Wed 22 May 2019:
Huawei announces cut-price premium phones with quad cameras and top-end chips
Huawei’s Honor is trying to dominate the increasingly crowded cut-price premium phone market with the launch of two new top-spec phones, the Honor 20 and Honor 20 Pro, flying in the face of the US blockade. With Apple, Samsung and now Huawei ceding the space of the sub-£600 top-end phone as starting prices have risen beyond £900, Honor’s latest offering continues the winning trend of flagship hardware at more reasonable prices.
The £400 Honor 20 and 20 Pro are practically identical, with the same glass front and back design and the flagship Huawei Kirin 980 processor last seen in the Huawei P30 Pro. The Honor 20 has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, while the Honor 20 Pro has 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Both phones run Huawei’s modified version of Android 9 Pie called Magic UI 2.1, and will have Google’s services included in western markets such as the UK.
Both phones have a 6.26in LCD screen that fills the front of the display with a small hole cut out in the top left corner through which the 32-megapixel selfie camera pokes. It’s a design the company used to great effect last year in the larger Honor View 20. A fingerprint sensor is integrated into the power button on the right side of the phone, there’s a USB-C port in the bottom and no headphone socket to be found. The main area where the two phones differ is the camera system on the back.
The Honor 20 has a new quad-camera setup, with a traditional 48-megapixel main camera, a 16-megapixel super-wide-angle camera and a 2-megapixel depth camera, which is used for the prerequisite portrait mode. The fourth camera is more unusual: a 2-megapixel macro camera, dedicated to super close-up shots. The Honor 20 Pro adds optical image stabilisation to the main 48-megapixel camera, has the same 16-megapixel super-wide-angle camera and 2-megapixel macro camera, but swaps the depth-sensing camera for an 8-megapixel camera with a 3x optical zoom.
The Honor 20 Pro also supports up to 5x hybrid zoom, which uses the other cameras to fill in details beyond the optical zoom, and up to 30x digital zoom. Honor hopes that the new camera system will be capable of matching some of the best camera phones in the business. Camera rating firm DxOMark gave the Honor 20 Pro a score of 111, placing it one point behind the current leader, the Huawei P30 Pro. But the phone launches into an ultra-competitive market, which sees Google’s Pixel 3a XL, Samsung’s Galaxy A-series and the OnePlus 7 battling it out. They also may be the last Huawei smartphones launched in the west with Google services on board, following the firm’s blacklisting by the US.
Whether Honor can succeed in such challenging conditions remains to be seen. But if concerns surrounding Donald Trump’s blacklisting can be overcome, Huawei may have another Honor hit on its hands. The Honor 20 is available for pre-order from Tuesday for £400 in the UK and €499 in Europe. Honor said availability for the 20 Pro, which will cost €599 (£525) in Europe, would only be “released in the near future” but did not say whether this delay was planned or due to the US action against Huawei.
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