Honor View 20 Review: Blingy design and speedy performance at an affordable price

Ever since the superb Honor 8 launched in 2016, followed up by the classy Honor 9 and the shiny Honor 10 Lite, we've come to associate unique finishes and value-for-money with the brand, notwithstanding the Honor Play and 8X with their more utilitarian designs. The View 20 is Honor's first flagship smartphone of 2019 and features a 6.4-inch punch-hole display, the powerful Kirin 980 processor, up to 8GB of RAM, up to 256GB built-in storage and a monster 48MP rear camera that is partnered up with a TOF sensor. Priced from £499, the Honor View 20 is perfectly equipped to duke it out with OnePlus 6T in the race for the affordable flagship crown.

Join us after the break for our review of the Honor View 20.

Design

The View 20's all-glass finish is nothing short of memorable, the Phantom Blue color with the chevron design is unique yet tasteful, glistening in the sunlight while the reflective ‘V' pattern shimmers. It's an attractive finish that is noticed by the people around you. As you might expect, though, the glass finish is slippery and attracts fingerprints, so a clear case is recommended. The top left of the rear panel features a strip that houses the TOF sensor and flash, with the 48MP sensor sat to its left, just below is the fingerprint reader and the Honor branding is centrally located towards the bottom.

Apart from the finish, the main talking point in terms of design is the presence of the punch-hole cutout for the selfie camera instead of the dreaded notch. As someone who isn't fussed about the notch one way or another, the switch to a punch-hole design has little to no impact other than the ability to adjust the wallpaper to line up with the cutout.

The metal power button and the plastic volume rocker are situated on the right-hand side, with the SIM tray located on the left. The edges are rounded and comfy to hold albeit a tad slippery.

The USB Type-C charging port is sat on the bottom of the phone with the single speaker chamber to its right.

Audiophiles will be happy to note that the 3.5mm audio jack sits on the top edge next to the IR blaster.

Hardware

Performance

The View 20 has a big 6.4-inch LCD with FHD+ resolution, and while it isn't on the same level as the OLED panels in higher-priced flagships such as the Galaxy S10 or Huawei's Mate 20 Pro, this is still one of the better LCD's that I've come across. The colors are vibrant with excellent viewing angles and bright enough to be seen outdoors in sunlight.

The single speaker that sits next to the USB Type-C charging port gets plenty loud enough, producing better than average bass and mid-levels. When playing content or games in landscape mode, though, it can sound a little muffled as the speaker is facing away from you.

With the Kirin 980 octa-core processor and 8GB of RAM under the hood, the View 20 positively screams. Opening apps, multitasking, and general usage is a dream, despite the presence of EMUI Honor's Magic OS. The View 20's Kirin 980 uses NINE Cooling technology that applies a liquid cooling system, which combined with GPU Turbo 2.0, seems to deliver a great gaming experience. Taking advantage of this gaming performance, Honor has partnered up with Epic Games and optimized the View 20 to run the smash hit game, Fortnite, which plays as smooth as you'd like without any dropped frames without resorting to the phone's Performance mode. Sadly, if your skills are at my level, it just means that you die extremely smoothly, over and over again.

As usual, we've run the Honor View 20 through some benchmarks (GeekBench 4, 3D Mark, Antutu) to show how the Kirin 980 performs in theoretical conditions. In real life, it sips battery and is up to pretty everything you throw at it.

Battery

It's almost tradition to say that Honor handsets have better than average battery life, and the View 20 doesn't disappoint with its tendency to get to midnight with around 50% left in the tank. Even when running around at MWC 2019, the View 20 just refused to quit. According to the GeekBench 4 Battery test, the View 20 is good for 10 hours of screen-on-time, which matches up to my experience with the handset. I've managed to get two days of usage without having to resort to any power-saving techniques, which is astonishing. If you do somehow manage to flatten the battery, you can use the SuperCharge technology to charge back up to 50% in just 30 minutes. The Honor View 20 gives you the ability to show battery anxiety the bird and never look back.

Software

Farewell EMUI, hello Magic OS. Perhaps not quite. As part of the effort to separate the Huawei and Honor brands, the EMUI interface has been rebranded to Magic OS with the promise that it will forge a separate path in the months and year to come. In the meantime, Magic OS is still basically EMUI, and for all intents and purposes at this juncture, features much the same pros and cons. The View 20 launched running Magic OS 2.0 which is based on Android 9 Pie and has since updated to v2.01.

Magic OS is just as feature-rich as EMUI, with Knuckle Gestures, aggressive power management, and multiple ways of taking screenshots present. Something that is missing, presumably due to the View 20 sporting an LCD panel and not an OLED display, is dark mode. This is unfortunate in my opinion; users are fond of this feature for more reasons than just saving on battery life. Other than that, this is much the same experience as experienced on other Honor handsets. By default, Magic OS spreads the app icons around the home screens, much like you'll find on iOS which isn't to everyone's liking. To remedy this, so you'll need to head to Settings, Home Screen & Wallpaper, tap on Home Screen Style and toggle the Drawer option which will enable the app drawer and tidy up your home screens. If Magic OS is too much for you, you can always install a third-party launcher to regain your sanity. There are a few pre-installed apps that can mostly be uninstalled, and there's a Themes app where you can customize the lock screen, wallpaper, and icons if you so wish.

Camera

So, the camera. There's a stonking great 48MP sensor on the rear panel, which is a move away from the dual-camera setups we've seen on other Honor flagships in recent years. This particular 48MP sensor comes courtesy of Sony, and in real-life conditions, it has proven to be reliable, producing impressive results, especially so when using the Ultra Clarity mode. This Ultra Clarity mode, which is best used for stationary objects, is capable of taking shots with great detail both in the daytime and at night. With Ultra Clarity Mode enabled, the camera takes several 48MP pictures at once, with the processor and dual ISPs collating the best details from each image to create a single 48MP image. The Kirin 980 processor and its NPU's then assesses the image, optimizing details in dark areas, and adjusting colors after which it creates a ‘Super 48MP Photo’ that shows plenty of detail when you zoom in.

The camera app is pretty much the same as on other recent Honor and Huawei smartphones, with the option of scrolling left or right to access the various shooting modes, with Food, Pro, HDR, and a bunch of other styles hidden behind the More tab. With the View 20 being powered by the Kirin 980 with its dual NPU's, the camera features AI smarts and is capable of recognizing more than 1,500 scenarios in over 60 categories. The AI isn't as aggressive as we've seen on other handsets, resulting in more realistic colors and saturation. Video can be shot at 1080p @ 60fps or 4K@30fps, with images stabilized via a software solution (AIS). Enabling the Pro Mode results in the availability of RAW images.

You may be wondering just what the 3D, or Time-of-Flight, actually does. Well,  it detects the depth in an image by emitting an infrared beam to measure the distance between the phone and the subject and is useful for Portrait images with the ‘bokeh' effect, although it can blur the wrong bits at times.

The 25MP selfie camera is good, if unremarkable. The Pixel 3 beats it in image quality, with the View 20 often producing grainy results despite its higher resolution. It's not terrible, by any means, but we were expecting a little more from its 25 megapixels.

Conclusion

The Honor View 20 isn't perfect, no smartphone is. The EMUI Magic OS interface is still not quite all that it should be and I miss the Always On Display and Dark Mode that I've become used to using on phones with OLED panels. As good as the 48MP rear camera is, you may find yourself missing the customary zoom and wide-angle capabilities found on other handsets. As for an IP rating, well, the View 20 doesn't have an official certification so don't go washing it under the taps. But, as we've seen with some recent premium priced flagships, it's all too easy to get blinded by gimmicks and features that you'll use once and then totally forget about (reverse wireless charging, anyone?).

I'm not going to go on and on about how the Honor View 20 is the best phone that Huawei's budget e-brand has ever produced, although it is. Or that the View 20's 4,000mAh battery just won't quit, although it won't. It's a phone that spans the divide from mid-range to flagship while maintaining an affordable price tag. I'm genuinely sad to move on from the View 20 as my daily driver, despite the new review unit being twice as expensive with a few extra features.

The Honor View 20 represents stonking great value, bringing a gorgeous design, extraordinary battery life, and an impressive camera to market for £499 ($650) for the 6GB/128GB variant, and £579 for the 8GB/256GB model reviewed here. You would never guess that the Honor View 20 doesn't cost a thousand pounds, visually or in terms of performance, and that is the highest compliment that I can pay Honor's newest affordable flagship.

Buy it Now: Amazon, Honor

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