Huawei P20 Lite Review

Huawei Reviews

DESIGN AND BUILD

  • Optional notch at the top of 18.7:9 display
  • Metal and glass sandwich
  • No headphone jack

The P20 is a radical design departure from last year’s P10. Where there was once sandblasted aluminium there is now glossy colourful glass. Our review unit is in a striking pink gold colour, and we also photographed the blue version for this review.

It also comes in an awesome gradient twilight colour that shifts between purple and blue. You can also find plain black or plain gold in some regions.

Gone also is the headphone jack in favour of USB-C audio, though Huawei puts USB-C headphones and 3.5mm headphone jack adapter in the box. It’s a flagship feature we’ll have to get used to.

There’s also a notch in the top of the 5.84in display – yes, like an iPhone X, but also like the Essential Phone and the Asus Zenfone 5. Like the absence of a headphone jack, notches are here to stay for 2018, with the OnePlus 6 also rumoured to have one.

Until manufacturers can put earpieces and cameras in slimmer bezels, then notches are the workaround in order to give the most screen to body ratio possible. Some will ask why more don’t ape the Galaxy S9 design which does seem to manage without a notch pretty impressively, but clearly Huawei has preferred the ‘eared’ design here.

Huawei has kept the fingerprint sensor on the front of the device. With so many so-called bezel-less phones moving the feature to the rear, it’s refreshing to see it on the front in a place that many prefer it.

The button is a slim pill shape to save space and makes unlocking on a table possible. This means less hand acrobatics in general to find a button you can’t see on the back.

The phone has a great in hand feel and a premium air about it that eluded the P10. The glass, while fragile no doubt, is lovely and the in-hand feel makes this a desirable piece of kit where Huawei design was once overly practical and utilitarian. And the pink gold unit hardly showed any fingerprint smudges given it’s lighter hue.

Huawei has changed the typeface of its branding and doesn’t use its flower logo on the phone at all. The branding is subtle and belies the phone’s desire to be used as a camera as all the writing on the back is landscape.

The dual cameras are housed in a slight camera bump but, as we’ll get onto, when they’re this good we don’t care (but it does mean the phone rocks if typing when placed on a table).

FEATURES AND SPECIFICATION

  • Kirin 970 processor with ‘AI’ smarts
  • Crisp LCD (not OLED)
  • Incredible cameras, particularly in low light

For a £599 phone, the regular P20 more than holds its own with its specs and performance. There are top features on show here, and apart from some nice-to-have features that aren’t present, there’s not much missing.

Display

The display you view everything through is a 2244×1080 18.7:9 LCD (bit of a mouthful), and although the OLED display is saved for the more expensive P20 Pro we have no complaints here.

The aspect ratio is great in the form factor being easy to hold in one hand though you’ll need two to reach the top of the screen. There’s a notch up there, you may have noticed.

  • Kirin 970 processor with ‘AI’ smarts
  • Crisp LCD (not OLED)
  • Incredible cameras, particularly in low light

For a £599 phone, the regular P20 more than holds its own with its specs and performance. There are top features on show here, and apart from some nice-to-have features that aren’t present, there’s not much missing.

Display

The display you view everything through is a 2244×1080 18.7:9 LCD (bit of a mouthful), and although the OLED display is saved for the more expensive P20 Pro we have no complaints here.

The aspect ratio is great in the form factor being easy to hold in one hand though you’ll need two to reach the top of the screen. There’s a notch up there, you may have noticed.

The AI features are fine, but unnecessary. The camera app can select modes automatically for you and to be fair it works better than on the LG V30S. The night mode is the real draw here – the phone keeps the shutter open for four seconds to take in as much light as possible and the results are excellent.

In our tests, the P20 gave the best night shots of any phone we’ve ever used, bar none. It beats the Pixel 2 XL and the iPhone X for the level of detail it can capture in low light. It’s awesome to see Huawei succeeding in this respect – look at the night shot of the Eiffel Tower in the below carousel.

The selfie camera has also had a bump to an impressive 24Mp – just remember to turn off Huawei’s still-annoying beauty mode unless you want to come out airbrushed. Even with it off, we found the photos not true to life which is a shame considering how good the rear cameras are.

Battery

Huawei has stuffed a 3,400mAh battery into a phone that’s only 7.65mm thick. That’s impressive, and with Huawei’s super-charger in the box you can easily keep topped up if you’re a heavy user. The phone charges stupidly quickly – from 0 to 60% in 30 minutes.

Huawei claims you can eke two days of use on the battery and we didn’t find this, though even in heavy use we got from 8am to 11pm with 30% left – very good for a phone with a battery under 4,000mAh. Its Geekbench 4 battery test score was 3170, lower than some rivals but our daily usage is what counts and the P20 hasn’t let us down.

Unfortunately, like the Mate 10 Pro, the P20 does not support wireless charging – despite the glass back that can technically allow it. It’s not a deal breaker and likely is a reason the phone costs less, but Huawei is behind the pack now in this regard. But we reckon it doesn’t care, and neither should you.

Other stuff

The P20 is only IP53 water resistant, unlike the IP67 P20 Pro. Like the LCD instead of OLED display, this can be seen as Huawei stripping back costs on the regular model to meet a price that appeals to the floating purchaser – the extra saving compared to some rival phones could nudge a few people into Huawei purchases this year.

The company claims the face unlock feature on the P20 is 100% faster than the iPhone X at 0.5 seconds and works in the dark. It’s fast but isn’t great in the dark unless the brightness is high, but the fingerprint sensor on the front is a fine fall-back.

Without the sensor array of the iPhone X, the P20 struggles in low light with face unlick as other Android phones do. It’s also less secure when relying on image only, hence the fingerprint sensor again for securing private apps.

One minor downside is the single downfacing speaker. It is quite loud, working fine for podcasts without headphones, but would have been better with a stereo set up.