Honor 20 Review

Honor, a smartphone brand owned by Huawei Technologies. Born in 2013 and began its expansion in 2014,Honor has been in the smartphone industry for almost 6 years now and we got some pretty amazing phones from honor like, Honor 3C, Honor 5C, Honor 6, Honor 7 and many more. Honor is a worldwide brand, with recognition in around 74 countries and it is even listed under the top 5 brands in the UK.

India is a fairly large market for Honor as the youth population is just huge and honor has an opportunity to grow here.

Now with the new launch of Honor 20, we can capture the life’s best moments anytime anywhere with its amazing 48-megapixel sensor. It’s a smartphone where passion meets creativity and performance. Also, this handset features  an innovative fingerprint design which is mounted on the side of the device and the world’s first Dynamic Holographic design for back panel.The glass design is iconic.

Enough of introduction now let’s dive into the more detailed review.

Honor 20 series have 3 models in this lineup named Honor 20 Lite, Honor 20 and Honor 20 Pro.

Honor 20 which we are reviewing today has only one base variant having 6GB RAM and 128GB onboard memory which can’t be further expanded because the phone lacks microSD card slot. It’s available in two color variants Midnight Black and Sapphire Blue, Both colors are superb, look very premium and simple.

As far as the price is concerned, the phone is exclusively available on Flipkart for INR 32,999 and from Honor’s official website. Although there are some discounts on Flipkart when paying through SBI Credit Cards or Flipkart Axis Bank Credit Card.

The HONOR 20 comes packaged in a beautiful white box with HONOR 20 written in beautiful vibrant colors at the bottom. Opening the box is pretty simple. The first thing you will see is the device. Underneath that, there is another smaller box which has a Protective Clear Case for the smartphone, and the SIM ejector tool moreover the box contains an adapter, a USB-C cable as well as a headphone dongle. 

Here is a quick overview of what you’ll be getting inside the box:

  – Honor 20 

  – Clear Protective Case 

  – Power adapter

  – Type C USB cable  

  – SIM ejector tool 

  – Manuals and documentation 

  – Headphone Dongle

Before we share our thoughts on the HONOR 20, let’s have a glance at the specifications. 

  – Display:  6.26 inches 1080×2340 px, 412 PPI ,IPS LCD

  – Processor & GPU: HiSilicon Kirin 980, Mali-G76 MP10

  – RAM & ROM: 6 GB RAM, 128 GB ROM

  – Rear cameras: 48MP+16MP+2MP+2MP

  – Selfie cameras: 32MP

  – Battery: 3750mAh battery with 22W fast charging

  – Software: Android 9.0 (Pie) based Magic UI 2.1

  – Dimensions: 154.3 x 74 x 7.9 mm 

  – Price: INR 39,999

With specs being cleared, let’s jump right into our comprehensive review of Honor 20.

Honor 20 has a massive 6.26-inch display which is beautiful and it can be easily used one handedly. The curved edges give a great grip and it feels more secure when holding. If we see the design, the front has a punch-hole camera on the top left corner of the phone which gives the phone a modern look this just shows that Honor is up to date with modern design innovations. The camera cutout offers the ability to get uninterrupted display space on either side of the screen, for information such as date, battery stats unlike notches which blocks a fair amount of screen.

On the left, we have a dual-Sim tray in which supports two nano-sim cards and unfortunately, no SDcard support is present so it’s storage is not expandable.

Then, at the bottom, we have the primary microphone, a bottom firing speaker and the USB  Type-C port for charging and data transfer. 

Integrated on the side, we have the power button with a fingerprint sensor, which is extremely quick and accurate and makes unlocking the phone very quick in a single tap. This innovative design of fingerprint sensor is one of the main highlights of this phone. 

Slightly above the fingerprint sensor we have the volume rockers. Honor doesn’t have any corner cuts when it comes to quality. It has 3D curved glass on all four sides of the phone. The screen to body ratio of this handset is 91.7 percent which is impressive and its perfect for watching movies and shows.

At the back of the phone, there are 4 cameras or as they call it Quad camera setup, each of the cameras is for a specific purpose. The Quad camera setup is a little outside of the overall frame which makes the device wobble a bit when placed on a flat surface the camera bump also helps to lift the phone when on a flat surface to prevent overheating heating issues.

Honor is known to have a 3D Triple Mesh Technology, i.e three layers of color, depth, and glass. When the light falls on the panel, it reflects it in very exquisite patterns and creates gradient effect for the display quality, it gives vibrant colors and the content on the phone is very much clear.

With a massive 6.26-inch display having 1080 x 2340pixels resolution, the picture quality is just flourishing with vibrant colors which are very pleasing to the eyes. The screen is full HD+ with a pixel density of 412ppi. The phone supports adaptive brightness technology which means it can adjust the brightness according to the environment automatically and it’s pretty accurate too which means that you don’t need to manually change brightness all the time. The viewing angles are pretty good too. There are also 4 preset color profies, you can choose between vivid and normal while reading or looking at your phone for long hours. For night time this phone as many other phones out there have an inbuilt night mode which reduces the blue light emission by using a yellow-ish filter. 

Huawei was kind enough to add a feature by which we can decrease display’s resolution from HD+ to HD which can save a lot of battery juice.

The Honor 20 is powered by Kirin 980. Kirin 980 is a 7nm-process based chipset which offers almost 75 percent boost in CPU performance and also being the world’s first 7nm process mobile phone chipset it combines multiple technological innovations and leads the AI trend to provide users with impressive mobile performance. It can perform AI tasks like object detection, face recognition and intelligent translation with the power of the dual-core. It is the foundation for the future of AI, especially for App developers. All the new HUAWEI products have Kirin 980 including Honor 20. It is powerful enough to run anything, multitasking is a piece of cake for this processor. It can handle dozens of active apps and background processes without sweating. Thanks to the massive RAM apps now stay longer in the memory and its really fast to switch between them. 

There are also some pre-installed apps on the phone for users to enjoy. So that their time and data can be saved from downloading them later , some of those apps are Fortnite, Facebook and booking.com. With all this, there is one more amazing gesture for taking a screenshot you just have to knock on the screen twice with your knuckle to take the screenshot. With two Knuckles knocking twice on the screen will activate screen recording.

The HONOR 20 supports Huawei’s Game Turbo 3.0 feature which is great at gaming performance by optimizing power consumption. Game turbo 3.0 currently supports over 50 games like fortnite, pubg, asphalt 9, candy crush saga, subway surfers, and real racing 3.

The Honor 20 runs on android 9.0 based Magic UI 2.1. This software has added many new features in it like smart video, caller video, GPU Turbo 3.0 and many more. The new updates to the GPU turbo 3.0 makes the gaming experience more breathtaking than ever. Honor 20 software is stable and speedy.  But the UI might not be for everyone.We personally are not a big fan on Magic UI.Advanced users can just flash a custom ROM and get rid of Magic UI but for basic users unfortunately they’ll have to stick with the magic UI.

Some of the features are quite astonishing like the Digital Balance which is close to stock android’s Digital wellbeing. It provides all the statistics related to app usage and it has important metrics like usage time, No of unlocks, No of notifications, etc. Digital balance also has a handy feature to set a timer for apps. An app can only be used for that fix the amount of time if the timer is set.

Honor 20 has a  vertical quad-camera setup with the 48MP main camera, a 16 MP super wide-angle lenses, a 2MP depth sensor and a 2MP macro lens for closeup shots. 

The main camera captures superior quality images. With the help of a new 117 degree super wide-angle lens now you can fit much more into a single frame The wide angle is very useful when taking large group photos. Furthermore, the 48 MP camera is intensified by Kirin 980 AI chipset’s dual-NPU and dual-ISP. 

The picture quality is crystal clear, even if it is shot from a distance. As impressive is the main camera other secondary cameras also excelled in their respective jobs too. The 2MP depth camera does a great job at distinguishing background from subject when taking portrait mode photos .The 2MP telephoto lens helps in improving the colors on photo and ,the 16MP wide angle lens is just great. It increases the field of view by almost 50%.

 Powered by the AIS algorithm, there is also NIGHT mode on the main camera which allows you to take clear and sharp photos in low light. You can do a Video shoot in slow motion too at 960 fps in 720p.

Honor 20 has a 32MP high-resolution selfie camera.The picture quality is improved by using a technique in which four pixels are combined into one larger pixel for brighter and clear image.The selfies taken by this phone are absolutely gorgeous and detailed the only things that we were not satisfied was that the color profile was way off and it sometimes made image look photoshopped or fake. The selfies are furthermore enhanced by AI which makes it look more gorgeous.

 The Honor 20 cameras also support AI Super Night Mode for crisp and sharp low-light shots. The camera quality makes the Blue skies look more blue, green fields greener, and everything just a little bit more. Occasionally this can tend towards the garish, but in general, the results are very pleasing.

This handset has a 3750 mAh battery. It can easily give up to two days of battery life on normal usage. Honor has been known to be the best in the business when it comes to battery life in smartphones. It won’t let you down. We tested this phone by trying to mimic the daily usage pattern which includes lots of social media browsing, clicking pictures in abundance and playing games, at the end of the day there was still 10-20% battery left on the phone. And, taking into consideration its charging capability, it can charge from  0 to 50 percent in just 30 minutes which is very impressive and handy. Thou honor 20 pro model has a 4000mAh battery. Both of them support up to 22.5W fast charging and Battery is non-removable.

Pros: 

  – Beautiful display 

  – Quad camera

  – Value for money

  – Massive battery backup 

  – Superb performance 

  – Premium design 

  – Free fortnite skins 

Cons: 

  – No microSD card slot 

  – Product future is uncertain due to the recent Ban by the US

  – Magic UI