The Huawei P20 ($800) is the scaled back sibling of the P20 Pro, an excellent phone that holds its own against flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S9.
The P20 has the same powerful Kirin 970 processor and lovely design as the Pro model, but a slightly smaller screen and a less powerful camera.
Note that if you're reading this in the US and you want a P20, you're going to have to buy one through a gray market importer.
We tested the phone in London for our sister site, Daxdi UK.
Design
Like the P20 Pro, the Huawei P20 is a metal phone that's coated in multiple layers of reflective paint and glass.
A number of color options are available; aside from Huawei's trademark Twilight purple-and-blue gradient, there are metallic champagne gold and pink gold versions with mother-of-pearl soap bubble finishes, and more standard blue and black versions.
A home button/fingerprint scanner sits at the bottom of the phone.
We're not sure why Huawei didn't put the scanner on the back here, as it did with the Mate 10 Pro, which would allow it to do away with the bottom bezel.
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There's no headphone jack; the USB-C port at the bottom handles power and music.
A dual SIM card tray sits on the left.
Unfortunately, there's no option to swap out one of those SIMs with a microSD memory card.
Onboard storage is 128GB on paper, of which 115GB is available.
That should be enough space for all of your pictures, videos, music, and apps.
Screen
The P20's 5.8-inch LCD has an 18.7:9 aspect ratio display with a resolution of 2,244-by-1,080, for 439 pixels per inch, and a total of 13.14 square inches of display (SQUID), the same as the P20 Pro's 6.1-inch display.
While it boasts great viewing angles, the P20's screen can't replicate the rich levels of contrast you get on the P20 Pro's OLED panel. It also falls behind the OLED Samsung Galaxy S9 (564.5ppi, 13.23 SQUID) and S9+ (529ppi, 15.12 SQUID).
The screen is notched, just like its bigger sibling.
The little black tab, which houses the 24MP front selfie camera and speaker, doesn't make its presence felt that heavily, and there's an option in the settings that fills the "wings" around the notch with black pixels to effectively hide it.
Network and Battery
The P20 comes with a Category 18 LTE 4x4 MIMO radio, capable of download speeds of up to 1.2Gbps, though you are unlikely to realize such speed in the real world.
In the UK, the P20 performed better outdoors than indoors, averaging download speeds of 36.04Mbps on EE, 24.68Mbps on O2, 34.67Mbps on Vodafone, and 16.48Mbps on Three.
Indoors, download speeds averaged 10.73Mbps on EE, 11.18Mbps on O2, 22.98Mbps on Vodafone, and 4.15Mbps on Three.
Draining the P20's 3,400mAh battery by streaming video over LTE with the screen on full brightness took 9, hours 21 minutes.
That's a little less than the P20 Pro's 11 hours and 18 minutes, but then again, that phone has a bigger battery (4,000mAh).
The phone charges quickly.
From empty, we were able to get the battery up to about 30 percent with the included charger (which uses Huawei SuperCharge, 5V/4.5A) in 30 minutes, and to 60 percent after an hour.
This rate doesn't continue past that—it took about two hours to hit 100 percent.
Performance
A HiSilicon Kirin 970 octo-core CPU (four 1.8GHz Cortex A53s and four 2.4GHz Cortex A73s), combined with Huawei's signature NPU are present on the P20.
This is the same processor that powers last year's Mate 10 series, as well as the P20 Pro.
You get 4GB of RAM (versus the P20 Pro's 6GB), and generally speaking, this is enough for just about everything, though we ran into some slight slowdown when doing things like streaming and shooting HD video.
Performance is solid, but consistently lags behind the Apple iPhone X and Galaxy S9.
On the AnTuTu benchmark, the P20 racked up a score of 206,964—impressive, but a hair behind the S9 (261,090), the S9+ (267,233), and the iPhone X (233,592).
The P20 scored 1,893 on the single-core Geekbench test, and 6,736 on multi-core.
Decent, but again, lagging behind the S9 (2,434 and 8,115), the S9+ (2,278 and 8,379), and the iPhone X (4,296 and 10,403).
In PCMark, the P20 netted scores of 13,195 and 4,977, while the S9 and S9+ scored 13,631/6,068 and 13,090/5,968.
The only area where the P20 comfortably comes out ahead of the Samsung phones is in web browsing, with 7,199 against 6,847 and 6,689.
3D graphics performance is fine, but not best-in-class.
On the GFXBench Car Crash test, the P20 managed 23fps off and onscreen, versus the S9+'s 35fps off and 32fps onscreen, and its Manhattan scores of 39fps both off and onscreen were again outstripped by the 59fps and 82fps recorded by the S9+.
Software
Android 8.1 Oreo is running out of the box, with Huawei's EMUI custom skin.
The UI offers a few benefits that will appeal to some, namely the very neat way almost everything found in the Settings menu is no more than three clicks away.
It also offers a feature that lets you tinker and tweak the color temperature levels to suit your preference, and even schedule in some Eye Comfort hours, for nocturnal texting.
While EMUI isn't a heavy customization, it could be a barrier to timely updates for Android P.
The Huawei P10 range did get an OTA update to Oreo, though it was almost a year after the phones went on sale.
Camera
The P20 features a 12+20MP dual-lens rear camera with a low-light mode that uses longer exposures and anti-shake to snap clearer night shots.
As with most of Huawei's dual-lens phones, you get a Bayer sensor (12MP, f/1.4) for picking up color, and a monochrome sensor (20MP, f/1.6) to record luminance.
Omitting the Bayer sensor allows the phone to resolve more detail and be more sensitive in low light.
Its higher pixel count also supports 2x digital zoom with little loss of image quality.
Compared with the P20 Pro, everything is a little smaller.
The P20's color sensor features fewer pixels (12MP versus 40MP), and while these are bigger (1.5 microns vs.
1), the P20 doesn't feature the same pixel binning trick of having a 2x2 group of one micron pixels act as one bigger pixel.
Hybrid zoom works by cropping the 20MP monochrome sensor, adding color information from the 12MP lens as normal.
Beyond 2x, traditional digital zoom kicks in (in other words, the camera just crops whatever's in the middle of the frame), and as you'd expect, details are lost the more heavily you crop.
Master AI is the new name given to Huawei's automatic scene recognition feature that was introduced last year.
Despite the name, it's not AI in the sense that it's not an artificial intelligence—it's a series of algorithms that do things like adjust shutter speeds and exposure values once the phone recognizes that you're trying to take pictures of some flowers, your dinner, a pet, a sunset, and so on.
All smartphones do this to some degree—Huawei has simply added its marketing spin to the process.
You can choose to dismiss these scene suggestions when they pop up, or disable Master AI entirely from the camera's settings.
Master AI is a bit random, sometimes engaging and then disappearing before you've had a chance to take a shot.
When attempting to take pictures of cats, for example, we noticed that the Cat mode popped into view and disappeared the moment one of the cats' turned its face away.
It seems like the rest of the cat's body doesn't indicate sufficient levels of cat-ness for Huawei's algorithms to kick in.
Another included algorithm-based feature is predictive focus, which, you guessed it, predicts a number of places where a moving subject, be it a toddler, a pet cat, or some daffodils dancing in the breeze, might appear in the frame the moment you press the shutter button.
Again, as with Master AI, you can easily turn the predictive focus off if bothers you.
The front-facing camera features a 24MP sensor with fixed focus and 6x digital zoom, should you want to get really close up, or have long arms.
While you can't manually set the focal point, it does a great job of taking crisp, in-focus selfies and there's the usual treasure trove of digital make-up effects, from skin whiteners and bronzers, to eye sparklers, in case you want to look like a sunburnt anime character.
The P20 also comes with a multitude of video modes; as well as the option of shooting 1080p at 30fps and 60fps, there's 4K and an unusual 18:9 aspect ratio FHD+ mode.
There's also a slow-motion mode (1080p at 120fps), a super-slow-motion mode (720p at 960fps), and a time-lapse mode.
4K clips are capped at 10 minutes, the 960fps video is limited to eight-second bursts, and you can't capture more than half an hour's worth of Benny Hill-type footage with the time-lapse mode.
As with the P20 Pro, video quality varies; 30fps and 60fps 1080p video looks smooth enough, with minimal shaking and distortion noticeable if you're walking or panning sharply.
At other resolutions and frame rates, the lack of stabilization is far more apparent, especially on 4K footage.
We'll see if Huawei is able to improve digital stabilization via a software update.
Conclusions
The Huawei P20 offers similar performance, both in processing power and camera quality, to its bigger sibling, the P20 Pro.
You don't get 5x lossless zoom like you do on the Pro, but it successfully replicates most of its camera tricks, and 2x zoom means you can get up close to your subjects without losing definition.
Given that it uses the same chipset as last year's Mate 10 range, it's hardly surprising that it lags behind the newest Samsung phones, and since it's slightly more expensive (and much more difficult to get in the US) than the Galaxy S9, it's a tough sell.
But Huawei has some dedicated fans out there, and anyone who find the $1,100 P20 Pro prohibitively pricey will find a lot to like in the P20.
The Bottom Line
Huawei's attractive P20 phone combines an eye-catching iridescent body with intriguing AI-powered camera tricks.
