Honor View 20 long-term review

Design

The Honor View 20 is undeniably a very attractive phone. The most notable thing about it is the ultra-shiny rear glass with a distinct design. It is certainly a topic for conversation, particularly in the US where some of the people we've shown this phone to have never seen or heard of the brand and proceeded to ooh and ahh over how sparkly the back of the phone is.

We're seeing more Chinese phones adopt these ultra-reflective rear glass covers so we're going to look past this for the remainder of this review. The rear glass of the phone is tapered all the way down the edges of the phone which makes it easy to hold and the aluminum frame wraps all the way around the phone, holding its rigidity and sturdiness.

Between the frame and front display panel is a thin plastic buffer that maintains continuity between the frame and the display glass. This buffer is where the ear-piece is placed since there is no upper bezel on the display. There's even a tiny RGB notification LED behind the grille, but it's not very easy to see if your phone is sitting on a coffee table in a bright room. Despite its delicate placement, the earpiece has ample volume. We found ourselves wishing it was a bit louder when trying to make a call at a noisy cafe.

Honor used the View 20 to showcase how well it could put a hole-punch camera into the View 20's camera. This was both Huawei and Honor's first attempt at a display with a hole for the purpose of placing a camera behind it. The execution of the feature isn't perfect as we can see some slight discoloration of pixels around the camera hole, but it does work as intended and could potentially be used in Huawei phones in the future.

Honor explained that this discoloration was intended to keep the LCD's backlight from leaking into the camera. We're glad to say that this hasn't been an issue during our extended time with the phone. You'll only notice the discoloration against white backgrounds and only if you really stare at it. At the end of the day, this phone doesn't have a notch and we find the hole-punch camera to be a wee bit less intrusive to the continuity of the display.

The keys and their positioning are great. The power key is just over halfway up the phone and the volume rocker is just above. When we first used the phone, we found ourselves pressing the space right in between both the power and Vol(-) key and took accidental screenshots this way but accuracy to hit the power key will improve in time.

The placement of the fingerprint scanner on the back is great. It's far enough away from the camera so you won't ever smudge it when unlocking the phone. Like any Huawei or Honor device, the fingerprint is both reliable and snappy. Above the fingerprint scanner is the dual camera comprised of a ToF sensor and a 48MP camera which takes really amazing 12MP shots after pixel binning. We'll talk more about the camera's performance in a dedicated section.

We appreciate a well-designed phone and the View 20 is designed well with no major complaints. We only wish it was water-resistant, but we can forgive that with the price.

Display

The Honor View 20 has an amply sized 6.4-inch IPS LCD and in our initial review, we praised it for its sunlight visibility despite the somewhat average brightness of 479 nits. Huawei's method for improving sunlight legibility is by shifting the colors' intensity to make them more visible in direct sunlight. While it might be okay to see black text on a white background, it's much more difficult to see photos in direct sunlight.

What may be inconvenient for some is the display's incompatibility with polarized sunglasses while in the landscape orientation. The issue doesn't exist when the phone is in the upright portrait orientation, though, so you'd need to flip your navigation setup to portrait.

We prefer editing photos on our computers, but some of us tend to prefer a near-accurate color profile on our devices as well. The Honor View 20 had deeply saturated colors with very cool whites out of the box. We were glad that we could tweak it to a nearly-accurate setting that we liked.

We understand not everyone has a color calibration tool, so simply switching from the "Vivid" profile to the "Normal" one is enough to offset the highly saturated profile that comes by default. We'd imagine the average person would be okay with the default profile. After all, it is vibrant and pleasant to the eye to see photos and videos.

Color temperature settings

The View 20's automatic brightness adjustment works okay. It sometimes doesn't get brightness right as you walk outside and sometimes we need to manually push it to max.

We're glad that this phone doesn't have an ugly notch and while the arguments about this are truly subjective, we prefer a hole-punch to a notch that ruins the continuity of the screen, of course, the same can be said about the hole-punch but the latter is not as obtrusive as the former.

We do have to talk about the execution of the hole-punch camera. As mentioned in the initial review, there is a noticeable darkening of the area immediately surrounding the hole-punch camera. Honor explained this was to prevent the LCD's backlight from leaking into the camera and interfering with the camera.

This isn't ever distracting and you can only see it against a white background. There is also a similar fading at the bottom edge of the display and while this isn't a deal breaker, we expect Honor will address these kind of imperfections in future devices. Perhaps AMOLED displays might be easier implement a hole-punch since the pixels are lit individually.

Notch settings

There's an option to black out the upper section of the display throughout the UI so that it can look like a normal bezel. While it brings symmetry to the display, it does so only in portrait mode. When you watch a YouTube video in the full screen mode, there's no longer a hole in the video - but the radius of the bar doesn't coincide with the radius of the display's lower corners, so it looks a little off.

We're mostly satisfied with the display, but we didn't like how outrageously vivid the colors are out of the box. The display could certainly be sharper and the viewing angles could be a bit better in terms of light shifting - thankfully there's no terrible color shifting. The display is definitely above average but nothing exceptional.