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Huawei P20 Pro

Updated: Jul 20, 2019

The Huawei P20 Pro is by far the most capable camera phone on the market, and that's down to the excellent camera array at its disposal. There are three cameras on the back, a 40MP main sensor, a 20MP black and white snapper, and a 3x zoom 8MP camera.

You can shoot at 3x without digital zoom, and even get good results at 5x. But the real star is the low light performance. The dedicated night mode lets you take low light shots with dynamic range to rival a far more expensive APS-C DSLR camera.

For the Instagram lovers, Huawei P20 Pro also has a very high-resolution 24MP front camera, which also does the security side with reliable face unlocking.

On the inside, we get the Kirin 970 CPU used in the Huawei Mate 10, 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. The results are an incredibly fast phone, that handled any task I put it through.


The P20 Pro comes in a variety of finishes, but it's the Twilight option that is by far the most eye-catching. It's closer to a super-car finish, with a gradient purple at the top which turns smoothly to a greenish-turquoise at the bottom. It's absolutley gorgeous, and a design trend I can see other manufactures mimicking, Under the eye-popping back there is a huge 4,000mAh battery, that doesn't add any obvious bulk to the shell.


The P20 Pro does not have the highest display resolution in its class., with a 1080 x 2244 AMOLED screen, which may seem to be a typo; but this is really just a Full HD screen stretched out to an 18.7:9 aspect ratio.


Pixel density of 408ppi isn't as high as the 529ppi of the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus, but the Huawei P20 Pro’s display quality is excellent. With deep rich Blacks and natural, yet popping colours, the display is a beautiful 6.1-inch AMOLED monster.


Back to the aforementioned camera setup, as this is easily one of the best parts about the P20 Pro. The main camera has an ultra-high resolution 40MP sensor, which works in tandem with the 20MP black and white sensor that helps with processing, including decreasing image noise and improving dynamic range.


The third camera has a 3x 'zoom' lens and an 8MP sensor, letting you zoom into a scene without using digital zoom.

Huawei have worked with camera aficionados Leica, to produce the best camera set up on any phone to date. The Huawei P20 Pro comes setup to shoot 10MP photos, but you can shoot at 40MP, and even 76.2MB DNG RAW files when using the Pro mode.


Using night mode, you can get ultra-dark shots with dynamic range and detail far in excess of most of this phone's rivals, and the photos it produces are very clean and detailed shots.

In terms of OS, the P20 Pro uses Android with Huawei's own EMUI’s skinned on top. Whilst EMUI has often been a poor experience, the newly optimized EMUI 8.1 is a great OS. Performance on the Huawei P20 Pro is excellent. extremely fast and responsive, whilst app load times are much shorter. I think Huawei should have bundled the upcoming Kirin 980 inside the P20 Pro, but the chip does it's upmost to keep interaction fluid.

 

Review Overview

Huawei P20 Pro

Summary : If you're after the best camera phone on the market, then the Huawei P20 Pro is the best you can buy. Whilst the screen isn't as good as the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus, it more than holds its mark.

The Huawei P20 Pro was reviewed using hardware provided and sent to us by EE/Huawei.


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