Excellent low-light camera mode; great battery life; versatile three-lens rear camera system
No headphone jack; no wireless charging; display not as sharp as the Samsung Galaxy S9
Huawei has to try harder than Samsung or Apple to find its fans. Its traditional technique was aggressive pricing. The Huawei P20 Pro is not an affordable phone by any sane metric, though. It costs £799 SIM-free.
While it still has a cost edge over the iPhone X and Samsung Galaxy S9+, the appeal here is camera technology, not value. As WIRED wrote in March, camera tech is the one area of real innovation in phones at present.
Read the WIRED Recommends guide to the best smartphones to see how the Huawei P20 Pro compares to rivals
The Huawei P20 Pro rear cameras offer the most interesting developments. There are three of them. One is a 40-megapixel camera with an f/1.8 Leica lens, another a 3x “zoom” camera with an f/2.4 lens. These are supported by a 20-megapixel tertiary camera with a black and white sensor. This is used to aid processing, cut down noise and boost dynamic range. It can do this because a B&W sensor has higher native sensitivity than a standard one. It doesn’t need a colour filter, increasing the amount of light that gets to the sensor.
We’ve seen several of these tricks before, though. Nokia made phone cameras in the 40-megapixel range half a decade ago, the Nokia 808 PureView and Lumia 1020. And Huawei started using B&W sensors in 2016.
Just like the older Lumias, the P20 Pro uses pixel binning, combining the read-out of four sensor pixels to create one pixel in the final image. You end up with very sharp 10-megapixel photos that are low on noise.
The Huawei P20 Pro can also shoot 40MP shots, and even 76.2MB RAW images. But unless they are cropped into beyond the point where the 10MP shots appear dramatically pixellated, they look softer than their lower-res counterparts.
This is a 40-megapixel phone designed to shoot at 10-megapixel resolution. So why is it interesting? Advanced processing. The Huawei P20 Pro is far faster at taking photos than the old Lumia phones ever were, with shooting speed and autofocus to rival the Galaxy S9 and iPhone X.
It also has low-light abilities that outclass every other phone, which is a surprise when increasing the megapixel count in a camera normally reduces low-light image quality. Shoot using the standard auto mode and the Huawei P20 Pro takes images that rival the iPhone X, if not quite the Galaxy S9.
However, it also has a dedicated night mode that merges a series of exposures over three to six seconds depending on light conditions. You can use this handheld, which is the most impressive technical achievement. A robot may be able to hold a camera perfectly still for that length of time, but a human cannot.
The Huawei P20 Pro uses the neural processing unit of its Kirin 970 CPU to merge these images even if their view of the scene is slightly different, due to natural hand shake. It even appears to re-shoot any sub-frames where an anomalous object passes through the scene.
Night mode produces photos with dynamic range far better than any other phone shooting in similar conditions, rivalling an APS-C compact system camera shooting on a tripod at low ISO settings. This is similar to the computational photography dream the Light L16 promises with its 16 sensor modules on its front - a pocket camera only an inch thick that claims to be able to match the image quality of a full-rame DSLR.
The only issue is you still have to stay reasonably still for several seconds. And fine detail is only decent, not revolutionary. There’s still a disparity between dream and reality, but it is progress.
Huawei likes to label every smart new thing it does “AI”. It calls its approach to low-light shooting “Artificial Intelligence Stabilization”. But it is really just intelligent processing.
It’s used throughout the camera. The Huawei P20 Pro recognises “food” and “nature” scenes, and bumps-up colour saturation when it does. This often goes overboard if natural colour is the aim, resulting in some near-radioactive tones, but it can be turned off.
“AI” is used to a degree in the Huawei P20 Pro’s camera zoom, too. A “native” 3x lens allows for sharp zoomed images with greater magnification than the iPhone X. And at 5x zoom the phone recognises text and sharpens it, as well as using more intense processing to clean up the image. Huawei also claims the other sensors are used to improve image quality at 5x zoom, too.
There’s more going on in the background than most will appreciate. The P20 Pro gives Huawei a chance for a few moments of glory before we all take such improvements for granted.
Its images won’t beat the Samsung Galaxy S9, iPhone X and Pixel 2 in all situations, though. The Pixel has better HDR processing, the Galaxy S9’s optical image stabilisation still outclasses the processing approach at times, and the iPhone’s colour is often more natural-looking. It’s not the best for macro photography either. However, the Huawei P20 Pro is a master at handling extreme conditions. The night mode can even be used in the day to boost dynamic range.
There are advanced video features, too, but nothing to shake the phone world up like the P20 Pro’s low-light mode. It will shoot at 4K resolution, but without stabilisation. It can shoot at ultra slo-mo 960fps, slowing footage down by 30x. But as this is only at 720p resolution, its cinematic effect is only Twitter-grade. The best results come from shooting 1080p 30fps video, as the software stabilisation is excellent.
Initially the Huawei P20 Pro’s front 24-megapixel camera seems like another potential star. However, its images are surprisingly familiar, matching rather than decimating the better lower-resolution alternatives. The Pixel 2 takes better selfies.
It does excel in low light once again, though. Selfies in poor lighting are so clear we have to wonder whether Huawei uses some of the same pixel-binning techniques seen in the rear camera.
The front camera is also used for face unlocking. It doesn’t use the clever infra-red techniques of the iPhone X, but is extremely fast and even works in low light. Just pick the P20 Pro up and you’re taken to the home screen within a half-second. Again, this suggests the front camera uses some form of sensitivity boosting procedures as a small 24-megapixel camera sensor should, in theory, struggle with poor lighting. This one does not.
Huawei has also attempted to ape the light effects off the iPhone X, emulating different kinds of lighting in the Portrait mode. However, its take is a poor impersonation, with none of the impact of its low-light shooting.
This front camera, and to an extent an unfortunate mobile design fad, is responsible for the Huawei P20 Pro’s notch. It’s smaller than the iPhone X’s, though.
There are no obvious benefits other than a contemporary look and a filling-out of the front with display. However, the Huawei P20 Pro automatically blocks off the surrounding screen area with black bars when many apps are run to avoid interface issues. And this can be set as standard across the interface if a screen with a black mound at its top does not appeal.
Battery life is the other Huawei P20 Pro stand-out feature. The phone is only 7.6mm thick but has a 4,000mAh cell, significantly larger than those of the Galaxy S9+ (3500mAh) or iPhone X (2716mAh). This is the same capacity as last year’s Mate 10 Pro, simply providing more scope for abuse. Draining it in a day is a sign you use your phone too much.
There’s little else to truly excite in the P20 Pro if the gradient finish seen here doesn’t have a visceral appeal. Depending on your taste it may look like the finish of a supercar, or the background to a badly Photoshopped children’s party invitation.
Elsewhere, the phone slaloms between following current trends and continuing quirky Huawei design habits. There’s glass on its front and back, with typically attention-grabbing polished metal on its sides. The headphone jack has been left out, but there’s an IR transmitter, last seen in a top-end Samsung in 2015. This lets the Huawei P20 Pro act as a universal remote.
It has a trendy 18:9 screen (18.7:9 to be exact), but like all but the largest Huawei phones has a Full HD-class screen rather than an ultra-high resolution one. Purists may notice, others probably won’t. This is an OLED screen made by Samsung: bright, colourful and with perfect contrast, if not quite perfect sharpness. This is a great screen for video streaming, although like previous Huawei phones it doesn’t seem able to stream Netflix at 1080p.
The Huawei P20 Pro is also not the most powerful phone around. Its Kirin 970 CPU is not as quick as the iPhone X’s A11 Bionic or Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845. However, only those who spend their time putting their phones through abstract benchmark tests are likely to care.
Outside of its camera the P20 Pro doesn’t set new standards, but meets ones that fit the high price well enough. There are a teething problems issues with the software, though. Huawei's EMUI interface has been maligned more than almost any other over the years, but today it’s a worthy replacement for those of Samsung and LG.
However, a mid-test update introduced several annoying bugs including one that killed inertial scrolling in apps and another that appears to stop background processes too readily. That gets annoying when you are just trying to listen to a podcast, and it keeps cutting out.
Given the many bugs that have affected Apple’s iOS 11, perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on Huawei about a few launch issues.
There are three features that make the Huawei P20 Pro special, its battery life, 3x “optical zoom” and the camera’s ability to deal with very low-light scenes.
However, this is enough to make this one of the more interesting phones of the year to date. No other phone can handle holiday shots of city vistas at night quite as well, without a tripod at any rate. In other situations Huawei’s image processing is borderline juvenile. But it can be tamed, and this is one of the most adaptable phone cameras available.
Outside of the camera there’s little to thrill, but frankly this is a problem facing all high-end phone makers at present.
Display: 6.1-inch Full HD “Plus” 2244 x 1080 pixel AMOLED (408 ppi)
Rear-facing camera: 40+20 megapixel, 3x zoom 8 megapixel, Leica lenses aperture, f/1.8, f/1.7, f/2.4
Front-facing camera: 24 megapixel, f/2.4
Memory: 6GB DDR4
Storage: 128GB (non expandable)
Dimensions: 155 x 73.9 x 7.8 mm, 180 grams
Battery: 4,000mAh, faster wired charging
Operating system: Android 8.1 (Oreo)
UK release date: On sale from April 6
Price: £799
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
