The Huawei P20 Pro (£799, about $1,100) is the most ambitious flagship phone from the Chinese manufacturer yet.
As well as boasting a unique iridescent paint job and an AI-centric processor, its main camera unit comprises three (count 'em) lenses, which in practical terms gives you 5x lossless zoom and stunning long exposures in poorly lit areas.
It's one of the best camera systems we've seen on a phone and it definitely warrants your attention.
Huawei's continued woes with the FCC, namely allegations of espionage and the threat of a subsidy block, means it's unlikely the phone will see an official release in the US.
If you're reading this in the States and you want a P20 Pro, 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.
Screen
Let's get one thing out of the way: The P20 Pro's screen is notched.
Blame Apple for popularizing it or the wider industry for following suit, but notched phones will be a thing for the foreseeable future, so you might as well get used to it.
Luckily, the indentation doesn't dig into the screen's real estate too much.
When you're taking 18:9 video or stills (traditional 16:9 video capture and 4:3 image capture are also available), the way the screen is arranged means that you'll always have a margin of pixels that essentially act as a buffer, stopping the notch from photobombing.
Similarly, when watching YouTube content, zooming out as far as you can won't see the dent spoiling anything.
In practical terms, we've only noticed the notch obscuring the action in one app so far (turn-based strategy game The Battle for Polytopia).
Thankfully, there's a setting that lets you hide it, by filling in its "wings" on either side with black pixels.
However, this has the effect of adding a black bar to any screenshots you take, which is not ideal.
Notch aside, the P20 Pro's screen is a 2,240-by-1,080-pixel, 6.1-inch OLED with a 18.7:9 aspect ratio that results in 407 pixels per inch (ppi).
That's a bit lower than the iPhone X's 458ppi and significantly lower than the Galaxy S9+'s 529ppi, but for these numbers at these sizes we don't think you'll notice much of a difference in sharpness between screens.
Using our own SQUID (square inches of display) formula, you get 14.54 square inches with the P20 Pro, which compares well with the iPhone X's 12.36, but puts it behind the 15.12 square inches of the Galaxy S9+.
Features like the new Natural Tone mode, which automatically adjusts color temperature based on ambient light conditions, and the ability to schedule a warmer Eye Comfort mode for nocturnal viewing, are very welcome.
Color reproduction in Normal mode seemed a little cold and washed out, so I mostly used Vivid mode.
This results in a more saturated look, but you can also manually tweak the color temperature if it still isn't exactly to your liking.
Design, Battery, and Storage
Glass-backed flagship phones are par for the course these days, and the P20 Pro is no different; where it stands out is the blue-and-purple Twilight version, which boasts an interesting iridescence.
While it's a cosmetic feature (and one that will be lost the second you put the phone in a case), it's still a very nice and eye-catching one.
The 4,000mAh battery lasted an impressive 11 hours and 18 minutes in our tests, and we were able to charge it fully in just over an hour and 45 minutes using the supplied charger.
The P20 Pro does not support wireless charging and there's no 3.5mm jack, so you'll be using the same USB-C port for power, data transfer, and wired headphones.
Out of the box, 115GB of the phone's 128GB of storage is available.
While there are two slots in the SIM tray, the second space does not double as a microSD slot, so you can't expand storage past the stock 128GB.
Despite two sets of drilled holes in the base of the phone, only one of those actually hides a speaker.
Audio coming out of the receiver speaker enhances this, but audio quality is fairly average.
The included hard plastic headphones are also fairly mediocre, and without rubberized tips they tend to leak sound and simply don't sit comfortably in your ears.
The P20 Pro supports the LDAC codec, which allows for 24-bit/96kHz hi-res audio files to be streamed over Bluetooth.
However, we weren't able to source any Bluetooth headphones or speakers capable of using this feature at the time of writing.
Left to right: Huawei P20, P20 Pro
Benchmarking and Network Performance
The Huawei P20 Pro is a smooth operator.
When browsing the web or watching YouTube videos, everything loads quickly and looks great.
The Kirin 970 chipset, the same one used in the Mate 10 Pro, comprises four 1.8GHz cores and four 2.4GHz Cortex A73 cores, with a Mali G72 MP12 GPU and 6GB of RAM.
It's not a slouch by any means.
It showed an AnTuTu score of 209,089, a little ahead of the Mate 10 Pro (178,449) but behind the Samsung Galaxy S9 (261,090), the S9+ (267,233), and the Apple iPhone X (233,592).
The Geekbench results followed suit: 1,924 for single-core and 6,750 for multi-core, just a hair higher than what we got with the Mate 10 Pro (1,923 and 6,680).
Compared with the Galaxy S9 (2,434 and 8,115), the S9+ (2,278 and 8,379), and the iPhone X (4,296 and 10,403), it doesn't quite measure up.
For web browsing, photo editing, and data manipulation on PCMark, the P20 Pro's results were closer, and even performed better than the Samsung phones in some cases.
It scored 7,291 for browsing, above the 6,847 and 6,689 we recorded with the Galaxy S9 and S9+.
The same can't be said for 3D graphics.
On the GFXBench Car Crash test, the P20 Pro managed just 22fps offscreen and 23fps onscreen, which doesn't compare well with the S9+'s 35fps offscreen and 32fps onscreen.
The P20 Pro features a Category 18 LTE antenna capable of 4x4 MIMO.
In theory, this will give you a top download speed of 1.2Gbps.
When we tested Huawei phones in the past, they have been tuned for their continent of origin.
That means that an imported P20 will have limited coverage and speed in the US.
In the UK, the P20 Pro performed significantly better outdoors than indoors.
It averaged 52.9Mbps down on EE, 19Mbps on O2, 30Mbps on Vodafone, and 20.3 on Three when tested outside, and 17.5Mbps on EE, 13.2Mpbs on O2, 10Mbps on Vodafone, and 15.2Mbps on Three inside.
Main Camera and Hybrid Zoom
The Huawei P20 Pro's camera is one of the best phone cameras we've used so far, and its key features (5x lossless zoom, stabilized long exposures) are impressive.
It combines three lens and sensor combinations: a 40MP RGB sensor with an f/1.8 lens, a 20MP monochrome sensor with an f/1.6 lens, and an 8MP sensor with an f/2.4 telephoto lens.
The camera also uses four different autofocus technologies, including laser focus, phase focus, contrast focus, and depth focus.
Tapping on the on-screen zoom control lets you jump between standard zoom, 3x, and 5x, and if you want to go further, you can either pinch to zoom in the frame or set the volume rocker to act as a W/T controller.
We preferred this option, as it lets you make more precise adjustments (1x to 1.2x, 1.3x, 1.5x, 1.6x and so on).
This hybrid zoom function that incorporates the telephoto lens is only possible if you dial the resolution down to 10MP, so you can't zoom in with full-size 40MP stills.
At both 3x and 5x zoom, the P20 Pro is capable of capturing high levels of detail, and even produces good results when you push zoom levels further.
Look at the detail on the clock face of St.
Botolph Without Aldgate below; while there's noise and distortion, the Roman numerals are clearly legible and the minute markers are distinct at 10x magnification.
As well as being much bigger, 40MP shots also look softer and warmer; there's clearly some sharpness added to images when you're shooting at lower resolutions, though whether this is a result of the lenses, image processing, or a combination of the two is unclear.
Blue Sky and Motion Prediction
The "blue sky" notification at the bottom of the frame (pictured below) shows Huawei's Master AI feature is working.
It was introduced with the Mate 10 range, and now can combine multiple detected scene types.
When the camera detects certain things, like flowers, pets, falling water, or, yes, a clear blue sky, this will let the camera pick the shutter speeds, exposure values, and ISO levels it thinks will work best.
So, in theory, if you are taking a picture of your pet cat striking a majestic pose at sunset, both the Cat and Sunset modes should engage.
That said, I've yet to see two different modes engage at the same time.
A number of motion prediction algorithms will also kick into gear the moment the camera notices that something's moving in the frame.
When you're taking pictures, you'll notice an orange three-by-three grid ghosting into life.
This is the camera automatically mapping a number of possible focal points.
If you find the suggestions Master AI offers annoying, you can elect to shoot in manual mode (called Pro here), or choose to disable Master AI entirely from the camera's settings.
Night Mode and Low-Light Shots
The P20 Pro's main RGB sensor is a 1/1.7-inch design, with about 50 percent more surface area than the 1/2.3-inch sensors used on other flagship phones (like the Google Pixel 2 XL).
Resolution is extreme, 40MP, but pixel binning, which maps adjacent pixels together to make them effectively larger in size, improves image quality at high ISO settings (used in dim light), while still giving you a 10MP image, absolutely fine for sharing online and printing in photo books.
New to the P20 Pro is a Night shooting mode, which is designed to capture better images when shooting at night.
By default, the Night mode takes a four-second exposure, though you can drop this down to a quarter of a second or rack it up to 32 seconds.
Huawei says that the AI-assisted stabilization algorithm only really works at up to eight seconds, so if you're taking longer shots that that, you'll want to prop up your P20 Pro up on something, or get a tripod.
Left: Night Mode.
Right: Auto Mode.
You can see the benefits of using the Night setting above and below.
The camera does a better job reigning in highlights, preventing the blown out regions we see from the camera's default exposure.
It also raises the brightness of the surrounding environment—think of it as an HDR mode for shooting at night, similar to what you can get from a traditional camera making a longer exposure at a narrow aperture, but without unwanted blur.
The flip side is that you do get the unnatural halo effect around some subjects when using Night mode—similar to what an overbaked HDR image creates using tone mapping.
You can see this in our example shot below, especially around the central portion of the Albert Monument in the lower left quadrant.
Left: Night Mode.
Right: Auto Mode.
We're disappointed to see that the P20 Pro's LED flash tends to fill rooms with a pinkish light.
The Mate 10 Pro's flash is not only better in this regard, it's also better at illuminating rooms in general.
Video and Selfies
The P20 Pro can shoot 4K video at 30fps, along with a plethora of 60fps and higher slow-motion modes at lower resolutions, like 1080p at 120fps and 720p at an incredible 960fps.
There is no recording limit for most modes, though the 720p960 mode can only shoot clips of up to eight seconds at a time.
The lack of image stabilization when shooting 4K or 1080p60 (or higher frame rate) video means that your Ultra HD clips will come out looking juddery, unless you've got a very steady hand, a powered gimbal, or a tripod.
Presumably there's not enough processing power to effectively steady the 1080p60 video.
When you drop down to 30fps for Full HD, however, clips look super smooth, thanks to digital stabilization.
Stabilizing 4K footage is another ball of wax; cameras that do it well, like the GoPro Hero6 Black, require a slight crop to be applied to the frame in order to keep things smooth and steady.
The 24MP front-facing camera doesn't feature OIS, but the results are still nice and stable.
Both normal photo and portrait modes see facial tracking focus on the center of faces as you move around in the frame, so everything tends to end up nicely crisp, even if it looks like there's a bit of artificial smoothing (even with the beauty mode dialed all the way down).
If you don't mind the smoothing, you can pile it on with enough 3D lighting modes and effects to make it look like you're giving an Oscars acceptance speech.
You can use soft lighting, along with the attendant skin smoothing, lighting, darkening, and even eye-enlarging filters.
User Interface
Huawei is sticking to its custom UI guns with the P20 range, updating EMUI to version 8.1.
If you're coming to this from another Android phone or even iOS, getting acquainted with EMUI will take no time at all.
And, if you're used to EMUI, standard functions like the memory cleaner, blurry photo detection, and the default launcher-free screen arrangement (forcing you to make use of home screen folders) are all present and accounted for.
Much of what's new with EMUI 8.1 is enhancements to the camera experience, along with runtime buffs to a few key apps like Android Messages, which replaces the default SMS app.
Messages will eventually also let you send texts from your desktop, add cute animations and cartoon eyes to your selfies, and basically do everything your favorite third-party messaging apps already do.
Expect the dedicated AI processor of the Kirin 970, the NPU (neural processing unit), to lend itself to a number of enhancements.
Primarily, it will drive camera improvements.
Prisma runs quickly on the P20 Pro, with most of the filters appearing on your snaps in around three to five seconds.
While you get Android 8.1 out of the box, there's no promise of future supports.
Last year's Huawei P10 range did eventually get updated to Oreo, but it took a while; OTA updates only started rolling out in March.
Availability and Conclusions
In the UK, the P20 Pro is available to buy on contract now.
In the US, your best bet is to order it through a reliable importer and you can expect to pay north of $1,100.
That's a hefty premium over the Galaxy S9+, which starts at $840, and even the iPhone X, which starts at $1,000.
You need to really love the P20 Pro's design and camera capabilities before you fork over that amount of cash.
That said, the Huawei P20 Pro is a...
