The Huawei P20 & P20 Pro Review: Great Battery Life & Even Better Night Vision
by Andrei Frumusanu on June 15, 2018 11:00 AM ESTBattery Life - Impressive
Battery life is a fundamental characteristic of a smartphone, and something that Huawei seems to want to pay special attention to due to the CEO’s obsession with being personally fed up with smartphones running out of power.
The P20 comes with a 3400mAh battery while the P20 Pro sports a 17.6% larger 4000mAh unit. Both represent an improvement in terms of capacity when compared to the P10 (3200mAh) and the P10 Plus (3750mAh).
In the web browsing test both P20’s perform extremely well, topping the charts. While not quite reaching the Mate 9’s figures (due to its very efficient LCD), the P20 Pro outpaces all other modern smartphones that we’ve tested, coming in at 12.20 hours. The P20 also isn’t far behind at 10.66 hours.
In PCMark, the P20 Pro showcased some record figures coming in at 12.3h, beating all previous flagship devices. The smaller P20 also fares very well – but the LCD screen is holding back the device as PCMark’s overall lower APL seems to favour the P20 Pro’s OLED display a lot.
This is also an interesting juxtaposition between the P20 Pro and say, the Galaxy S9+ with the Snapdragon 845. Both have similar AMOLED screens and sizes, but the P20 Pro comes in at a 51% longer runtime, even though its battery capacity is only 14% bigger.
Compared to last year’s P10 – both P20’s mark significant improvements.
In general this perfectly showcases the balance that companies have to make when deciding between performance and battery life. Although the Kirin 970’s isn’t the greatest performer in 2018, it’s able to remain outstandingly efficient. The fact that the P20’s have larger batteries while maintaining slim form factors is just a bonus on top what is fundamentally a requirement of having an efficient SoC and device platform.
Over my time with testing the device I did notice a catch in the battery life of the P20s – both seem to have less than impressive idle standby times, however given the overall outstanding on-screen battery results, this should be of no particular concern to everyday users.
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Andrei Frumusanu - Sunday, June 17, 2018 - link
I meant to say that I emphasised it in the S9 piece by bringing it up, praising Samsung for keeping it. I'll reword it here.djayjp - Saturday, June 16, 2018 - link
I personally found the noise vs noise reduction smear balance of the s9 much more appealing in the night shotss.yu - Tuesday, June 19, 2018 - link
Me too. Huawei NR smears the most out of all the flagships (HTC's seems to smear the least, surprisingly) and the only thing in auto propping up that low light performance is that second 20MP monochrome, because the 1/1.7" 40MP main on its own is horrible, its low light performance alone is completely out of proportion with its sensor size (easily hands the win to S9 and Pixel2), even if you manually bin the 40MP's output down to 10MP its low light performance is good as useless, Phonearena already did such a comparison size-matching the output of the P20Pro 40MP and a regular Pixel2XL low light shot.djayjp - Tuesday, June 19, 2018 - link
Agreed! I think the author is out to lunch on this claim of his about the Huawei's supposed dominance in night shots. It clearly looks worse.nrecob - Saturday, June 16, 2018 - link
New Cameraphone: Huawei P20 Pro. Old phone" iPhone X.Enjoying my P20 Pro immensely! My regrets: not buying the "Twilight" version & buying an iPhone X in the first place.
banvetor - Sunday, June 17, 2018 - link
Why no comments or comparisons to the Google Pixel 2 in the camera pages? For me they still look the best in many cases (no pro photographer here though)Andrei Frumusanu - Sunday, June 17, 2018 - link
I didn't want to comment on every single phone and kept the phones to a minimum - personally I did not like the Pixel 2's shots - too much tendency towards unnatural HDR processing in daylight and too much noise and fuzziness in the night shots. Colour accuracy is the Pixel's forte I must admit though.banvetor - Sunday, June 17, 2018 - link
They look good to me exactly because of their HDR! And their colour of course. Anyway, appreciate the reply! CheersQuantumz0d - Sunday, June 17, 2018 - link
No excuse for Huawei on their glaring 3 major flaws.1- Design copy of EMUI as iOS
2 - Extended too deep as they just want to make the phone damn like an iPhone X with this Notch, camera module, the phone aesthetics, the plasticky frame look of that metal with polish like Apple again.
3 - No Headphone jack, another inspiration from Apple.
They want to be in serious front lines and all about their own AI powered notification system was a damn mess, I don't think it's going to be fixed anytime, Their lack of updates and price it to the north with tons of SKUs. After seeing the GSMA samples of Lumia 1020 Pureview, No camera comes close to that phone, they had Xenon flash, bigger massive sensor true lossless zoom and perfect natural colors unlike Huawei's AI crap or Samsung's oversaturated processing.
Their recent fiasco of no bootloader unlock is another middle finger. Removing the jack driling holes like Apple. sheesh this phone doesn't even deserve any praise on the design front, and should be called out for it's cheap design, Only Huawei phone which is a true flagship was Mate 10 standard edition, no rounded drama, no notch, has a headphone jack, front scanner, 16:9 panel, SD slot. This phone doesn't have any of those or any phone from Huawei.
Chinese phones nowadays have flooded the market with this obnoxious chin + notch BS and all phones are looking the damn same. A shame to the whole industry which Apple brought with their always fancy style over substance.
No wonder no ones cares about audio anymore, soon LG will stop bleeding and ditch that ESS (half baked anyways needs mods to enable the HIM - High Impedance Mode as they crippled it unlike the older days SGS - Wolfson Linux driver compatible DACs) as they did with V20's removable battery and made an abomination G7 ruining the perfect balanced design, 19:9 is so impractical and useless, adding the chin (yeah I've said it by 3 times) it's just insane and stupid.
Andrei shouldn't excuse them for adding a battery, Samsung's Note 8 has more tech inside it (ofc they played a stupid safe game of absurdly small battery) the stylus tech, Iris scanner, better construction and quality yet has a 3.5mm jack, S9+ improves on it, Note 9 rumored to have 3800+ mah (maybe it will help that failed Exynos 9810's custom kernel optimization) and have a 3.5mm jack again with SD Slot and all bells and whistles.
Upcoming Pixel 3 XL having a notch, just ruins the Android now. Every OEM on the planet want to be like Apple. Sigh, Sorry for the long rant.
GREAT Expectations - Monday, June 18, 2018 - link
Wow... It's just a phone. You sure do have strong opinions about this. Maybe use more full stops next time? Also IMHO, go get a life :)