Huawei P20 Lite

To bring a portion of the premium-ness of the P20 to the budget crowd, Huawei brings the Huawei P20 Lite. Priced at Rs. 15,550, this attractive phone comes with the intention to mark its place in the midrange market.

However, the Huawei P20 Lite fails to keep up with the competition it comes in. It has poor performance and battery specifications, making it lag in the performance department.

The Huawei P20 Lite comes with a rear glass panel and comes along with an aluminium frame. It is quite sleek and does not have any antenna lines. It has curved sides, which makes it comfortable to hold. Due to the glass back, it feels premium, but that makes it scratch-prone. The fingerprint scanner is present in the rear panel and is well-located. The P20 Lite is a durable phone and can withstand scratches. It is quite compact and easy to pocket. The volume and power buttons are placed on the right and can be easily reached. The buttons are fiddly and small. However, all in all, the phone has a good build, which can fit in hand and is easy to handle – still, it is not something to get excited about. You can feel the lack of premiumness in the design.

The phone comes with a 5.82-inch display. The screen comes with a resolution of 1080×2280 pixels. It has a reasonably small notch on top which has minimal bezels, and thus, it can give an enjoyable screen experience due to the 80.55 percent screen-to-body ratio. The display is quite bright and punchy. The phone also provides incredible viewing angles. Due to the 19:9 aspect ratio of the phone, it can provide an immersive experience. It has a high 432ppi which adds to the sharpness.

The Huawei P20 Lite gets its power from Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin 659 chipset. It is paired with 4GB RAM. Daily tasks are performed smoothly within a certain limit. However, app switching can be a bit laggy, especially if you have several apps running in the background. The phone can handle graphics-intensive games like Asphalt 8, but it will lack playable frame rates, especially when cranked up to High settings. The phone does not get too warm either, which adds to its advantages. Huawei P20 Lite manages to reach about 3568 multi-core points on Geekbench, which is quite good. Proper light conditions can make the Face Unlock work well too. However, under extremely bright or dim sunlight, it starts to falter.

The P20 Lite has two cameras on its rear panel – a 16MP camera with an f/2.2 aperture paired with a 2MP depth-sensing supporting camera. The colours are quite accurate and have excellent dynamic range, the edge detection is average but remains decent. The wide aperture mode lets you capture shots by using depth-of-field effects, which gives average edge detection. In the case of low-light shots, the noise is low, but the photos lack details. There is no front LED or screen flash to help you handle low light shots.

On the front, the phone hosts a 24MP camera. It produces selfies with a fair amount of detail.

The front camera records 720p videos at max, and the rear gets 1080p videos. They lack details and are not good.

The phone comes with a 3,000 mAh battery. The battery life is not very good since the HD video loop test found it getting up to 9 hours and 10 minutes, which is slightly disappointing. With moderate use, the phone is unable to get through an entire day. Moreover, the phone does not support quick charging, and takes a long time to charge, going up to 2 hours and 49 minutes.

The Huawei P20 Lite looks handsome and is quite compact. It comes with a vibrant display. The problem with the phone is that it has a low battery life. The performance is not something to praise either. While it is a good phone, it does not beat the superior performance of Redmi Note 5 Pro.