensive camera app with a ton of features. Some of them we’ve seen before, like the depth-sensing aperture and portrait modes. Others, like the completely wild handheld night photography mode, are new.

I’m glossing over the regular P20’s camera a little here, mainly because in day-to-day use it’s basically a slightly better version of the Mate 10’s camera. There’s a lot more to say about the triple-camera rig of the P20 Pro, which combines a massive 40-megapixel main sensor (measuring 1/1.7 inches, which is huge by phone standards) with its own 20-megapixel black-and-white camera, and an 8-megapixel, optically stabilized 3X telephoto camera.

The main camera sits behind an f/1.8 lens, and takes 10-megapixel images by default, in a downsampled mode that allows it to shoot with an equivalent pixel size of 2 microns at that lower resolution. (A technique known as pixel binning turns a 40 megapixel sensor with 1-micron pixels into a 10-megapixel shooter with 2-micron pixels.) That’s huge for low-light photography, as well as just being able to produce a high-quality image at 10 megapixels without fine detail becoming mushy. It’s an ambitious camera setup to be sure, and to Huawei’s credit, for the most part it works incredibly well.

AI magic on a 40-megapixel sensor helps the P20 Pro take stunning low-light shots, leapfrogging the Pixel 2.

Meanwhile, that monochrome sensor, behind an f/1.6 lens, is used to add in fine detail. And by combining this with the dedicated 3X telephoto camera, the P20 Pro can achieve 5X hybrid zoom. That gives you zoomed images with a unique field of view that really don’t look like they were taken on a smartphone. Huawei’s camera setup also sticks with the telephoto camera even in relatively dark conditions, unlike the Samsung Galaxy S9+, which quickly reverts back to a digital crop of the main sensor in even middling light. Generally that’s a good thing, however the point at which the P20 Pro does switch to a digital crop of the 40-megapixel main sensor is highly noticeable, because a 3X digital crop is significantly grainier, even with that larger sensor size.

Regardless, 3X telephoto gives the Huawei P20 Pro a unique strength — you can zoom further with more detail than any other phone camera.

But where the P20 series truly excels is in the handheld night mode. Both models have it, but that’s strongest on the P20 Pro, thanks to that pixel-binning magic. In this mode, the phone shoots a series of exposures over around 4 seconds, then does some number-crunching, uses AI to counteract hand motion, and normally leaves you with a mind-blowingly awesome low-light photo. (It’s not unlike the HDR+ “enhanced” mode from Google’s Pixel 2 phones, only shot over a longer period of time.)

In full auto mode, the P20 Pro is pretty great at low-light photography. But with this new dedicated night mode, it leapfrogs the Pixel 2 and pulls in light and colors that your eye can’t even see, all while keeping fine details clearly rendered. In night mode, the P20 Pro captures all the color and bright, vivid highlights that the Pixel 2 camera does, but with reduced noise and sharper fine details.

At least… it does that most of the time. The beauty of the Pixel’s camera is that there are no separate modes to worry about, just take your photo and it’ll always look great. Same deal, to a large extent, with the Galaxy S9. On the P20 and P20 Pro, you need to think a little more about which mode is appropriate for the shot you’re after. That trade-off gives you more control, and as a result the ceiling for image quality is arguably higher on the P20 Pro than the Pixel 2, but the effort needed to get there is also that much higher.

Artificial Intelligence is part of what makes the P20’s low-light skills so formidable, and the burgeoning AI capabilities we saw in the Mate 10 have been further enhanced in the P20 and P20 Pro. The phones can now recognize more scenes automatically, and Huawei even claims it can tell the difference between different kinds of food — though I didn’t really notice this in my couple weeks of use. The same goes for the phone’s AI assistance with scene composition — it’s supposed to help you figure out where to put the horizon line in shots, and how to frame up different kinds of scenes. Either I’m just unusually good at composition, or these features are less prominent than Huawei claims.

Huawei can’t beat Samsung or Google’s latest in video mode.

Overall, however, the AI Master feature, which is turned on by default, is a bit of a mixed bag. Two of the AI modes, greenery and blue sky, seemed to excessively oversaturate blues and greens, and add vignette effects while crushing blacks in a way that obliterates shadow detail. In many situations it made shots look worse, not better. It’s easy to disable this feature entirely, but it’s all or nothing. You can’t selectively kill the AI modes you don’t like, nor can you remove the AI tweaks once you’ve shot your photo.

And while I’m complaining, I’ve experienced a few instances where the P20 Pro’s camera will way over-sharpen certain outdoor scenes, even with the AI turned off. This doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, certain parts of images with fine detail, such as tree branches, become mired in artifacts. I noticed no such trouble with the same shots taken on a Galaxy S9.

Tucked away in the P20’s screen notch is a 24-megapixel selfie camera, behind an f/2 lens. The front-facer is a solid improvement on the Mate 10’s, with the usual caveats around very-low-light situations, where competitors like the Pixel 2 pull ahead. Fine details appear slightly softer than rivals too, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I was less impressed with Huawei’s attempt to copy the iPhone’s studio lighting features. Half the time I couldn’t even tell they were on. The other half turned out looking weird, and in some cases comically bad.

The video feature of the P20 are more or less the same as the Mate 10 Pro — you can record at up to 4K resolution at 30 frames per second, which is a step below the 4k60 that the Galaxy S9, iPhone X and others can shoot. And worse still, video stabilization is only supported at 1080p, which is a shame because it does work very well — you just have to make do with a lower resolution.

The big new video feature is 960fps slow motion capture, which you’ve probably seen by now in ads and reviews for the Galaxy S9. Huawei’s version of this super slow-mo feature, like Samsung’s, is limited to 720p resolution, and also needs a good deal of light to work well. The videos produced are also pretty much the same quality as the S9’s, with the same trade-offs, although you miss out on one crucial feature that Samsung’s built into the S9 to make slow-mo easier to capture.

On the S9, you get a handy little targeting reticule that helps you line up where the action’s going to be, and when it detects motion there your slow-mo burst starts. On the P20, it’s all manual — a split second after you press the trigger, you get a quarter of a second of super-slow-mo footage. Having used both, Samsung’s version is just way easier — on the P20, manually timing that button press down to a fraction of a second requires superhuman reflexes. You’re guaranteed to have to take a few trial runs before you get the shot you’re after.

The bottom line for the P20 and P20 Pro cameras is that they’re excellent overall, though not as capable as Samsung and Google’s phones in video. For straight-up photography, you’ll get extremely impressive results, particularly from the P20 Pro in low light. But doing so involves more tinkering around and fiddling with settings than you’re probably used to. And the much-hyped AI Master feature causes at least as many problems as it solves, while Huawei’s slow-mo video feature doesn’t really bring anything new to the table.

Super Charged

Huawei P20 + P20 Pro Battery Life

Despite their similar footprint and in-hand feel, the roomier chassis of the P20 Pro bags you a significantly bigger battery — the larger body is filled out by an ample 4,000mAh cell up from 3,400mAh in the standard P20.

The smaller phone manages perfectly fine with this power pack, getting me to the end of the day with the standard three-to-four hours of screen-on time. Meanwhile, the Pro’s battery life has also been commendable, with a one or two weird inconsistencies. Weak network connections, and camera use in particular, will quickly tank even the larger of the two batteries.

My real-world numbers have been all over the map, but at the low end you’re looking at about four hours screen on time, at the high end somewhere around six. That’s assuming you’re not using any of Huawei’s power-saving modes, which scale back the CPU and background tasks to save juice.

Note quite Mate 10 Pro good, but still well above average.

Battery life on the Pro is by no means bad, but after two weeks of use I did find myself finishing each day with slightly less power to spare than the Mate 10 Pro. On travel days I could push it into the danger zone by early evening. That’s a bit weird, and perhaps speaks to software wonk as a root cause — again, I didn’t experience this on the Mate 10 Pro, which shares a lot of the same hardware specs. With lighter use, it’s absolutely possible to push a second day out of the P20 Pro in particular.

Although there’s no wireless charging included, your main refill option is the excellent Huawei SuperCharge — which hasn’t changed since its introduction on the Mate 9, but is still one of the fastest fast charging methods for any phone. Even if you forget to charge overnight, 30 minutes plugged into the bundled SuperCharger will guarantee you a day’s worth of juice.

The bottom line

Should you buy the Huawei P20 or P20 Pro?

Buy the Huawei P20 or P20 Pro if you want a phone with striking design and cameras which, once tamed, can produce jaw-dropping telephoto and low-light photos.

If you do splash the 680-900€ required to pick up one of these phones, you’ll also get excellent performance, above average battery life and Huawei’s most polished software yet, running on the latest version of Android.

With such a significant price gap between the two models, and a relatively minor difference in size, the choice between P20 and P20 Pro mainly comes down to feature set and cost. If in doubt, I’d say just get the Pro — the in-hand size difference is fairly small. If you want to save some cash, you’ll mainly lose out on true telephoto zoom and some of the Pro’s more exotic low-light capabilities.

The Good

• Gorgeous design
• Impressive battery life
• Strong telephoto zoom (P20 Pro)
• Amazing low-light cameras
• Software significantly improved

The Bad

• Software copies iOS in some areas
• No water resistance (small P20)
• Some AI camera modes can be hit-and-miss
• Video features not as strong as rivals

Huawei P20 Pro

Huawei P20

For me personally, the Huawei P20 Pro will be my daily driver for the foreseeable future. (Or at least until the next big thing I’m reviewing comes along.) That’s a little surprising even to me, and it’s a result of the additional software polish as much as the epic battery life or impressive camera features. I think we might eventually look back on the P20 series — and the P20 Pro in particular — as a milestone device for Huawei. It’s not free from imperfections by any means, but this is one hell of a phone.

Take the $18 Anker Soundcore mini portable Bluetooth speaker everywhere

Amazon is offering the Anker SoundCore mini Super-Portable Bluetooth Speaker for only $17.99 when you use the code R46TM4H9 during checkout. These regularly sell for $30. Over 1,500 Amazon customers gave this a collective rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars. The code is valid on the black color.

This powerful, compact little speaker is extremely portable, but that doesn’t compromise the audio quality it puts out. It features an advanced 5W driver and a passive subwoofer to keep your music sounding great. You can also use it as a hands-free speakerphone, and if you don’t want to stream music via Bluetooth, this has support for microSD cards, an AUX jack, and an FM radio. The Bluetooth range is 66 feet and the battery will last for 15 hours with continuous playtime, too.

See at Amazon

The Galaxy S9 and its Hyperknit case are a match made in heaven

Strange name. Great case.

It’s not often that a case speaks to me, but when the Galaxy S9 was unveiled in Barcelona and the beautifully-lit, cavernous demo area was opened up, I was almost (almost!) as intrigued by the first-party accessories as the phone itself. And I was not disappointed.

After gazing longingly at Samsung’s Alcantara case last year — I bought one for the Note 8 — I wondered what else would be available, the alongside the practical, colorful silicone coverings I saw the true winner of the accessory crown, the oddly-named Hyperknit cover.

It’s difficult to describe exactly why it works so well, but the so-called “woven material” it’s made from feels like nothing else I’ve ever used. It’s light and grippy, almost cloth-like but coarser, with what appears to be a houndstooth pattern lending to its airiness.

Like this year’s Alcantara case — an improvement over last year’s model — there are real, reinforced plastic buttons on the sides, and the bottom is open, leaving the headphone, charging, and speaker ports open. Some have criticized this move, but I prefer it: the phone is already water-resistant, and the corners are reinforced to absorb any impact to the bottom part of the frame.

Of course, being open this isn’t a protective case — Samsung has its own (cheaper) Military Grade Case with Kickstand for that — but it’s already saved my Galaxy S9 from more than a couple ignominious falls in the few weeks I’ve had it.

I also think it looks great. I have the grey model to accompany my purple S9, but there is a red version that would look fantastic with a black or grey phone. I particularly like the way the lilac glint of the fingerprint sensor contrasts with the muted ashen case.

If there’s a minor criticism to level at the Hyperknit cover, it’s the difficulty in activating the swipe-down notification gesture on the fingerprint sensor. The actual gesture requires the whole sensor to be covered, and such an action requires a bit of finesse, and maybe one or two repeats, with the case turned on. Andrew noticed the same thing on the Alcantara model, too, so it’s not unique to this model, but it does hamper the experience somewhat if it’s a common gesture, which it is for me.

The Galaxy S9, even the smaller model, is so slippery I actually feel like a case makes the phone better. I bought the GS9 with the Hyperknit cover and haven’t felt the need to remove it which, given the number of cases I receive, is high praise indeed.

The Hyperknit cover runs for around $35, but it’s a bit less than that on Amazon right now.

See at Amazon

Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+

• Galaxy S9 review: A great phone for the masses
• Galaxy S9 and S9+: Everything you need to know!
• Complete Galaxy S9 and S9+ specs
• Galaxy S9 vs. Google Pixel 2: Which should you buy?
• Galaxy S9 vs. Galaxy S8: Should you upgrade?
• Join our Galaxy S9 forums

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