Honor View 20 review: First to offer a hole punch display and great value

Overview

The Honor View 20 is one of the first flagships of the year, and also one of the first phones you can buy with a hole punch display, which is looking like it will be the hottest trend of 2019. If you don't know what a hole punch display is, it's a small circular cutout in the display's top left corner for the selfie camera (which looks as if a paper hole puncher was applied on that corner screen, thus the name). The upcoming Samsung Galaxy S10, as well as numerous other phones likely to be announced at MWC next month, will most likely feature this type of display.

As a sub-brand of Huawei, Honor's phones tend to focus on good value over outrageous features, and their new View 20 does just that. It has a 6.4-inch Full HD IPS LCD display, a Kirin 980 AI processor (the same processor inside Huawei's flagship Mate 20 Pro), a 48-megapixel rear camera, and a 25-megapixel front camera, all for just S$699 for the 6GB RAM/128GB version or S$829 for the 8GB RAM/256GB version.

Both phones are available at Honor's online official stores on Qoo10, Lazada, and Shopee, at selected Gain City outlets as well as at various authorized retail partners’ stores across Singapore. 

For a limited period, customers who purchase the 6GB/128GB version from an official online outlet or at Gain City are eligible to purchase an Honor Band 4 for just S$29 (usual price: S$59), while customers who purchase the 8GB/256GB version can purchase the Honor Watch Magic for just S$99 (usual price: S$199).

Design

Almost every phone today has a glass back, but none of them look quite like the View 20. The 8GB/256GB version we're reviewing is available in either Phantom Blue or Phantom Red, and they both have an ultra-reflective rear with an underlying chevron pattern (or maybe it's a 'V' for View?). There's a sunburst effect too, with the colors around the edge darker than they are in the middle. Honor calls this design "Aurora Nanotexture" and it's definitely a head-turner, although it might be a little too bold and flashy for some.

If you opt for the 6GB/128GB version, which is also available in red or blue, you'll still get the chevron pattern, but you won't get the sunburst effect, which is exclusive to the 8GB/256GB versions as part of Honor's collaboration with Italian fashion house Moschino.

There's actually a more subdued black version too, but it's not currently available in Singapore. On all of the phones, the glass back is a major fingerprint magnet, so expect to wipe it down frequently.

Like most glass-backed phones, the edges on the View 20 are curved for comfort, which also helps to provide a more secure grip. Despite last year's Honor 10 having an in-display fingerprint scanner, the View 20 instead has a regular fingerprint scanner, which is positioned three-quarters of the way up the middle of the rear. While that's a bit of a disappointment, for a phone in this price range, it's not too surprising. The phone also has a Face Unlock option, but as it doesn't have a 3D front camera, it's more for convenience than security.

In the top left corner, you'll find a somewhat unusual looking camera setup, with the primary 48-megapixel f/1.8 Sony IMX586 lens isolated in its own camera module, and the ToF (Time of Flight) 3D stereo camera lens sitting in an elongated module next to it, which also includes the LED flash.

At the bottom of the rear, the View 20 has a big, bold 'HONOR' wordmark in all caps, replacing the old lowercase 'honor' branding we saw on the Honor Play. I prefer the more understated appearance of the old branding, but the new all caps lettering does fit better with the View 20's loud and colorful aesthetic.

Onto the front, you'll see that the View 20 is one of the very first smartphones available with the front-facing camera directly behind the display, leaving a small "hole punch" cutout in the top left corner. According to Honor, the cutout is just 4.5mm in diameter, making it much smaller than the 6mm cutout used by most of its competitors. Honor still managed to fit the earpiece, proximity and ambient light sensors into the tiny bezel above the display too - all very impressive. Thanks to the much smaller cutout, the View 20 boasts a 91.8 percent screen-to-body ratio! It doesn't exceed the ratio achieved by the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3, but it's still commendable.

I've heard some people refer to the hole punch cutout as a "huge dead pixel" but after a few days with the View 20 I find it much less obtrusive than a notch. I think even the most hardcore of notch-haters will find it a good compromise between a notch and having huge unsightly bezels above the display.

On the left side of the phone, there's a dual nano SIM tray. Unfortunately, the View 20 does not have a microSD card slot, and it doesn't support the new Nano Memory format that Huawei introduced with the Mate 20 Pro either.

On the right side, you'll find the power button and volume rocker, which both have a nice firm feel. The volume rocker is smooth, while the power button is textured, which lets you easily identify them by feel alone.

At the top of the phone are a 3.5mm headphone jack, an IR blaster, and a noise-canceling microphone. The bottom has a USB-C port, downward-firing loudspeaker, and another microphone.

Finally, it's worth noting that the View 20 doesn't have an IP rating, so you should probably keep it away from dust and water.

Display

The View 20 has a 6.4-inch IPS LCD display with a 2,310 x 1,080 pixels resolution. The screen isn't as nice as the higher resolution OLED displays you'll find on more expensive phones, but at this price, it doesn't really matter. The screen is sharp enough, with good brightness and decent viewing angles.

Contrast could be a little better, but it's acceptable, and you won't really think much of it unless you're comparing it directly with an OLED panel. The default 'Vivid' color profile is a little too oversaturated for my liking, but if you go to the settings menu and switch to the 'Normal' color profile, it looks much better.

If you look closely, there's actually some slight discoloration on the display right around the camera hole. Apparently, this is completely normal and is a side effect of a special technique Honor uses to prevent any light from leaking into the selfie camera. 

Unlike a notch, the hole punch cutout seems to mostly disappear in use, and it generally doesn't block any important info. If you really can't stand it, there's an option to hide it, which adds a black bar to the top of the display (similar to how you would hide a notch). In the settings menu, it's still referred to as a 'notch' even though it's clearly not.

Audio on the View 20 comes from a single downward firing speaker. It doesn't have much bass, but it is really loud, and it doesn't suffer from the distortion you normally get when cranking up the volume.

UI

The View 20 runs on Android 9.0 Pie out of the box with Honor's new Magic UI 2.0 on top of it. Magic UI seems to be Honor's version of Huawei's EMUI but for all intents and purposes, it's essentially the same OS we saw on the Mate 20 Pro. It's not the most lightweight experience, but it's fairly clean and simple to use. The UI has some redesigned menus and icons, a new color scheme, and as usual, some pre-installed apps offering varying levels of extra functionality.

As with almost all Chinese phones, the home screen removes the traditional app drawer, and instead puts all of your apps on the home screen, similar to iOS. Fortunately, there's an option in the Settings menu to restore the app drawer if you prefer.

If you really want to take advantage of the bezel-less display, Magic UI also includes an iOS-style gesture-based navigation that lets you get rid of the navigation bar completely. Swipe up from the middle for Home, Swipe up and hold for Recent apps, Swipe up from either lower corner to summon Google Assistant, and swipe inward from the left or right edge to go Back.

The phone includes quite a lot of pre-installed apps and utilities, including Huawei Health, which lets you track your activity, Huawei Share (accessed through the pull-down notifications panel), which lets you wirelessly share or print files with a PC or printer on the same wireless network, something called "Party Mode" which seems to let you sync audio between several Honor devices on the same wirelessly network (unfortunately I wasn't able to test this), a Password Vault to store your passwords, and a Smart Remote app that uses the IR blaster. Unlike a lot of phones, you can easily uninstall any app you don't want.

Benchmark Performance

The Honor View 20 uses the same Kirin 980 processor Huawei uses in its flagship Mate 20 Pro. The phone comes with either 6GB RAM and 128GB internal storage or 8GB RAM with 256GB storage. We're reviewing the latter version.

The Kirin 980 is a 7nm octa-core processor with a unique setup: four low-power cores, two medium, and two high-power cores. The two high-performance Cortex-A76 cores are clocked at 2.6GHz, the two medium Cortex-A76 cores are clocked at 1.92GHz, while the four efficient Cortex-A55 cores max out at 1.8GHz.

The phone also includes an internal liquid cooling system that provides heat dissipation for the processor, camera, and charging circuitry.

For graphics, it has a Mali-G76 MP10 GPU ten-core chip. In addition, the GPU supports Huawei's GPU Turbo 2.0, which allocates extra resources to supported games for better performance. However, right now the list of supported games is fairly short, with the only notable ones being PUBG MOBILE and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that while the Kirin 980 supports 4G LTE speeds up to Cat21 (1.4Gbps), Cat21 LTE isn't actually listed on the View 20's list of specs. I've asked Honor for clarification regarding this and will update this review when I get an answer.

SunSpider Javascript

SunSpider JavaScript measures the browsing performance of a device when processing JavaScript. It not only takes into consideration the underlying hardware performance, but also assesses how optimized a particular platform is in delivering a high-speed web browsing experience. 

The View 20 was marginally slower than the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, but was still speedy and responsive when it came to actual web browsing.

Geekbench CPU

Geekbench CPU is a cross-platform processor benchmark that tests both single-core and multi-core performance with workloads that simulate real-world usage. Geekbench 4 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 4000 (which is the score of an Intel Core i7-6600U CPU processor).

Huawei's Kirin 980 performs really well in this benchmark, easily outperforming Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845. Apple's A12 Bionic is still miles ahead however.

3DMark Sling Shot

3DMark Sling Shot is an advanced 3D graphics benchmark that tests the full range of OpenGL ES 3.1 and ES 3.0 API features including multiple render targets, instanced rendering, uniform buffers and transform feedback. The test also includes impressive volumetric lighting and post-processing effects. We're running this benchmark in Unlimited mode, which ignores screen resolutions.

The View 20 actually beat the Mate 20 Pro on this benchmark, however gaming still seems to be the Kirin 980's weakness, and it failed to keep up with both the Snapdragon 845 and Apple A12 Bionic.

Imaging Performance

The View 20 has a unique dual camera setup pairing a 48-megapixel f/1.8 main lens with a Sony IMX 586 image sensor with a secondary TOF (Time of Flight) lens. 

The main sensor uses a quad-Bayer array for pixel binning, which results in higher-quality 12-megapixel images. You can also opt for non-pixel binned 48-megapixel images if you prefer, but the resulting image quality is a bit softer and a lot noisier. My recommendation is to stick to 12-megapixel mode, but if you do want to shoot 48-megapixel pictures, there's an AI Ultra Clarity mode, which uses AI and multi-sampling to sharpen your photo and increase the dynamic range.

The ToF lens is used for Portrait photography but is much more than just a depth sensor. It's also used for augmented reality and includes support for depth measurement, bone recognition, motion capture, 3D body shaping and 3D somatosensory games. Unfortunately, right now there's not too much you can do with the ToF lens, other than a gimmicky option to create a 3D cartoon character that can mimic the actions of another person in real time. Hopefully, Honor will add more features in the future.

The phone also includes all of the AI capabilities you'll find in the Mate 20 Pro, which includes scene and object recognition, as well as AI-assisted night photography and AI stabilization. 

Image quality on the View 20 is excellent, with sharp details from edge-to-edge, minimal distortion and natural colors. There's no noticeable processing or graininess, and the auto-focus works well in both well-lit and less than ideal conditions. This would be an impressive camera even for a phone costing twice as much.

Battery Life

Our standard battery test for mobile phones has the following parameters:

• Looping a 720p video with screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
• Constant data streaming through email and Twitter

The View 20 has a large 4,000 mAh battery and did pretty well in our video looping benchmark lasting eleven hours and 42 minutes. While that's not as long as the Mate 20 Pro, iPhone XS Max or Samsung Galaxy Note9, it's still better than the Pixel 3 XL, Oppo Find X, and OnePlus 6T. This is particularly impressive when you consider that all of the above phones are using more power efficient OLED displays.

The phone supports fast charging and comes bundled with a Huawei SuperCharge adaptor, which was the fastest charging standard in our fast charging shootout. The phone doesn't support the newest 40W version of SuperCharge (which you'll only find on the Huawei Mate 20 Pro) but still charges at 22.5W, which is plenty fast. Using the bundled charger, the View 20 will go from 0 to 60% in 30 minutes, and to 100% in about an hour. Unfortunately it doesn't support wireless charging.

Conclusion

The Honor View 20 offers fantastic value with flagship-level benchmark and camera performance and very respectable battery life too. It does have a few compromises though. While the display resolution is fine, the View 20's LCD panel pales in comparison to the OLED displays you can find on other phones around the same price range, like the OnePlus 6T and Xiaomi Mi Mix 3. It also lacks wireless charging, stereo speakers, and expandable storage.

In terms of design, while the phone has a premium build that rivals any other high-end flagship, its bold Aurora Nanotexture finish is polarizing, and won't be to everyone's taste. Having said that, if you don't like it, you can always use a case.

If you're looking to jump on board the hole punch display trend early, and you're looking for value over creature comforts, the View 20 is a great alternative to the usual suspects from OnePlus and Xiaomi.

Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.