Honor View 20 Review

Honor View 20 Review: Overview & Price

In this Honor View 20 review, we go over everything you need to know about the phone as well as showcasing the best Honor View 20 contract deals in the UK.

The Honor View 20 phone was released on January 22^nd of 2019; it is a cheaper alternative to some of the early 2019 flagships, i.e. the Samsung Galaxy S10.

The phone offers a solid battery life and some cool features at an affordable price of £499 in the UK.

The Honor View 20 performance aspect is great, ploughing through anything you throw at the phone with ease.

Check out the best Honor View 20 contract deals…

Some of the highlights of the phone are its crazy 48MP camera, 256GB of internal storage and a cool punch hole in the display, it really is unique and gives users a huge amount of value for money.

You may be wondering if the Honor View 20 is waterproof? Find out shortly in this review.

The Honor View 20 takes reflective glass to a whole new level, with an interesting V shape being the focus of the design, is it enough to put you off this eye-catching phone?

Let’s take a close look…

Honor View 20 Review: Design & Display

The first thing you will notice about the Honor View 20 design, is its crazy reflective design.

Honor has implemented a chevron pattern which points towards the base of the phone, this is super eye-catching and really looks flashy when in direct light.

The Chinese call this phone the ‘Honor V20’ and it’s easy to see why! The phone is sold in Blue, Red or Black and being honest they all look fantastic thanks to this design.

The phone also has a gradient effect, which makes it grippier to the touch and makes it feels nice to hold in your hand.

The second thing you will notice is that it has a very unique hole-punch camera at the top left of the display.

Honor say rather than trying to hide the camera in a bezel, which some users don’t like anyway, why not just hide it in plain view, and that’s exactly what they have done.

Honor has achieved this by placing the selfie-camera behind the glass, then cutting a hole out of the panel.

Honor has still managed to squeeze the light sensor and earpiece at the top of the display without the need for a notch.

Around the back of the phone you will find the rear fingerprint sensor, this is in a great position and your finger naturally gravitates towards it rather than having to move your hand in an awkward position to unlock the phone.

See Related:

*Honor View 10 Review*
*Honor Play Review*
*Honor 8X Review*
*Honor Watch Magic Review*
*Honor Band 4 Review*

The sensor is super fast and responsive but we would have preferred to see the more recent in-screen style, fingerprint reader.

Just above this sensor you will find the camera setup, slightly raised but not enough to make your phone wobble when sat flat on a desk, it looks pretty cool.

You will also find a 3.5mm headphone jack, which is a rarity nowadays with most companies following suit and removing it.

Now, unfortunately, the Honor View 20 is not waterproof, meaning you will need to be extremely careful when using this device around water.

Qi charging would have been a nice added feature to this phone, especially with it having a glass back, although we imagine this would boost the price up a fair bit and with this being a cheaper alternative we can see why they didn’t add this.

The Honor View 20 has a beautiful 6.4-inch IPS LCD display which takes up 91% of the front view of the phone.

It has curved corners and extremely small bezels, giving you an almost completely edge-to-edge display.

Brightness levels of the display are strong, however, when in direct sunlight you may struggle to see the screen.

Now with this being an LCD panel, it means that blacks won’t be as deep as what you would find on an OLED, nor will the colours pop as much.

That being said the display overall is extremely impressive, and we found it delightful to watch YouTube videos and lots of Netflix on this phone.

The display is crisp and colourful, sharpness is superb and without knowing that this display is an LCD, you might even mistake it for an OLED!

There are multiple colour profiles to choose from in the settings tab, giving you the options to choose from a more natural look, or boosting up the saturation for those super bright colours.

HDR is present on the Honor View 20, giving you way more dynamic range than you would expect from a none-HDR display.

We found that the phone would manage really well considering it has a hole punch in the display, when watching YouTube videos the phone would automatically cover the hole with a black bar, meaning you can’t be distracted by this when watching movies on your phone.

Keeping in mind that networks are offering some extremely cheap Honor View 20 deals and the value for money on this thing is great, we had no real concerns with its display.

Honor View 20 Review: Performance

When it comes to the Honor View 20 performance, it has plenty of power under the hood, it is up there with the same performance power as the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and iPhone XS.

The phone uses a Kirin 980 SoC (System-on-chip), which has an efficient 7nm manufacturing process, essentially allowing the phone to be extremely efficient with its battery life whilst maintaining great performance.

This is the same chip used in the Huawei Mate 20 Pro so you know the phone means business when it comes to the power department.

Alongside this powerful chip is the two storage options; 128GB or 256GB, more than enough for the average user and giving the phone enough space for business use also.

The Honor View 20 also has a whopping 6GB of RAM or 8GB depending on the region in which you purchase the phone.

All of these specifications combined gives you an amazing experience overall when using the phone, you will not find any lag or stutter when running graphically demanding games, and storing music and movies on the phone is a breeze with the huge amount of internal storage onboard.

The Honor View 20 has a cool GPU Turbo feature which essentially boosts the performance even further when gaming, of course, we tested the phone out on some of our favourite games.

Firstly we played PUBG, which for those who don’t know is a very demanding game especially for a handheld device, the phone ran the game smoothly without any interference or lag which was as expected from a phone with this much horse-power.

Next, we then moved onto Runescape, which is an MMORPG, again extremely intense for most phones but the Honor View 20 handled it exceptionally well and we found ourselves immersed in the game for over an hour.

Some phones would overheat when playing a game like this for long periods of time, however, Honor say that they have implemented some new cooling technology into the device.

This runs up the main internal components of the phone keeping everything cool and allowing the phone to get rid of unwanted heat caused within the phone, keeping it cool and stopping it from overheating even when under lots of pressure.

We did find that when multi-tasking applications on the phone, because it was ridiculously fast and snappy, that it would almost be a little too fast for the apps to handle and cause a second of lag before swiping through the app.

This only happened on a rare occasion but we found it to be extremely annoying as we were used to the phone being so responsive.

One feature worth mentioning that Honor has been shouting about is their triple antenna Wi-Fi, claiming that the phone has the capabilities to grab a stronger connection from almost anywhere when used in reality we did not notice a huge difference to other phones we reviewed.

That being said we did manage to maintain a strong connection throughout the whole time using the phone.

The Honor View 20 is also dual-SIM, meaning that if you have another number you would like to use in the phone, alongside your personal number then this can be easily placed into the SIM tray.

This is great for those who travel a lot or have a business line they would like to use in their handset. As a whole, the performance of this phone is extremely impressive.

Although one downfall is the speakers, they aren’t as loud as we hoped for and sound a little tinny, for a phone as well built as this we expected a little better speakers to enhance the gaming experience.

The Honor View 20 runs Android 9.0 Pie, which is the latest version of Android. Also having the Magic UI skin over the top of the phone, which essentially overwrites the operating system to make it customisable.

Software-wise it is almost identical to what is used in Huawei phones, you won’t find an application drawer when pulling it out of the box, but you can enable one in the settings.

Gesture navigation is also available to use on the Honor View 20, which can be easily adjusted in the settings.

We found it takes some getting used to but once the gestures are all set up it makes it a whole lot easier to navigate around the device.

For example when you take a screenshot on the phone you will find that an icon appears on the display, you have a few options from there such as flicking the icon up, which allows you to share the image on social media, flick down to take a scrolling shot or swipe along to dismiss the image.

Honor View 20 Review: Camera

On to the most interesting part of the phone, well what we think is the most interesting anyway.

The Honor View 20 has a 48MP Sony sensor with a secondary ToF (Time-of-Flight) sensor, with multiple features and fantastic specs to help even the most novice photographers capture some incredible images.

Now just because the Honor View 20 has more megapixels doesn’t necessarily mean it has a stronger camera than other flagships out there.

The Honor View 20 will take an image in 48 mega-pixels, then will shrink the image down into a 12MP image, in doing so the image will become refined and have a lot more details, way better dynamic range and some incredible low light shots.

We were blown away when using the Honor View 20 camera; it was able to capture some amazing images, with great detail and strong dynamic range.

Images were sharp and looked crisp, we definitely recommend taking images with the 12MP setting turned on, as we found it gave a much better overall image than when shooting in the phones natural 48MP setting.

The Honor View 20 camera also has an ‘ultra clarity mode’, which when turned on will use AI to produce the highest resolution image possible.

However when using this mode it does take a second or two to actually capture the shot, so it’s far from ideal when trying to take a picture of a moving object or if you need to take a quick snapshot.

The area of the phone’s camera which we were the most impressed with is definitely when in low light situations, the phone stacks multiple images on top of each other whilst drawing in as much light as possible.

Even when taking shots in almost total darkness, the camera would still manage to draw in more than enough light to capture an amazing image; again this does take a few seconds to capture the image.

Being able to capture such amazing images when in great darkness is an incredible feature of the phone, making the Honor View 20’s camera stand out from the crowd.

The front-facing camera is equally impressive, with a 25MP selfie-cam the phone has the capabilities to capture you that Instagram ready selfie.

That being said the phone can sometimes over-process images making the final image look a little bit too smoothed, this is a minor and down to personal preference, just with images being produced on the slightly cooler side you might find that it can make you look a little paler than usual.

The Honor View 20 can record 4K video at up to 30fps and Full HD in up to 60fps; video footage looks clear and crisp, making it easy to record stunning footage in any light condition.

We were extremely impressed with the recording ability of this phone; the whole camera side of the phone was brilliant in-fact.

Honor View 20 Review: Battery Life

The Honor View 20 battery is a strong 4000mAh, which is at the higher end of the scale when it comes to smartphone batteries. Easily enough power to get you through a full day of usage, of course depending on how you use the phone.

Gaming for long periods will decrease this and watching multiple videos will too, however for the most part and an average user the battery will be more than capable of getting you to the end of the day if not more.

The Kirin chipset also makes the phone extremely efficient at managing the power distribution to keep you going for longer, when the Honor View 20 is in stand-by you will find that it hardly uses any battery life whatsoever.

The phone also comes shipped with an Honor supercharge plug, which supports 5A/4.5V speeds and will power up the phone in no time, when testing this we found it would shoot up from 0-50% in just 30 minutes.

Honor View 20 Review: Summary

We had so much fun reviewing the Honor View 20, simply because it is such a unique phone in so many ways.

From its stunning chevron design to its whopping 48MP camera, the phone really does stand out from the crowd.

We wished that the Honor View 20 was waterproof though, as we feel an IP68 rating on this device would have been the icing on the cake.

As well as these impressive features it also packs a huge amount of power under the hood, great for gamers or those who love to watch long movies or videos on their phone.

HONOR View 20 Dual SIM, 6GB RAM and 128 GB storage, 48 MP AI Camera with 6.4 Inch Full View Display, UK Official Device – Sapphire Blue 

The huge amounts of storage and RAM on the phone make the Honor View 20 performance aspect incredible, capable of sailing through intense tasks, multi-tasking is a breeze and the option to place another SIM in the phone is great.

The main competitors for this phone are the Oneplus 6T, we definitely recommend you check out our review on that phone before making any purchase decisions as both offer great value for money.

We hope you have enjoyed our Honor View 20 review, feel free to leave a comment and check out the best Honor View 20 contract deals at the top of this post.

Honor View 20 Review: Full Specification

Launch: 2018, December

Body:

• Dimension: 156.9 x 75.4 x 8.1mm (6.18 x 2.97 x 0.32 inches)
• Weight: 180g (6.35 oz)
• Build: Front glass, aluminium frame
• Sim: Dual SIM (Nano-SIM, dual stand-by)

Display:

• Type: IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 16M colours
• Size: 6.4 inches, 101.4 cm² (-85.7% screen-to-body-ratio)
• Resolution: 1080 x 2310 pixels (-398 PPI density)
• Protection: Yes

Platform:

• OS: Android 9.0 (Pie); Magic UI 2
• Chipset: HiSilicon Kirin 980 (7nm)
• CPU: Octa-core (2×2.6 GHz Cortex-A76 & 2×1.92 GHz Cortex-A76 & 4×1.8 GHz Cortex-A55)
• GPU: Mali-G76 MP10

Memory:

• Card slot: No
• Internal: 256GB, 8GB RAM or 128GB, 6/8GB RAM

Camera:

• Primary:
  – 48MP, f/1.8, 1/2″, PDAF
  – ToF 3D stereo camera
• Features: Panorama, HDR, LED flash
• Video: 2160@30fps, 1080p@30fps, 720p@960fps, (gyro-EIS)
• Secondary:
  – 25MP, f/2.0, 27mm
• Features: HDR
• Video: 1080p@30fps

Sound:

• Loudspeaker: Yes
• 3.5mm Jack: Yes
  – Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic

Comms:

• WLAN: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, hotspot
• Bluetooth: 5.0, A2DP, aptX HD, LE
• GPS: Yes, with dual-band A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS, GALILEO, QZSS
• NFC: Yes
• Infrared port: Yes
• Radio: No
• USB: 3.1, Type-C 1.0 reversible connector, USB On-The-Go

Features:

• Sensors: Fingerprint (rear-mounted), accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass

Battery:

• Non-removable Li-Pro 4000 mAh battery
• Charging: Fast battery charging (50% in 30 mins)

Misc:

• Colours: Saphire Blue, Phantom Blue, Phantom Red, Midnight Black
• Price: As seen in the above post

Tests:

• Performance: Basemark OS ||: 4363 / Basemark OS || 2.0: 4281 / Basemark X: 43637
• Display: Contrast ratio; infinite (1313), 3.597 (sunlight)
• Camera: Photo / Video
• Loudspeaker: Voice 68dB / Noise 74dB / Ring 82dB
• Audi Quality: Noise – 93.1dB / Crosstalk -64.5dB
• Battery life: Endurance rating 88h