The Honor View20 made by Huawei, the Chinese manufacturer at the centre of a political storm, offers a top-notch experience including a great camera for £500 – less than half the price of an iPhone XS.

The company is at the centre of allegations of violating sanctions and theft of trade secrets, but it’s undeniable that it has produced some excellent phones at affordable prices over the last year. The View20 is Honor’s attempt to show that is has the beans to step out from the shadow of just being Huawei’s cheaper sub-brand with a top-flight phone of its own.

The all-screen front and a wild colour scheme on the back make the View20 an eye-catching device, but some might think the V-shaped light reflecting etching looks a little cheap.

Etching under the glass back of the phone catches the light creating bright, cascading V-shaped patterns - not your normal boring black slab. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

The View20 is the first phone on the market to offer a so-called hole-punch notch - a small hole in the top left of the display through which the selfie camera pokes. That leaves the rest of the front, bar a small chin at the bottom, entirely dedicated to its massive 6.4in FHD+ LCD screen. It’s really quite impressive, and unlike some other notch designs, you quickly forget the little hole is there, particularly when playing video full-screen.

The display is good too, very bright and with excellent viewing angles. It’s not quite as vibrant and colour rich as some of the best OLED displays out there, but it’s really not that far off.

At 8.1mm thick, 75.4mm wide and 180g in weight, the View 20 is also fairly light, slim and manageable for a phone with such a large screen, coming in 5g lighter than the OnePlus 6T and 2mm narrower and 28g lighter than the iPhone XS Max. The curvature of the glass back and metal edges aid your grip considerably compared with some of the flatter competition.

The bottom of the phone has an average down-firing speaker and USB-C port for power and connectivity, while the top has a headphone socket – a real rarity in 2019.

Specifications

Screen: 6.4in FHD+ LCD (398ppi)

Processor: octa-core Huawei Kirin 980

RAM: 6GB or 8GB of RAM

Storage: 128 or 256GB

Operating system: Magic UI 2 based on Android 9 Pie

Camera: rear 48MP camera + 3D sensor, 25MP selfie-camera

Connectivity: headphone socket, LTE, wifi, NFC, Bluetooth 5 and GPS (dual-sim available in some regions)

Dimensions: 156.9 x 75.4 x 8.1 mm

Weight: 180g

Top-end class performance

The USB-C port in the bottom of the phone takes care of charging, which is extremely fast using the included power adapter. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

The Honor View20 has the same processor as Huawei’s current king the Mate 20 Pro, and an option of either 6GB or 8GB of RAM. As such it is fast, powerful and snappy all round, matching the best of the rest powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845, even in gaming.

Battery life is also good, but not quite class leading, lasting about 31 hours between charges.

Starting at 7am on day one, it would easily last until lunch on the second day, dying at about 2pm, meaning it would make it through even the heaviest of days and nights out without battery anxiety.

The View20 lacks wireless charging, but hits 100% from dead in about 100 minutes, with 60% reached in just 30 minutes, making it one of the fastest charging phones available.

Call quality, even with the tiny speaker right on the top of the phone, was excellent. The View20 was also able to get a usable 4G data connection in more places than rivals, similar to the Mate 20 Pro.

Magic UI 2

The selfie camera pokes through a small hole in the top left of the screen. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

The View20 is one of Honor’s first phones with its new Magic UI 2 software, which is the manufacturer’s version of Android 9 Pie.

While Honor says that it will differentiate Magic UI over time, right now it is essentially Huawei’s EMUI, as seen on the Mate 20 Pro, but with a new name.

As such it is a bit like Marmite. Some are going to love it, others will hate it and wish it ran a more Google-like version of Android. For instance, it comes out of the box with icons for every app on the homescreen mirroring Apple’s iOS. There is an option to enable the more traditional Android app drawer, but it comes with an old-school button rather than the more modern swiping gesture to open it.

You also get the option of the traditional three-button navigation keys, a joystick-like navigation dock and gesture navigation, which is good but lacks a way to quickly jump to a previously used app.

Aesthetically Magic UI isn’t as attractive or modern-looking as Android on the Pixel 3 or OnePlus 6T, but it supports full system themes and has added power-saving features that can extend battery life dramatically if needed.

Honor promises to deliver two Android major version updates and small updates as and when required for the View20.

Biometrics

The fingerprint scanner on the back is one of the best in the business, but isn’t as cutting edge as those embedded into the screen offered by rivals. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

The big fingerprint scanner on the back is well placed, accurate and very fast indeed – easily one of the best on the market.

The View20 also has camera-based 2D face unlock, which is also very fast in all but poor lighting conditions, but is potentially less secure, particularly compared with more sophisticated 3D face recognition as found on the Mate 20 Pro or latest iPhones.

Camera

The camera is brilliant, beating many higher-priced rivals. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

The camera has been Honor’s biggest weak point in the past, but not any more.

The View20 has one of the best cameras available at any price point. The new 48-megapixel camera – one of the first on the market – is paired with a secondary sensor, which is used to capture depth information for portrait mode and other bits.

While more megapixels doesn’t necessarily mean better photos, Honor’s camera is genuinely better. By default it shoots 12-megapixel images, combining four pixels from the camera’s sensor into one for the photo. That helps remove artefacts and boosts low-light performance.

Photos come out looking richly detailed, well coloured and simply blowing most of the View20’s competition out of the water. Low light performance is also excellent without using the special Night mode, which didn’t appear to improve much when activated. Even the zoom, which is 2x lossless then up to 10x digital zoom, matches some of the best from Apple and Huawei.

Alongside the 12-megapixel shooting mode there’s the option to turn on Honor’s AI Ultra Clarity mode that shoots full 48-megapixel photos by combining a series of frames into one image. It only really works well in medium to good lighting conditions outside and it takes several second of holding the phone steady, but the images it produces are fantastic. They capture a level of detail only achieved through zooming, but across a full wide-angle image. Great fun.

The camera lumps on the back are actually fairly shallow compared to some rivals. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

The camera app is good too, and there are plenty of modes to have fun with, including a Pro mode for shooting in RAW, 960 frames-per-second slow motion video and a reasonable portrait mode, which can only be used when the camera can detect a face.

Honor’s AI photography system is also much improved over previous versions, reducing the highly oversaturated images it used to produce. I still prefer to make adjustments to colour and contrast manually, but it didn’t totally ruin photos as it has before and I think most will probably just leave it on now. I still wish there was a quick toggle for HDR mode, rather than having to tap through a menu to activate it.

The 25-megapixel selfie camera, which pokes through the hole in the screen, is really good too. It captures a great amount of detail, but there’s a surprisingly good skin-smoothing beauty mode if images filled with every fine line and pore aren’t to your taste.

Observations

When rotated left into landscape, the notch sits out the way of full-screen video as nothing important ever seems to happen in the bottom left corner. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

The notch obscures the time in the left corner when using Android Auto on the phone

There’s a tiny amount of uneven backlighting at the very bottom of the screen, which almost looks like shadow from the bezel

Sometimes the three navigation buttons were shunted slightly off to the left of the centre when held in portrait orientation

Honor has included a very useful button on the navigation bar to rotate the screen when you have auto-rotation disabled (as I have all the time)

The View20 is one of the first three Android phones to support Fornite at 60fps

Price

The Honor View20 costs £500 with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage or £580 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, available in four colours.

For comparison, the 128GB Huawei Mate 20 Pro costs £900, the Google Pixel 3 XL costs £869 with 64GB, the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 costs £899 with 128GB, 64GB iPhone XR costs £749 and the OnePlus 6T costs £499.

Verdict

The Honor View20 is genuinely brilliant phone that gives the very best in the market a run for their money. But then you realise that it costs half as much as an iPhone XS and is a full £400 cheaper than Huawei’s Mate 20 Pro.

At £500 the Honor View20 is an absolute bargain. It’s fast, lasts a long time, looks good, feels great and fits a giant screen in a still-manageable body. Its rear-mounted fingerprint sensor is really good, but not quite cutting edge. It is the first phone out of the gate with a hole-punch notch, which is a marked improvement on other notch designs, and it’s even still got a headphone socket.

Much of this matches the other flagship bargain, the OnePlus 6T, but where the View20 is unrivalled is its camera, which is as good as the most expensive phones out there and blows the competition out of the water.

The software might not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s relatively adaptable and easy to live with. The LCD screen is inferior to a good OLED screen, but whether anyone will really notice or care is debatable.

It’s not cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but if you want a big, top-end phone with a cracking camera at a much more affordable price the Honor View20 is it.

Pros: hole-punch notch, snappy performance, good battery life, brilliant camera, good screen, dual-sim, headphone socket Cons: Magic UI not to everyone’s taste, no expandable storage, no water resistance, no wireless charging

There’s a headphone socket in the top of the Honor View20, which makes it the best phone available with the much-missed legacy port. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

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