Mid-range trendsetter
The Honor View 20 holds its own against some premium smartphones, writes Khalid Anzar
The Honor View 20 from Huawei is the first smartphone in India to feature a punch-hole screen. It is also the first Honor-branded smartphone powered by Huawei’ s flag ship K ir in 980 system-on-chip—a mobile process that powers Huawei’ s premium flagship, the Mate20 Pro— and a 48- megapixel primary camera sensor. For amid range phone, it promises to be a feature-rich proposition. Butisit? Let’s find out:
Design (***)
The phone has a glossy glass body and a metallic frame. It comes with V-shaped gradient lines on the back, which reflect light, making the phone stand out. These lines are, however, prominent only in the sky blue variant and not so much in the others, including the black unit I reviewed. Instead of in-display finger print sensors, the Honor View 20 has a conventional finger print sensor at the back. Its utility makes up for the obstruction it causes to the phone’ s u ni body design. The phone’ s punch hole display, while comparable to notch screens, also has a visible bezel at the bottom, which obstructs its profile.
Display (**)
The phone has a 6.4-inch IPSLCD screen with full HD+ resolution, stretched int all 19.75:9 aspect ratio. Most videos are created to work on 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratio screens, so the unconventional aspect ratio makes it less suitable for video consumption. When viewed in horizontal mode, you see a thick black baron the side soft he screen.
While the screen has good contrast, the colour rendition is far from natural and the sunlight legibility is average. The pixels around the punch-hole display, too, are dim mer than in there st of the screen.
Camera (****)
The Honor View 20 has a capable set of cameras— front and back. The image output is better than in other mid range flag ships such as the One Plus 6 Tor Oppo R17 Pro. The camera takes detailed shots in daylight, thanks to built-in artificial intelligence scene recognition. Low-light photography is also better than in other mid range flagship phones. The phone’s night mode brightens up low-light environment, but with a loss of frame details in some cases.
The phone has a time-of-flight 3D sensor at the back that measures the depth information. This sensor assists the primary rear camera in portrait shots and also works in video mode to add effects or artificial blur in the background. And the portrait mode on the selfie camera does proper segmentation of the object and the background to create enhanced portrait shots.
Performance (*****)
From handling day-to-day tasks to rendering graphic-intensive gaming titles, the Honor View 20’s performance is as glitch-free as in a premium smartphone. The phone keeps apps active in the background and handles multitasking efficiently. It boots Android Pie operating system-based Magic user interface, which is an improvement over Huawei’s emotion UI. The UI supports gesture navigation, which is intuitive, responsive and suitable for both leftand right-hand users.
Its 4,000 mAh battery keeps the phone running for at least a day. And its 20W fast charger takes the battery from zero to 100 per cent in about an hour.
Verdict (3.5/5)
Priced at ~37,999 for the basemodel, with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage, the Honor View 20 shares space with the some premium smartphones. If performance, camera and design are what you’re looking for, then this -smartphone is for you.