Honor View 20 Review
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| Honor View 20 Full Review |
Table Of Content
Honor View 20 design
Honor View 20 specifications and software
Honor View 20 performance, battery life, and cameras
Verdict
Honor View 20 specifications and software
Honor View 20 performance, battery life, and cameras
Verdict
The Honor View 20 ₹ 37,999 has an even more powerful flagship processor and a radically new hole-punch in the display for its front camera. With competition getting fiercer by the day, is the Honor View 20 ₹ 37,999 the best pick in the premium segment? We review it to find out.
HIGHLIGHTS
- The Honor View 20 has a hole-punch display design.
- Performance is excellent thanks to Huawei Kirin 980 SoC and 6GB of RAM.
- The 4000mAh battery helps the Honor View 20 deliver good battery life.
The Honor View 10 went on sale at the start of 2018 at an aggressive price of Rs. 29,999. It was squarely aimed at the OnePlus 6 and used Huawei's powerful, AI-capable Kirin 970 SoC to compete with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845. The View 10 had lots of software enhancements and offered good camera performance.
What we didn't like about the device was its awkward camera bumps and the fact that a fast charger wasn't bundled in the box. Honor has now launched the successor to the View 10, dubbed the View 20.
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| Honor View 20 Full Review |
Honor View 20 design
Honor has gone to the glossy back panel just like some of its other smartphones. The sapphire blue color on our review unit looks plain, but a V-shaped pattern appears when light kills it at some angles. View 20 is also available in Midnight Black and Phantom Blue, later only an option with 8 GB RAM / 256 GB storage variants.
Honor View 20 has a modern design but it does not feel premium in hand. There are curved sides that make it comfortable to catch up. The back panel is made of glass, but Honor has not mentioned the type of glass that it has used. We found that the slide will slide when the phone is placed on any surface, which is not the level so you will need to be careful not to keep it.
The frame is made of metal and cooled to touch in an air-conditioned room. The power and volume buttons are on the right while the SIM tray is on the left. The power button has a texture pattern that makes it easy to distinguish without seeing it. We found the placement of the volume button too much because we needed to manipulate the phone in our hand to reach them.
You will find an IR emitter and ambient light sensor on top with a 3.5 mm headphone jack. At the bottom, this phone has a USB Type-C port with loudspeaker and primary microphone.
Now, there are coming to the display which has kept Honor View 20 in the news. The 6.4-inch panel has a hole-hole in the upper left corner for the selfie camera. This is the first smartphone to be launched in India, which is such a design instead of the usual number. It eliminates the need for a notch by pushing the speaker grill and proximity sensor in the frame of the phone.
This results in more screen real estate, but just like a notch, hole-punch can be a distraction for some people. Receiving screen protector and case may be an issue for some time, but in the Honor box a case is shipped and pre-applied to the screen protector.
Although the hole-hole means that you lose a small part of the display in the corner, we had no problem with it. Since it is in a corner, it does not take care of your attention as it does a traditional step. In fact, we had to point out some of our friends and colleagues to the punch.
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Honor View 20 specifications and software
Huawei Kirin 980 SoC comes in the form of a little surprise on the imagery sheet. It is a powerful processor based on the 7nm manufacturing process, and it is also found in the premier Huawei Mate 20 Pro Review 69,990 (review).
It is an octa-core processor in which there are three different types of core, depending on how much power and efficiency are needed in different usage scenarios. It is also the first SoC to feature ARM Cortex-A76 Core. There are Mali-G76 GPUs and Dual NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for graphics.
6GB of RAM and 128GB internal storage which is not expandable. 8GB RAM, 256GB storage option is also available at a higher price.
The first hole-punch display of its kind on HonorView 20 Sports Full HD + Resolution (1080x2310 pixels) You can tweak the color output of the panel according to your liking or adjust the color temperature.
This phone gives you the option of scaling the display resolution to HD + and can also automatically automate battery life through Smart Resolution feature. If you are not particularly fond of the hole-punch design, you can mask it in display settings.
HonorView 20 is a dual-sim device and has two nano-SIM slots. Both SIMs support VoLTE as well as 4G. The connectivity options on View 20 include Bluetooth 5, dual-band WiFi 802.11ac and six satellite space systems. HonorView 20 has a battery of 4000mAh and the 40W Supercharger is tied in this box.
Honor recently shipped View 20 with Android 9.0 pie out-of-the-box and its new Magic UI with security patches in December 2018. This new UI looks much like EMUI, which is quite common on Honor smartphone. UI is optimized for working with hole-punch display and all notification icons have been moved to the right.
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| Honor View 20 Full Review |
It also has a digital balance facility that helps you manage how much time you spend on your device. We found it very useful on Honor 10 Lite 999 13,999 (review). Apart from the traditional Android navigation buttons, there is support for gesture navigation and navigation docks.
There is a single floating button on the navigation dock screen that can be used to navigate around. Magic UI also has support for themes so you can customize the UI.
There are some apps already on HonorView 20. There is an Honor App including HighCare (a support app), Health, Appjeller, Honor Club and Party Mode. We also find some 360 bloatware on the smartphone that includes Camera360, Vigo Video, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Netflix.
Google apps are also preinstalled, and finally, a phone manager app that helps you manage your phone's resources.
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| Honor View 20 Full Review |
After influencing us in the Huawei Mate 20 review, Kirin 980 SOC displays the same display on scene 20. It was quick to load the app and the game without any indication. 6GB RAM ensures that there is a multitasking smooth without the need to kill the app in the background. The Magic UI uses a horizontal multitasking layout and you can easily scroll through all the background apps.
While many people will point out that this phone does not have an in-display fingerprint scanner like the OnePlus 6T Review 37,999 (review), the rear-mounted physical fingerprint scanner is quick. View 20 also has a face recognition feature that uses a selfie camera to scan your face and unlock it yourself.
We found that the Face Unlock feature was fast when it had enough light to work, but in the case of low light, it was quite slow.
We ran a benchmark to see how to rent 20 compared to the competition. In AnTuTu, the phone managed to score 2,77,415, which is more than the Asus ROG phone ₹ 69,999 (review), but still, OnePlus 6T has scored less than 2,94,802.
In Geekbench 4, it achieved 3,313 and 9,742 points respectively in single-core and multi-core tests and managed 7,624 in PCMark Work 2.0.
Honor View 20 scores 58fps and 51fps in GFXBench's T-Rex and Manhattan 3.1 scenes, respectively. It scored 3,630 and 37,675 in 3DMark's Slingshot Extreme and Ice Storm Unlimited tests respectively.
We played PUBG Mobile and Asphalt 9 on the device, and they ran without hesitation. The graphics set on PUBG HD and went well with set frame rates at high. We could play games without any intervals, and the holes-punched notch did not obstruct the control or the scene. Even while watching videos on YouTube, the Hole-Punch step did not bother us, but it removes a small part of the display.
In our HD Video Loop Test, the 4000mAh battery powering the phone lasted 12 hours and 31 minutes. We also tested supercharger which comes bundled with smartphones. The view was able to charge 20 to 47 percent in 30 minutes and 86 percent in one hour, and it took only 1 hour, 35 minutes to fully charge it.
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| Honor View 20 Full Review |
We charged HonorView 20 to 100 percent and started at 7am in the morning. With nearly 4 hours of navigation using Google Maps, 30 minutes of PUBG Mobile, taking some photos and an active Whatsapp Account, still, at the end of the day, 39 percent of battery life was still left.
Honor Vu 20 is very noisy about the camera and with good reason because it is one of the few devices that sport 48-megapixels primary shooter. There is also a TOF (flight time) 3D camera which has been seen on Oppo R17 Pro Review 43,690 (review).
The camera app looks the same as we have seen on Honor smartphone but it has been tweaked to add some more shooting modes. In addition to regular photo and video modes, there are AR lenses, knight, portrait, pro, aperture, artist and panorama mode. HDR is also a different mode, not a quick toggle. The app also offers you several filters before taking a shot.
Photos taken with Honor View 20 are good, and when we were out of shooting we had no problem. The camera is set to take 12-megapixel photos by default, and you want to use the highest possible resolution, you have to go and change it to 48 megapixels in settings.
In daylight, we saw important differences in photos with AI enabled and without taking pictures. As a result of the AI, there were shots with high contrast and more details in deep areas. We did not see any significant difference between AIR and AA's Macro shot because there was a good extension in both, and the phone could separate the subject from the background in both the cases.
AI works similarly for low-light shots and gives better details in our samples. The software managed to keep the noise in control, but when we zoomed into our sample pictures, grain was visible. Portrait shots were decent, and the phone had good edge management.
There are many portrait lighting options that you can use. In portrait mode, we can use the 3D camera using the 3D shaping feature, which drops a person down the digital way. It squeezes the frame where the subject is so that they look slimmer. However, it causes minor distortion around the area which is worth noting.
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| Honor View 20 Full Review |
There was good detail in the selfie taken with the 25-megapixel front camera. Scene 20 also uses AI with its front camera to detect faces and different scenes. This phone does not have a selfie flash but it can make the whole screen light after taking photos in low light.
Video recording maxes out at 4K for the rear camera and 1080p for the selfie shooter. When shooting at 1080p with the rear camera, the footage is stabilized. This phone is also capable of 4K video recording but there's a 10-minute limit. While recording with the selfie camera, you get the option to enable AI HDR, which is helpful when you are shooting against the light.
Honor View 20, with its hole-hole display, stands out compared to its notched competitors. Although it still does not have an all-screen front, it's a step in the right direction.
The attractive sapphire blue color is good for drawing attention, but the slippery back is something we were constantly worried while using this smartphone.
The new Kirin 980 SoC can hold on its own against the current major processor. There is still some bloat in the software which can lose it and can recognize the face to work better in low light.
The price of Rs 37,999, is against the Honor View 20 OnePlus 6T (Review), which is a tough competition. If you have a clean choice near the stock Android experience, then OnePlus 6T provides a clear advantage, but if you want to be the first to become a master of a hole-punch display device, then proceed. View 20 is a solid artist without much compromise.
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