Huawei P20 Pro

At a glance

• 6.1 Inch OLED Screen
• Android 8.1, planned upgrade to Android 10
• Triple Camera, 40 and 20 MP wide lenses and 8 MP telephoto
• 4000 mAh battery, 22.5 mw fast charging
• £349 (Appliances Direct) £29 pcm (EE)

Highlights

• Outstanding camera array for its price range, the P20 Pro camera was groundbreaking on release and still stands up to most flagship smartphones.
• Very good battery performance, moderate users could get up to two days on a single charge.
• One of the last Huawei phones to support Google apps.

Design and appearance

On release, the P20 range from Huawei were all extremely well received in the design stakes. The P20 Pro's design is sleek, with an opalescent colour gradient design that's eye-catching compared to it's generally neutral coloured competitors. The P20 Pro is a little larger than the P20 at 6.1 inches, but it's still a comfortable one-handed smartphone and feels great in hand. with a Gorilla Glass and Aluminium frame, the P20 Pro is fairly light at 180g, which is surprising considering it contains one of the larger smartphone batteries on the market. A screen “notch” contains the front facing camera, but the P20 pro has software to darken the spaces either side of this notch, meaning it doesn't cut into on-screen content.

Camera

The camera department is where the P20 Pro really shines. Another product of Huawei's partnership with Leica, the P20 Pro contains 3 main cameras, taking images up to 40 MP, and shooting video in up to 4K. This kind of performance is almost unparalleled and when coupled with Huawei's smart AI technology for scene selections, and extra processing power from a black and white sensor, the photo quality is top notch. While the subsequent P40 and P30 Mate models have advanced on these camera specs, the P20 Pro is still photographically excellent for all but the most dedicated smartphone photographers. The P20 Pro has up to 3x Optical zoom, a dedicated night-mode, high resolution selfie camera and AI stabilization. It's simply a very good camera array.

Display

The P20 Pro has a slight display upgrade from the P20, utilising an OLED screen which looks very crisp despite not having as high a resolution screen as many of its flagship competitors. The screen is slightly longer than the standard 18:9 aspect ratio, at 18.7:9, which provides a lot of screen real-estate for browsing. As with other P20 models the P20 Pro has a lot of colour presets which allow the user plenty of control over the display.

Software and features

The P20 Pro runs on Huawei's EMUI overlay for Android 8.1. It will be able to upgrade to Android 10 soon although it's worth noting that, with Google now banned from creating software for many Chinese companies including Huawei, Android capabilities are likely to be affected going forward.

Performance

The P20 Pro runs on a Kirin 970 chip, with 6GB RAM. This hardware will stand up to all but the heaviest of usage, and will happily play top-end games, record 4K video and run multiple applications. Special mention must also go to the 4,000 mAh battery, which is one of the largest in the market, and will last over 24 hours on a single charge for most users.