Huawei P20 review: Performance

Here, on the Huawei Mate 20 – with its powerful processor, oodles of RAM, and with Android 9.0 Pie pulling the strings behind the scenes – it actually feels pretty great. It even lets Android shine through a little. You can still access the Google Feed by swiping to the left of the homescreen, while Google Assistant can be found with a long press of the virtual home button or through an ‘OK Google’ vocal prompt. Huawei has cleaned up its EMUI act significantly, and the divisive UI runs flawlessly here on the Huawei Mate 20. It isn’t a pain to live with, by any means.

But it’s also well short of the brilliant stock Android experience, which is a shame. Huawei Mate 20 – Camera While the Huawei Mate 20 isn’t the first phone to pack in three rear cameras, it still remains a head-turning novelty. Just like the Huawei Mate 20 Pro before it, the Mate 20 packs in one wide, one ultrawide, and one telephoto lens. What this means in layman’s terms is that you can switch between a “normal” camera view, a slightly zoomed-out and expansive camera view, and a slightly zoomed-in camera view.

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They’ll also work together to provide features such as enhanced depth-of-field effects and a whole host of extra modes of varying utility. From an exterior design perspective, I’m far more of a fan of Huawei’s positioning of these three cameras in a square cluster than Samsung’s four-strong lineup with the Galaxy A9. I’m still not convinced that this is the most efficient or effective way to improve mobile photography, though. Arguably the best smartphone camera in the business – the Google Pixel 3 – does wonderful stuff with just a single camera, after all. That said, the Mate 20 Pro camera proves to be a strong and flexible operator, so there’s clearly something to be said for the brute-force approach. I found the Huawei Mate 20 camera to be capable in most situations, although it isn’t up there with its big brother or the rest of the top tier.

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Its primary camera actually packs in a good deal fewer megapixels than the Mate 20 Pro (12 megapixels versus 40 megapixels), and it doesn’t benefit from the “pixel-binning” technique that produced such refined 10-megapixel pictures in the Pro. But the images I captured on the Mate 20 in decent lighting still popped with colour and reasonable detail, for the most part. If you want more fuss-free shots, with sophisticated scene selection and automated HDR, you’ll want to flick on the Master AI mode in the Camera Settings menu. This seemed to be set to the “off” position by default for me, which was a little strange. When activated, it will use the Kirin 980’s dual neural engines to read the scene and change the camera’s settings accordingly.

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For example, it will quickly and reliably read human faces and switch to Portrait mode for close-ups. It will also bring in the ultrawide camera for sweeping landscape shots. Things inevitably become noisier in lower lighting, and that’s especially noticeable when you switch to the 16-megapixel ultrawide or telephoto cameras. You can probably blame the lesser f/2.2 and f/2.4 apertures for that, with the main camera’s f/1.8 aperture letting way more light in and producing some pleasing results. Related: Best camera phones For really dark shots Huawei has included a Night mode, which asks you to hold the handset very still for several seconds.

It then proceeds to take multiple shots at various exposure levels, and combines them intelligently as a way of brightening the shots whilst minimising the effects of hand-shake. The result is undoubtedly brighter, clearer night-time shots, although this brightness also seems to draw attention to excess noise and a general sense of fuzziness. Any movement within the shot will also be picked up on, while very bright elements such as lights can tend to appear blown-out. It can be great if the scene and your subject are perfectly still, though.

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