Honor 20 Pro
A top-end spec and an excellent set of cameras for a special price – even if we don’t love the display
Honor is in a tricky place. As a sub-brand of Huawei, it suffers from all the same trade war/privacy threats that affect its parent company, and so potential buyers may well be put off the Honor 20 Pro. Before you strike it off your list, however, take note: it has the world’s first 48-megapixel with an f/1.4 aperture, 256GB of storage and excellent performance, yet undercuts rivals such as Apple and Samsung on price.
The phone is available in two colours – “Phantom Blue”, which counter-intuitively looks green, and “Phantom Black”, which looks purple – and both have a fancy, all-glass, chrome-like finish. It looks amazing when you first take it out of the box but, as ever, attracts fingerprints too easily and will probably end up protected by a case anyway. Also note the cluster of cameras protruding from the chassis round the back, which means the phone rocks when you place it on a flat surface.
Honor ditches the rear-mounted fingerprint sensor of the View 20 (se e issue 294, p72) in favour of a side-mounted sensor, which doubles up as a power button. Personally, I prefer the previous arrangement where the fingerprint reader could also be used to answer calls, dismiss alarms, swipe through photos and for expanding the notification panel. These are all lost with the Honor 20 Pro.
A volume rocker sits just above the fingerprint sensor with a dual nano-SIM tray on the opposite side. There’s no storage slot but when the Honor 20 Pro ships with 256GB of internal storage, that shouldn’t be an issue. Perhaps the biggest negative is that there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack, which is disappointing given that Honor has so far resisted the
trend. There’s also no support for wireless charging and no IP rating for dust and water.
Elsewhere, it’s business as usual. The phone employs USB-C for charging – it jumps from zero to a 50% charge in 30 minutes – and there’s dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5 and NFC. And on a further positive note, the holepunch selfie camera in the top-left corner of the screen looks great and leaves the display occupying the full expanse of the front panel, with no notch eating into the top edge.
Notchless display
That display measures 6.26in across the diagonal with a Full HD+ (1,080 x 2,340) resolution. More surprising for a flagship phone, there are no curved edges and Honor sticks with IPS LCD technology rather than AMOLED.
Compared to other flagships, the Honor 20 Pro lacks brightness: it only achieved 443cd/m² in “Normal” mode and 477cd/m² in “Vivid” mode. By comparison, the 6.1in Dynamic AMOLED display on the Samsung Galaxy S10 ( see issue 296, p70) reaches peaks of almost 1,200cd/m², which are much needed if you’re hitting the ski slopes or watching HDR+ video.
Contrast ratio figures of 922:1 and 979:1 in each mode are also lower than we’d expect, but Honor regains credibility with excellent gamut coverage: in Normal mode, which is tuned to match the sRGB standard, it covered 95.5% of the colour space, while Vivid mode is aimed at movie fans and reached 92.9% DCI-P3 coverage.
Turn of speed?
The Honor 20 Pro uses a Kirin 980 chipset and couples this with 8GB of RAM. In other phones, this has proved to be a formidable combination and it should be the same story here. I say “should” because Honor made the disappointing decision to block benchmarking apps on our review unit, meaning Geekbench 4 and GFXBench were unable to run.
Fortunately, real-world gaming isn’t blocked. I put the phone through its paces with a series of games and monitored the frame rate using GameBench. Here, the Mali-G76 MP10 GPU outputs a consistent 40fps on PUBG Mobile, which is the maximum the game permits in its higher quality modes. It also averaged 59fps on the highest quality setting on Shadowgun Legends. This is an impressive set of results that puts it on par with other flagships.
Battery life is strong, too. The phone lasted 16hrs 51mins in our video-rundown test, which is superior to the 14hrs 51mins achieved by the View 20. Both, however, are outclassed by the Huawei P30 Pro ( see issue 297, p68) at 21hrs 21mins and the Xiaomi Mi 9 ( see issue 296, p72) at 22hrs 54mins.
As for software, despite what Honor says about its own Magic UI being different from Huawei’s EMUI Android overlay, they’re essentially identical. Specifically, the phone uses Magic UI 2.1, which adds a skin on top of Android 9 Pie, and brings a few improvements over the previous version – most notably, GPU Turbo 3, which aims to boost performance in games. In my tests with PUBG Mobile, a game that has been supported since
“The Mali-G76 MP10 GPU outputs a consistent 40fps on PUBG Mobile, which is the maximum the game permits in its higher quality modes”
version 2, I saw no notable differences with the technology enabled. Whether you choose to use it or not is your prerogative.
Quad cameras
Honor pulls out all the stops with its quad-camera array: a 48-megapixel Sony IMX586 1/2in sensor with an aperture of f/1.4 and optical image stabilisation (OIS); a 16-megapixel f/2.2 wide-angle camera; an 8-megapixel f/2.4 telephoto camera that offers 3x lossless optical zoom (plus 5x hybrid zoom and 30x digital zoom); and a small, 2-megapixel f/2.4 macro camera that sits above the dual-tone LED flash module.
It all comes together to bring one of the best camera performances I’ve seen from a smartphone. It rivals, if not beats, the Huawei P30 Pro – a device that’s widely considered as the best smartphone camera. My only caveat is that you should ensure Ultra Clarity mode is enabled, because this allows it to capture a phenomenal amount of detail.
Honor appears to perform some magic with the 8-megapixel camera, which produces 12 megapixel images (4,000 x 3,000). This is because the main and telephoto cameras work together, with images captured at 8 megapixels then upscaled to 12 megapixels using detail added from the 48-megapixel sensor. As with the Huawei P30 Pro, to use the telephoto camera you have to switch out of 48-megapixel mode; while the Honor can’t match the 50x digital zoom of its sibling, we suspect its 30x zoom is plenty for most people.
Even indoors with reduced light levels, the Honor device holds its own: with flash disabled, the 20 Pro and P30 Pro suppress image noise to a minimum, while with flash toggled on shadows are eliminated. Better still, the image doesn’t lose its colour temperature, which is fantastic. The 16-megapixel wide-angle camera is competent, too, producing detailed images; just not quite as detailed as the Huawei P30 Pro’s 20-megapixel wide-angle camera. Finally, for the rear at least, the 2-megapixel macro lens proved excellent for 4cm macro photography.
The 32-megapixel hole-punch selfie camera is extremely impressive too. It captures plenty of detail and creates convincing portrait images with nicely blurred backgrounds.
Close to genius
The Honor 20 Pro is a flagship phone that deserves serious consideration. At £550, it pits itself against far pricer smartphones, such as the Huawei P30 Pro at £899. You’re getting nearidentical camera performance to the P30 Pro, a flagship processor and 256GB of internal storage at a fraction of the price. That’s an incredible deal.
But this phone is flawed. It omits the 3.5mm headphone jack, has a good rather than great screen, offers no dust or water resistance and doesn’t support wireless charging.Plus, Honor and Huawei are still under fire from Trump’s administration.
It also has competition. The £499 Xiaomi Mi 9 offers similar power and better battery life but a lesser camera; the Asus ZenFone 6 ( see issue 299, p70) has a rotating camera, superior screen and also costs £499; and the more refined Samsung Galaxy S10e (se e issue 298, p75) offers a 5.8in AMOLED screen, excellent cameras and a street price of less than £500.
Perhaps the most direct rival is the OnePlus 7 ( see issue 298, p74), which shares the Honor 20 Pro’s 256GB of storage and £549 price. The OnePlus 7’s dual camera may not be as feature-packed as the Honor’s, but it still produces excellent images – and, like the Xiaomi Mi 9 and Samsung Galaxy S10e, it’s a safer bet in terms of future support.
“The Honor 20 Pro is a flagship phone that deserves serious consideration – at £550, it pits itself against far pricer smartphones”
SPECIFICATIONS Octa-core 2.6GHz/1.92GHz/1.8GHz Huawei Kirin 980 8GB RAM Mali-G76 MP10 graphics 6.26in IPS screen, 1,080 x 2,340 resolution 256GB storage dual nano-SIM slot quad 48MP/16MP/8MP/2MP rear camera 32MP front camera 802.11ac Wi-Fi
Bluetooth 5 NFC USB-C connector 4,000mAh battery Android 9 74 x 8.4 x 154mm (WDH) 182g 2yr warranty