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Honor 20 Review – Times Now


Honor 20

Honor 20&nbsp

Product Name:Honor 20

Brand Name:Honor

Price:32,999/-

Key Highlights

  • Honor 20 brings with it a 6.26-inch full HD+ display sat on a compact form factor phone
  • Honor 20 is powered by a Kirin 980 SoC paired to 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage
  • Honor has announced that the device will get Android Q update in the future

Huawei and its sub-brand Honor have faced a rather tumultuous past few weeks with the ensuing trade war between China and the US taking an ugly turn. Amid the uncertainty raised over the introduction — and then the subsequent revoking — of Google’s Android ban on Huawei and its subsidiaries, Honor too has found itself caught in the middle of the storm with questions being raised over the future of the company. 

But even as this Shenzhen-based smartphone maker battles these rising fires of uncertainty, the launch of its latest flagships — the Honor 20 and 20 Pro — have come as a sigh of relief for Honor which only a few months ago undertook a revamp of its brand identity in a bid to enhance its presence in the smartphone market in the country. 

While the Honor 20 Pro is the top-of-the-line flagship from this line-up, the Honor 20 is the slightly affordable sibling which pretty much brings the same promise of solid performance and brilliant cameras tied to a modern and compact design.

We’ve had the Honor 20 with us for a while now, during which we’ve extensively used the device for not just carrying out day-to-day tasks but also for heavy gaming and clicking hundreds of pictures and multiple videos. During our review of the device, we also put the Honor 20 through the paces to test its battery endurance and figure out the traits of the device.

Read our review to know just what you’ll be buying into if you decide to spend the Rs 32,999 that Honor is asking for this mid-range flagship. 

Pros

Premium minimalistic design

A compact form factor that fits nicely in the palm

Kirin 980 SoC’s solid performance

Impressive camera array that clicks detailed shots

Brilliant battery life

Cons

Magic UI takes time getting used to

Lacks AMOLED panel

Honor 20 Review: Design

Honor’s brand revamp back in March-April this year pushed it to introduce a sense of modern-ness and a touch of premium into the DNA of the company, and as it appears, it’s something that has also found a way to the Honor 20. 

With sheets of unspecified protective glass on the back — sat over another glossy reflective sheet underneath — and a similar sheet sat over a 6.2-inch display, the phone looks as premium as it is to hold. Because of a combination of glass sandwiching a metallic frame in the middle, there’s also a pleasant heft to the device which is felt the moment you hold it your palm. 

Another thing to note here is that despite the rather large display on board, the phone has a nice compact form factor which makes the device easy to carry around — but owing to the fact that  the Honor 20 features slippery glass as the primary material in its design, the phone does feel  vulnerable to accidentally slipping out of your hands. 

However, to counter this, Honor’s added a brushed metal frame in the middle, which with its curves, not only adds to the appearance of the phone but also helps ensure the phone feels more secure in the hands. 

The metallic frame also houses the phone’s fingerprint scanner-cum-power button on the right, with the Honor 20’s volume rocker sat just above it. There’s an IR blaster on the top with a speaker grille placed just on the edge of the top of the phone’s frame. On the left, there’s a cutout for a dual-SIM tray which also doubles up as the microSD-card reader, while the device’s USB Type-C port, as well as a single firing speaker, is placed at the bottom of the frame. 

The phone is available in two colours — Sapphire Blue and Midnight Black — of which the former looks a little flashy, while the latter — as we found out with our review unit — stands out from the crowd with its understated class. 

Honor 20 Review: Display

Another thing that massively adds to the design of the phone, and makes it look premium par its price is the Honor 20’s display which sports a high bezel to screen ratio. With only a small punch-hole notch on the immersive display and a slight chin at the bottom, the Honor 20 is one of the better-looking devices you’ll find in the market. 

But apart from adding to the design, the display on the phone in itself is quite impressive. However, in times when HDR content is becoming more common than before, this display does lose out a few battles when placed next to some of the more premium devices in the market. 

The Honor 20 packs a 6.26-inch, full HD+, IPS LCD panel which despite its ability to output punchy colours and showing good dynamic range does not match up to AMOLED panels on competing phones that also bring with them higher brightness ratings and support for HDR and HDR+. 

But in isolation, it has to be noted that the IPS LCD panel on the device still performs pretty well and from colour reproduction to the brightness under direct sunlight and even the crispness of text and videos — owing to the high 421 PPI pixel density of the panel — there’s very little that the phone display doesn’t impress with. 

Honor 20 Review: Specifications and performance

Under the hood, the Honor 20 brings with it hardware that’s fit to find space on a flagship device. 

While there’s no Snapdragon 855 chipset from Qualcomm on board, Honor as always has gone for an in-house solution to power its phone. As such, at the core of the device lies a HiSilicon Kirin 980 SoC.

For the uninitiated, this is Huawei’s flagship chipset made using the highly sophisticated 7nm manufacturing process and one that’s found on the company’s premium flagship phones, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and the P30 Pro. 

Armed with four ARM Cortex-A76 cores and four Cortex-A55 cores as well a dual Neural Processing Unit, and the Mali G76-GPU for graphics-intensive tasks, this chipset is as powerful as they come. To ensure the phone runs smoothly under heavy load and multitasking, Honor has paired the SoC with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. 

Overall, this core configuration allows the phone to perform quite well when tasked to run any and everything. In our time with the device, we found the Honor 20 equally capable of handling daily tasks and even heavy duty games such as PUBG, Asphalt 9 and Dragon Ball Z: Legends. 

However, where the 980 SoC does lag behind a little is when the phone is tested against synthetic benchmarks. In Geekbench 4, the Honor 20 Pro scored a single-core score of 3305 and 9724 for the multi-core test. On Antutu, the phone scored 287791 points. 

A big factor behind the Honor 20 experience is the phone’s Android 9 Pie based Magic UI 2.1 OS. While we’re still not sure if we love it or hate it, what needs to be mentioned here is that it does feel very different from the usual Android experience you’d get on other close to stock Android devices. 

There’s also a little bloatware on the device, including some uninstallable apps such HiCare which despite adding to the clutter also adds value to the device. This custom Android 9 Pie based solution also sees the Honor 20 bring Huawei’s Game Turbo 3.0 feature, which the company claims boosts gaming performance by allocating system resources and optimising power consumption. 

While the list of games that the Game Turbo 3.0 can be used in is limited for now, with only 30 odd games finding support, the feature still came quite handy when playing PUBG on the device.

Honor 20 Review: Camera

Cameras are a plus when it comes to the Honor 20. Although it skips on the 5x optical zoom supporting periscope style lens found on the fancier Honor 20 Pro, the phone does bring with it a triple camera setup which is one of the best in not just the price segment but the entire market. 

The device comes sporting four rear lenses, with the primary one being a 48-megapixel Sony IMX586 sensor with an f/1.8 aperture paired to a 16-megapixel 117-degree field of view wide-angle lens with an f/2.2 aperture a 2-megapixel lens for capturing depth as well as a macro lens for close-up shots. 

It is important to note that the primary lens in this setup is a 12-megapixel pixel binned solution — Honor calls it 4-in-1 Light Fusion technology — that combines four pixels into one bigger pixel. Honor explains this allows the camera to capture more light for brighter and more detailed pictures. But does this translate to better-looking pictures in real life? 

As we found out during our review where we extensively tested the Honor 20’s camera and its various modes, images clicked using the phone did come out quite well, with more than enough detail and pretty much accurate colours. 

While we did find the AI of the phone tweaking the colours too much once in a while, with the images usually leaning a bit towards oversaturation, that also isn’t too big of an issue as these days most people do prefer a slight punch when it comes to colours reproduction in the pictures they click. 

Talking about detail, the Honor 20 captures enough of it, but the aggressive post-processing does take away a little of it. This is particularly discernable when comparing the results of the Honor 20 with those of competing devices such as the Oppo Reno 10X Zoom. 

However, this aggressive post-processing does ensure that in low light, the phone clicks incredibly detailed shots that pop not just because of the vibrancy of the colours but general detail in them. 

But moving on from the prowess of the primary lens of the device, the Honor 20’s wide-angle lens proved to be a perfect companion for clicking expansive ultra-wide landscape shots of the mountains and the skies. 

The Honor 20 also brings with it a dedicated 2-megapixel macro lens, which to be honest did not impress us much. For most pictures, it turned out to be a hit and miss, with some shots coming out blurred. 

Apart from this, we found the Honor 20 excelling truly when it came to the camera software features on board. Portrait shots clicked using the device looked stunning, with edges being detected well by the camera AI. However, it is important to note that the feature only works with faces in the frame.

For objects, Honor’s included an Aperture mode which allows users to set the size of the aperture to click nice bokeh shots. There are also features like Light Painting that according to set presets, creates beautiful images by capturing light at variable speeds. 

On the front, we have a 32-megapixel front-facing camera that also gets many of the features that the Honor 20’s rear camera does. The result is that it takes impressive selfies that pack in a good amount of detail. 

While the photos did generally come out fine, we did notice the AI kicking into overdrive and smoothening skin texture a little too much at times. Low-light selfies were good but did lack a little in terms detail. 

Honor 20 Review: Battery

Coming to the battery performance of the phone, the device comes with a decent sized 3750mAh pack soldered under the hood, which to be honest punches well above its weight. 

While on paper a 3750mAh battery on the phone sporting a display of this size isn’t anything to write home about. However, as we found out during our review, owing to the OS level optimisations and high energy efficiency of the Kirin 980 SoC the phone comfortably lasts a day on moderate to heavy use. 

We usually found the Honor 20 lasting over a day even after using it extensively for browsing through social media apps, watching videos and clicking countless pictures through the day. We were also pleasantly surprised by the standby times the phone offered. While not being used, the phone hardly lost any charge, with the battery percentage dropping a maximum of 2-3 per cent overnight. 

The phone also manages thermals exceptionally well, which could also be another reason that explains the impressive battery performance of the Honor 20. 

And even when we did run low on battery, the phone with its support for Huawei’s 22.5W SuperCharge technology took a little less than an hour and a half to achieve a full charge. 

Honor 20 Review: Rating

Design: 8/10

Display: 8/10

Performance: 8/10

Cameras: 9/10

Battery: 9/10

Overall: 9/10

Honor 20 verdict: Should you buy it?

Because of the sum of its design, specs and overall performance, Honor 20 is quite simply one of those rare devices that’s very difficult to ignore. With its top-end specs, it not only shines on the spec sheet but also impresses in daily use with its near-flawless performance. 

Be it the cameras or the battery; the phone leaves very little to be desired. And quite frankly, all of this looked at from the perspective of the aggressive Rs 32,999 price tag makes recommending the Honor 20 to buyers looking for mid-segment flagship option a rather easy task. 

However, things that seem easy are rarely so — especially in the times we live in today. 

As has been well documented already, and something that we’ve even touched upon above, Honor 20 despite being a very impressive option in the segment — one that also provides excellent value for money — does come with serious questions raised over its long term future. 

The Trump-Xi Jinping face-off has already seen Google announce plans to remove Huawei and it’s subsidiary Honor from the list of OEM partners in the future. Now on Honor’s part, breakdown in this long-running partnership with Google could have disastrous consequences for the brand. 

If not overturned before the deadline, any future products from Honor and Huawei will be barred from gaining access to Google’s suite of services which include Google Play, first-party Google apps like Gmail, or Play Services, which is responsible for many underlying operations on modern Android devices and even updates — both feature and security.  

However, the operative term here being future products with both Google and Honor already confirming that all existing products will be exempt from the ambit of any future ban and as such ensuring that the device will not only retain access to not only Google’s Android updates but also Google’s full suite of services. To make matters easier, the company has also assured that the Honor 20 series phones will also be getting Android Q updates in the coming months. 

And as such, there’s little to fear about buying any of the existing Honor phones — including the Honor 20. If you still find yourself erring on the side of caution and afraid to take the plunge on this device, then it might be prudent to look at an offer that Honor’s extending with the 20 series phones right now. 

For those still undecided, Honor is extending the Love or Return challenge on the Honor 20 which provides 90 per cent buy back guarantee on the Honor 20. The terms of the offer state that the company would refund 90 per cent value of the phone if the customer decides to return the device within 90 days from the date of purchase — enough time for clarity to emerge on the issue. 





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