Huawei P20+P20 Pro Review

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Ubergizmo was in Paris on 3/27 for the launch of the new Huawei P20 Series of high-end smartphones with the Huawei P20, Huawei P20 Pro, and the Porsche Design Huawei Mate RS editions. All three models share a common SoC platform based on the HiSilicon Kirin 970, and the same software framework. This series will constitute the new tip of the spear for Huawei in the high-end segment ($650+) and will compete with the Galaxy S9, iPhone 8/X, Google Pixel 2, etc…

Huawei P20 vs. P20 Pro vs. Mate RS: the main differences

Huawei P20

The P20 (~$680) is the baseline version of this new hardware. It defines a new design language and form factor (5.8” display), along with an improved software interface which has evolved from last year’s Huawei P10. The P20 has 4GB of RAM and an IP53 rating, which means that it is splash-resistant, but not submersible.

Huawei P20 Pro

The P20 Pro (~$920) is, in my opinion, the real star of this show. Created to address the large-display market (6.1” and ~11.5% more surface area), it improves over the P20 significantly in several areas. It has an OLED screen, a significantly larger RGB camera sensor with 3.3X more pixels and a third 3X optical zoom camera. Finally, it has a much larger battery (+18% capacity) and 6GB of RAM. These are the most critical differences in my view. The P20 Pro is IP67 rated and can survive a short immersion in water.

Porsche Design Huawei Mate Rs

The Mate RS (~$1800) could be viewed as a “deluxe edition” of the Huawei P20 Pro. Although the Mate Series is supposed to be different, there is much in common this time. The differences are that the Mate RS gets integrated wireless charging (with ~0.7mm of additional thickness), more storage (256GB vs. 128GB), dual-SIM and a lot of great accessories (better earphones, leather case, VIP card, etc…). The Mate RS is also IP67 rated and also has 6GB of RAM.

Industrial design: a leap forward

With the P20 Series, Huawei has launched a significant design change. Last year’s Huawei P10 was built with an aluminum unibody design with a sturdy all-metal chassis. In 2018, the P20 Series gets a dual-glass design and an aluminum metal frame.

This type of design was popularized (if not introduced) by Samsung with the Galaxy S6 series and is known to be very difficult to manufacture. The glass back makes the handset look “more premium” in the eye of many consumers, and the pull is so strong that even Apple switched to something similar with the iPhone 8 and iPhone X.

Huawei made the right choice by following the trend and adding its own twist with a stunning “Twilight” dual-tone blue/purple coloring. This is by far the most beautiful version of P20, and it will surely make people talk when your phone is on a desk/table. The Huawei P20/P20 Pro have rounded edges, but do not have the glass curve -as much- onto the edge of the phone. The fingerprint reader remains in front of the device -arguably the best location- but Huawei still manages to get 80.3% and 82% of screen-to-body ratio, a very high number.

The advantage of not having the curved glass and screen is that the phone should be less prone to glass cracks than the Galaxy Series 7-edge/8/9 and Note 8 phones. However, it may be a tiny less aesthetically pleasing to some users and the screen may appear a bit less “borderless.” You decide.

Huawei has removed the 3.5mm audio connector, and although the earphones are USB-C or there will be an adapter, this move might upset some potential customers. This is still a controversial topic.

Durability

With an IP Rating of only IP53, the Huawei P20 is not “waterproof.” The IP53 rating means: “Prevents moderate amount of dust from entering but is not dust tight. Protected against sprayed water at an angle of up to 60 degrees (from the vertical). Tested for 5mn at 0.7L/mn at a pressure of 50-150 kPa (no water immersion)”.

For the P20 Pro and Mate RS, IP67 means: Dust tight, no dust can penetrate. Up to 1-meter immersion for a limited duration won’t harm the device. Tested for 30mn.

None of the P20-Series handsets have passed the MIL-STD 810G certification. You can open the link we added to learn more, but this standard is a series of test used to ensure that military gears can survive a certain level of shocks and vibrations.

Looking at the design of the new P20-Series, we can say that it is at a similar risk of “glass crack” than many other “2-sided glass” high-end phones such as the V30, iPhone 8/X, etc… however, the Galaxy S8/9 series would be even more at risk because of the glass found on the Left/Right edges of the phone. Keep in mind that this is from a statistical point of view. All it takes is one severe drop in the real world.

Display

At first glance, all three displays have a high image quality, but there are significant differences, especially when it comes to sharpness (pixel density) and image quality.

• P20 Pro (6.1”): 1080×2240, ~408 PPI
• P20 (5.8”): 1080×2244, ~429 PPI
• iPhone X (5.8”): 2436×1125, ~463 PPI
• Galaxy S9+ (6.2”): 2960×1440, ~531 PPI
• Mate RS (6.0”): 2880×1440, ~537 PPI
• Galaxy S9 (5.8”): 2960×1440, ~568 PPI

Both P20 and P20 Pro have an elongated version of a 1080 / FHD display. That results in the PPI (sharpness) numbers above, which are very decent, but certainly not the best. That is why the Mate RS has a 2K display: because it is supposed to have the best of everything.

The display brightness of is 775 NITs is impressive (that’s 11% brighter than the Galaxy S9 in our tests). In general, higher brightness is useful to watch the screen content on a sunny day (or bright environment). Higher brightness leads directly to better image quality in very common situations.The resolution of 1080 x 2240 would be considered to be high in absolute terms, but compared to the competition it would be mild. Many other screens have more pixels (the S9+ screen is ~30% sharper).

The next difference between P20 and P20 Pro and Mate RS is the OLED screen on the more expensive models. Huawei didn’t say if the P20’s LCD was using IPS technology or, not. However, even if it did, OLED is still generally better.

"AN EXTREMELY BRIGHT 775 NITS OLED DISPLAY"

OLED is a radically different display technology (than LCD) that has been widely available to handsets mainly thanks to Samsung. The primary difference between OLED and LCD displays is how light is emitted. With LCD, there is a small number of white light emitters (1-2 for handsets, 2-100 for TVs) and black pixels are created by “blocking” the white light with a filter.

Unfortunately, using a filter leads to “light bleeding” and “black color” that is actually dark-gray. With OLED, every pixel emits its own light. This also means that creating a black pixel means merely leaving it OFF. As a result, black color is indeed black, and other colors are more straightforward to control without using complex filters and color control technologies such as Quantum Dots and Nano Dots. You can read our complete LCD vs. OLED article which goes deeper into the details.

At this point, it is difficult to compare the OLED screen Huawei uses against those in different handsets. In general, some difference in brightness can be easily detected, while color and saturation are much more difficult to spot without specialized equipment. This also means that the superior black-levels are the primary thing users often notice with the naked eye as it is quite uncommon to see horrible OLED displays (at least in US-sold phones).

Camera: up to three cameras rear camera system

The Huawei P20 Pro has the most sophisticated mobile camera hardware, co-developed with Leica (don’t miss our field-trip to the Leica HQ in Germany). It comes with (up to) an impressive three-camera combo in the rear, and a 24 megapixel selfie camera in the front. In addition to this, Huawei is using multi-frame noise reduction to unprecedented levels and claims to use artificial intelligence (AI) in many other features. The P20 has two rear cameras, while the P20 Pro and Mate RS have three.

"THE HUAWEI P20 SERIES HAS THE MOST SOPHISTICATED MOBILE CAMERA HARDWARE"

It is important to understand that mobile photo has two pillars of considerable importance: Software and Hardware. The software is usually very secretive, and it is very hard to gain good insight to determine its quality through a fair process. Also, photography is not just science. It is also art.

The camera equipment is the other area which is more measurable. Camera hardware is potentially a substantial limiting factor to mobile photography performance. Even if you use the best algorithms on it, the quality of the input signal data still plays a significant role in the final photo outcome.

Camera #1 (Main): 12 to 40 MP RGB Camera

• The P20 has a 12 Megapixel RGB camera with a f/1.8 aperture.
• The P20 Pro and Mate RS have a 40 Megapixel RGB camera at f/1.8.
  • It uses a Quad-Bayer filter for higher dynamic range and low-light performance
  • The 40 MP sensor uses pixel binning under some conditions, turning it into a 10 Megapixel sensor better suited for low-light.
    • It is similar to what the LG V30S and LG G7 ThinQ pixel binning.
  • The sensor size is huge (~40 mm²)

"THE LARGEST MOBILE CAMERA SENSOR ON THE MARKET"

This camera’s aperture number is not impressive by itself since competitor may feature f/1.5 (S9), f/1.6 (V30) or f/1.7 (S8) apertures. But keep in mind that the f/stop number is relative to the sensor size. The Huawei P20 Pro’s 40 megapixel RGB sensor is the largest mobile camera sensor on the market.

A larger aperture is typically used for two reasons: first, let more light come in and secondly to get more natural bokeh (or out of focus blur). With Natural Bokeh being out of the question on a tiny phone lense, “more light” is the primary reason for a larger aperture.

The RGB Camera is here to capture the color and details of the image with as much fidelity as possible. With the dual/ megapixel modes, it can perform very well in daylight, but also at night. This is a really interesting setup.

Camera #2 (Mono Lens): Light / monochrome

This 20 Megapixel f/1.6 (monochrome) camera is dedicated to capturing the light intensity of the image. Removing the RGB layer from the sensor (and thus making it monochrome) enables more light to hit the sensing areas.

This camera module supplements the massive RGB camera, and its image will be combined with the RGB image to improve the overall photo quality. At least, that’s the theory – we would love to see the different images captured by each sensor, but this secret will probably never be revealed.

The concept of dual-lens for better light capture is sound and favored by some OEMs, but we remain cautious of this approach because it is very complicated to execute. Back in the Huawei P9 days, this concept had a hard time beating single-lens solutions (read our Huawei P9 review and check the photo samples).

Low-Light Performance and ultra-long exposure

With what we just described above, the Huawei P20-Series seem ready to take on the most drastic low-light scenes. From our initial tests, we are excited and sometimes very impressed by the photos. After testing the phone in Europe this summer, Ubergizmo co-founder gathered more data about the P20 Pro capabilities which confirmed many of our initial findings.

During the Huawei/Leica European Tour, Eliane shot a lot of pictures at night in Milan, using both the auto-mode and the 4-second night mode. She shot high-quality photos, check her pictures of Milan in the paragraph dedicated to the ultra-long exposure feature after the nigh photo comparisons. Please note: to fit the web page format of this review we had to scale down all the photos from 3648 pixels wide (10MP 4:3 and 7MP 18:9 resolutions – we did just a few shots in 40MP) to 1000 pixels wide. Selfie shot was scaled from 5632 pixels wide to 1000 pixels wide. Check the original photos in our online album.

Even in “auto” mode, the P20 Pro can capture images that reveal low-light details that other phones won’t capture. In addition, Huawei is also introducing an ultra-long exposure of 4 seconds for low-light photos. The principle is based on a variant of the multi-frame noise-reduction technique and HDR photography used by many top phones such as the Pixel 2 and S9: take a lot of photos with low ISO and fast shutter speed, and combine them into a bright, low-noise final image.

"HANDHELD ULTRA-LONG EXPOSURE IS AN EXTRAORDINARY ABILITY"

Typically, the camera driver will shoot a dozen or so photos to do this. Because of minute handshakes, a sophisticated algorithm is used to re-align photos as accurately as possible to avoid loss of sharpness. Huawei seems to be shooting a considerable number of photos over several seconds and manages to re-align them and produce a sharp photo. This is an excellent idea, and so far, we have seen extraordinary sharpness preservation in our early tests — that is, for static scenes.

Handheld ultra-long exposure is an extraordinary ability, and the potential for this technique is enormous because it can be entertaining to do long exposure-style photos, but without using a tripod. There are potential caveats to this, and we’ve already seen some blur issues when people/things move. Also, it doesn’t magically make all scenes better when compared to a regular top camera-phone. However, we think that in many scenes, it could be a very unique tool.

Overall, the 4-second ultra-long exposure manages to preserve fine details in low light, in the dark areas in a high-contrast zone, close to a light source at night. In the example below the auto-HDR shot (1/25s – ISO 500 – photo below) lost the details of the glass pattern covering the street lamp globes, while the long-exposure photo (4s – ISO 200, photo above) shows them well. The trade-off is some blurriness in a small area of the photo, on the left, Eliane probably moved a bit, due to her body position for that angle: arms up holding the phone and leaning back.

The 4s exposure can produce nice artistic effects if you use it intentionally as Eliane did in Paris, in a dark covered passage in broad daylight. She shot the picture while standing still holding the phone with both hands, without a tripod! As you see in the photo below, the dark covered alley is correctly exposed and in focus, and the moving pedestrian in the foreground is slightly blurred. Some people, like us, would love to experiment with that effect and ask friends to move at different speeds in the street at night, to obtain eye-catching effects.
This is a unique feature that no other smartphone offers, and it delivers great results in ultra-low light. (see photo samples below)

The same 4s ultra long exposure can also be useful in specific cases, like food photos in very dimly lit restaurants. We like to post fancy food pictures on Instagram, and Eliane tried this with success.

As you can see in the photo below, the 4-second exposed photo (left) is sharper in the in-focus area and displays the fine details in the shadow areas. By comparison, the regular shot at 1/25s lost them (right photo below). The in-focus area in the regular shot is a little blurry (the photo may be with bokeh effect), while the long-exposure picture photo is perfectly sharp everywhere. The 4-second exposure trade-off is a slight loss of high contrasts due to the multi-frame HDR processing. However, users can easily correct the contrast with filters, but the loss of details or sharpness cannot be restored.

4s exposure

1/25s exposure

When the P20 Pro triggers the 4-second exposure, when you are in Night Mode or AI mode at night (“x night mode” shows up on the screen, and you can reject it from there if you like), the user interface lets you know that you have to hold the phone still for 4 seconds with a timer. So, in most cases, it is easy to get perfect shots like the one below where all areas are in focus.

That feature doesn’t magically make all low-light photos better when compared to the top camera-phones out there. However, we think that for many scenes, the P20 Pro handheld ultra-long exposure is a very unique and creative tool.

The low-light bottom line is this: the Huawei P20 Pro is a formidable low-light smartphone that uses extreme variants of multi-frame HDR techniques to capture images that sometimes border on the supernatural / over-processed. Some people will love it, others, not so much. The ultra-long exposure is a unique feature in today’s mobile photography, which allows creating night pictures like no others. We have added more photo galleries for you to decide.

The P20 Pro has an excellent low-light camera, however, it does not win every single time. For example, some users will argue that the Pixel 2 has “better” HDR processing, again, a matter of preferences. Finally, the Galaxy S9/S9+ will capture objectively slightly sharper and less noisy photos. It’s not obvious if you use your photos for social media, but it’s pretty visible if you zoom in a little bit on the original, especially if you have a large HiDPI display.
Check the original photos in our online album.

Camera #3: 3X Optical zoom (5X Hybrid Zoom)

As you know, Apple introduced a 2X optical zoom with the iPhone 7 Plus, followed by Samsung shortly after in the Note 8. Huawei is outdoing both of them by integrating a 3X optical zoom in the P20 Pro and Mate RS. With this new lens, Huawei can create a great 5X hybrid zoom (optical+digital).
Nothing beat the optics specifications, and, 3X optical zoom is simply sharper than 2X. It is that simple. The Huawei P20 Pro zooming capabilities beat everything that the competition has to oppose.

To prove our point, we have tried it against the S9 zoom (see photo below) and on multiple occasions in touristy areas such as the Louvre in Paris, where zooming on the huge palace’s small sculptures from far is useful (see photos below and in the gallery).

"THE HUAWEI P20 PRO ZOOMING CAPABILITIES BEAT EVERYTHING THAT THE COMPETITION HAS TO OPPOSE."

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

"HUAWEI IS A PRIMARY FORCE BEHIND AI MOBILE PHOTOGRAPHY"

There are many other aspects of the new Huawei P20 Series that we might go back to later, but things like Super Slow Motion at 960 FPS and Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven photo are on the menu. For the most part, the AI photo is an evolution and extension of what was introduced with the Huawei Mate 10. That is most of it consists of setting up the camera (in auto-mode) as well as possible depending on the scene.

With AI

Without AI

It is true that photography has a lot of sub-domains (food photo, scenery photo, portrait photo…) and you can see this in how (human) photographers advertise themselves. The addition of AI in photography can leverage this kind of knowledge but in a completely automated form. In its ideal form, AI photo *should* be as powerful as “Pro Mode,” but in full-auto mode. We’re not quite there, but I like where this is going, and Huawei is a primary force behind AI mobile photography.

With AI

Without AI

The P20 Pro offers 19 different scene categories such as “Food,” “Blue Sky,” “Night Mode,” Greenery” and more. Huawei brought a nice update to the AI user interface compared to the Huawei Mate 10: users can disable the feature each time directly from the screen by simply clicking the little cross in front of the scene category (i.e., x Food, or x Greenery) in case the AI settings does not look good.

Some people like some of the settings that the Huawei AI engine offers, but some people do not like the color saturation. Eliane tried it in very touristic areas in Paris, so you can decide for yourself what you prefer (photos Seine River with Notre Dame and View of Paris from the top of the Arc de Triomphe)

For food pictures, the AI brings a little more light, a little more saturation and in some cases a nice bokeh effect.

Portrait Mode

Eliane tried the portrait mode, and it delivers a great bokeh effect in the background alongside slight processing of the face that smooths the skin. (photo above)

In the photos below you can see the differences in lighting and processing in the background between the portrait mode (left) and the regular auto-mode, with HDR processing (right). HDR is automatically triggered when necessary in auto-mode and probably in AI mode as well – see the differences on the faces and in the background between the portrait mode (left) and the auto-mode with HDR (right).

In the photo: Keaton Keller and Madison Hughan

HDR Quality

In auto-mode, HDR is automatically triggered when the lighting conditions require it. We regret that the user interface does not indicate when the HDR is utilized, just for the sake of knowing.
Eliane shot several HDR photos at night and during the day, the image quality is excellent, and on par with the top camera phones available now. See the photo above in the previous paragraph (right side) and photos below.  Check the original photos in our online album.

Selfie camera

In addition to the impressive array of Cameras in the back, the front-selfie is a 24 Megapixel camera on all three handsets. The 24 Megapixel number doesn’t define quality in itself, especially in low-light conditions. We think that because Huawei uses the screen as a soft-flash, it thinks that increasing the pixel count at the cost of having smaller pixels (0.9 µm) and a smaller aperture (f/2.0) might strike a better balance. It’s an unusual stance, and we will have to put it to the test.

For example, the Galaxy S9 has an 8 Megapixel selfie camera (-66%), but a significantly larger aperture (f/1.7) and larger pixels (1.22 µm, or ~35% larger). This shows very different assumptions on how selfies are taken (no flash / screen flash) and shared (social media, without the need for ultra-high resolution).

Software

The Huawei P20 Series will ship with Android 8.1, and of course with EMUI 8.1. EMUI is Huawei’s user interface layer on top of Android. EMUI is a vast topic that we should cover in an independent series, but suffice to say that it is sufficiently different from most Android phones such as LG, Samsung and pure Android handsets that should you should a look at it.

Here is a good video to have a taste of what EMUI is about if you have never experienced it.

I will update this article with more AI features, because some of the new ones would deserve an explanation, but I don’t want to delay this article further because of it.

Battery

"THESE HANDSETS CAN SERVE AS REFERENCE FOR BATTERY CAPACITY"

The battery capacity of P20 is 3400 mAh, which is very good in its category. The P20 Pro and Mate RS have 4000 mAh, which is excellent in the high-end category and they can serve as reference high-end handsets in that respect.

Battery life is one of the most critical features of a smartphone. A key metric is obviously its battery capacity — especially within the same ecosystem (Android, iOS or other). Battery life can be affected by many factors, but the main ones are the main processor aka SoC, display and wireless radios (LTE broadband, WiFi, the cell towers location and more). It is impossible to precisely estimate through synthetic tests how much energy drain YOUR unique lifestyle will generate. However, two things are surly always good:

• A higher battery capacity
• Faster charging

With a charging speed of 67 mAh/mn, the Huawei P20/P20 Pro is one of the fastest charging smartphone. Combined with its exceptional capacity, this makes it one of the most desirable handset for battery-oriented users.

It is generally impossible to predict realistic battery life by running synthetic tests. Things such as display brightness, (LTE/WiFi) radio usage and distance to access points will vary too much. Also, how many apps installed and their usage is unpredictable. Battery capacity is the most crucial battery-life indicator for YOUR usage.

This product does not have a removable battery, which is the norm for a smartphone nowadays. Closed batteries cannot be taken out or quickly repaired, but they do allow for smaller designs and slightly more substantial battery size inside the same product volume.

This handset has a relatively standard screen resolution. Although this may be a weakness from a display quality point of view, having fewer pixels to deal with is a good thing for battery life.

System performance

All three handsets use a HiSilicon Kirin 970 (8 Cores, 2.36 GHz) which has access to 4GB of memory (RAM) in the P20 and 6GB for the P20 Pro and the Mate RS. The amount of RAM is paramount for heavy users, or for having many apps/services on the handset. When the memory is tight, the handset may become less responsive if the OS has to read/write from the slower Flash storage instead. This used to be one of the differentiation between low and high tiers of phones, but this line is blurry now.

"3D GRAPHICS PERFORMANCE IS LAGGING"

We rated the Kirin 970 SoC as a competitor of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 chip. Since then, Qualcomm has moved to Snapdragon 845, which gives competitors some advantage from a general-computing (CPU +20%, See S9 Geekbench 4 score) and graphics-computing (GPU +30%) perspective. The difference also shows in an overall system test, such as Basemark OS II 2.0.

Snapdragon 845 also brings power-efficiency improvements, but it is not easy to compare apples-to-apples with a Kirin 970 handset. For VR/AR and 3D Gaming, Snapdragon or Exynos are still ahead, thanks to their faster graphics units. Tests such as 3DMark Slingshot 3.1 show this well.

Huawei does have a Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which is more or less a DSP (Digital Signal Processor). These units are used for many things, but the NPU is explicitly marketed for A.I purposes. At the moment, there isn’t a cross-platform benchmark and known use case to compare different vendors.

Although you can see some benefits in the form of AI features such as in-Camera scene recognition, we know for a fact that you don’t need an NPU to do so. LG has proven it with its new LG V30S Camera App. However, NPU and DSP units do allow for a better performance-per-watt (battery savings). It is tough to quantify this for now, but we are confident that the number of use cases is too limited to be perceptible from a battery-life perspective.

Extreme Broadband performance: 1.2 Gbps

Huawei is a master of 4G LTE technology, and it is not surprising to see it offer a CAT18 modem that can climb to 1200 (DL) / 211 (UL) Mbps of maximum theoretical speeds.  With 5G being rolled out next year (2019), this kind of 4G LTE speeds will become more common. If you will keep your handset for the next two or more years, this is something that should be taken into account.

Conclusion: a technological marvel

The Huawei P20 Series is a leap forward from an Industrial Design point of view, and the P20 Pro is an excellent representative of the new family. The new design is elegant, but packs an impressive battery capacity at the same time. The thinness comes at the expense of an internal wireless charging system, but we can overlook this because it charges so fast over USB-C.

The new camera system is hugely ambitious and innovative. Huawei and its partner Leica have pushed the mobile photography envelope, and have expanded in new areas outside of classic photography (long zoom, extreme low-light/HDR) which has earned it high scores of photo benchmarks.

The P20 Series is one of the most exciting line of smartphones of 2018, and it is one that everyone should give a good look at. It gives both the iPhone X and the Galaxy S9 a run for their money and solidifies Huawei’s position in the Top 3 smartphone makers. We told you for the past few years that Huawei was coming fast and hard. So far, the Huawei detractors were wrong: Huawei is evolving faster than any other OEM.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Cellphones, Reviews
Tags: Editor's Choice, Editors Choice 2018, Editorspick, Huawei, Huawei P20, Huawei P20 Pro, Porsche Design Mate Rs