The Honor 20 Pro: A Quad-camera Hands-On Review

Conclusion & End Remarks

Overall the Honor 20 Pro is quite the odd device. Priced at 599€ it puts itself quite at the higher end of the scale. The issue with such a pricing is that in my view the Honor 20 Pro still compromises quite a lot on some features.

In terms of design, the front of Honor 20 Pro very much reminds us of the View20, although it the back design takes a lot of design cues from Huawei's P20 Pro. It’s still a very solidly built phone and the ergonomics work out just fine, although I liked the thinner edge design of the View20 more.

The LCD screen is good, and while it’s an improvement in terms of viewing angles and contrast to the View20, it’s tough to argue for an LCD screen in the middle of 2019 when essentially all competitors have switched over to OLED displays.

Further product design weirdness from Honor is the fact that the Honor 20 Pro only comes in a 8/256GB configuration. If you want a cheaper variant in the form of the 6/128GB Honor 20 at 499€, you’ll have to give up on the telephoto module, and make due a slightly smaller battery at 3750mAh versus 4000mAh capacity.

While we didn’t cover performance in this review, the device performs identical to the View20 and other Kirin 980 devices, that is to say, it’s very good and competitive.

The combination of an efficient LCD screen, 4000mAh battery and the Kirin 980 make for excellent battery life and the Honor 20 Pro lasts as long as the View20, which is at the top of the battery charts.

The cameras on the Honor 20 Pro are the star of the show and the main reason why one should consider the phone. The issue here is that while Honor has improved the processing on the main camera sensor and it does produce better results than the View20, it’s still somewhat behind some of the competition. I do have a bit of a hard time to place the Honor 20 Pro in this regard as it’s really not a bad camera, it’s more about the balance of what it provides versus the price of the phone.

The wide angle camera sensor is definitely a fantastic addition to the brand’s line-up and is extremely competitive with the best devices out there. The 3x telephoto lens was in line with previous Huawei devices, which is to say it provides good detail, however it’s not quite the best at keeping exposures in line with the main camera module.

The new macro camera is in my opinion quite the gimmick. Yes it does allow you to take shots very close up, however the resulting quality is quite low resolution, low dynamic range, and very noisy. Most of the time you’d be better off using the main sensor and just cropping the shots.

Video recording is an improvement for Honor thanks to OIS, however there were issues in regards to video quality of the wide-angle lens, as well as big issues in terms of focusing with the current tested firmware.

The problem with the Honor 20 and Honor 20 Pro I think is that they’re priced too high. At 499€ and 599€ there’s one very obvious contender that seems to offer a better package: The OnePlus 7. While you don’t get the wide-angle or telephoto cameras, you do get a better screen, better software and dual stereo speakers.

More worrisome than the actual product itself is Huawei’s and Honor’s position due to US Commerce Department’s addition of the company to the trade blacklist, with Google not supporting the vendor with software updates. Currently there’s just better alternatives out there, and buyers might find significantly better value and return for their money if they pay a little more for say a Galaxy S10 or a OnePlus 7 Pro instead of the Honor 20 Pro.