Honor View 20 long-term review

Camera

We had high expectations from the View 20's camera, particularly since the Huawei Mate 20 Pro has a triple camera with a 40MP sensor and the View 20's has a higher-res 48MP one. We're happy to say that this camera does not disappoint. At the price point, it certainly has its advantages over the OnePlus 6T, an identically priced competitor.

The camera itself uses a new kind of depth sensor that we're seeing more smartphones implement for depth mapping. This is the ToF or "time of flight" sensor. The verdict on whether the ToF sensor can synthesize a better bokeh effect is in: it doesn't make it much better than before. The View 20 camera does have a feature that makes use of the ToF sensor and that's body shaping.

The camera can make you appear to be thinner in your full body pictures. This feature only works in portrait mode when shooting in the main camera. We're not too fond of doing this, but perhaps Honor's Asian demographic is more likely to use this.

The View 20 has Huawei's proper Night mode, which allows the user to take a long-exposure shot while electronically stabilizing handheld motions. Of course you have to keep it somewhat still and the results are pretty consistent.

Although there is a second camera, the View 20 doesn't offer any hybrid zoom feature. It does have a zoom button to toggle between 1X and 2X zoom, but the 2X zoom frame is actually a crop of the high-resolution 48MP sensor.

The View 20 lets you shoot in two full-resolution 48MP modes, and the default 12MP mode, which uses pixel binning. Since the main camera is 48MP, shooting in 2X will simply be a crop of the full 48MP resolution. We recommend not zooming, but walking up closer to the subject.

There's otherwise the 48MP Ultra Clarity mode, which takes a few images in full resolution and stacks them together to capture more details, but the drawback to this is that it takes several seconds to shoot in this mode so your scene and subject should have no movement.

Samples

In everyday camera shooting, we never found ourselves switching from the default 12MP mode. It offers the best dynamic range and the best clarity. Even full resolution 48MP images look kind of soft by comparison. We've compiled a few daylight shots with each shooting mode so you can compare the final result between the resolution modes.

Day Samples: 12MP • 48MP • 48MP Ultra Clarity

In some of the samples we shot, we found inconsistent white balance when switching between the different resolutions modes. Otherwise, we find that the most consistent image with the best dynamic range, exposure, and sharpness will be with the standard 12MP mode.

Shooting in the 48MP mode makes images look softer and the other Ultra AI Clarity mode takes several seconds to capture a still. We'd recommend using either full resolution mode with a tripod and use the 12MP mode in all other scenarios.

Since most people are going to upload these photos to social media, you will not see a benefit to shooting in a softer 48MP mode only for the image to be further compressed. Stick to the 12MP mode.

Low-Light samples

There are actually two approaches to shooting in night mode. Since the 48MP camera is binning four pixels into one, it is able to capture ample amounts of light. Because of this, you can shoot in either standard automatic mode or the proper Night mode.

The mode you should use will depend on the amount of light available at the scene, and whether there's movement in the scene or not. The easiest way to see is to shoot a regular photos and see if you got the shot. If not, proceed to shoot with Night Mode. Check out samples from both modes below.

Low light: Auto • Night mode

When shooting in night mode, you can manually select a shutter speed or ISO. We found that Night mode can be too aggressive and the resulting photos look too unrealistic. If you have time, you should play with the ISO level when taking a night mode shot, depending on the available light, you can shoot somewhere between 400 and 1000 ISO and get a shot that was more convincingly taken at night.

Selfie

We were mostly satisfied with the selfie camera on the Honor View 20. There's a good amount of detail thanks to the 25MP camera, while sharpness and contrast are okay. Depending on the person you are, it might annoy you that the selfie camera's default shooting mode is portrait mode.

If this bothers you, you can always turn off the beautification features and you can take a normal selfie. The point of this is so that selfie takers who like to use beautification all the time can take advantage of it every time the selfie camera is opened. It won't apply a blur effect unless you select one.

Selfie beautification: Off • 5/10

Resolved details are above average, but details in the background of the selfie taker suffer a different fate. If you'd rather take vanity selfies, beautification mode works well enough, but those who zoom into the image might be able to tell the extra processing noise throughout. Also, dynamic range is not very good with the light coming in from outside the windows.

Selfie: HDR and AI OFF • HDR ON • HDR and AI ON

We found that the selfie camera is lacking in dynamic range. Toggling HDR on does have a noticable improvement, but it still wasn't enough to avoid highlights getting clipped. Toggling AI in addition to HDR will slightly boost colors depending on what the AI sees, but that's about it. Depending on the lighting, the selfie camera may also over expose areas of your face.

In bright light, we found selfies to wash out skin color, even on darker-skinned people. This always tends to be the case with Chinese selfie cameras, however. This wasn't as much of an issue with in warmer lighting like indoors or at dusk. The Chinese market has different camera needs and different standards of beauty than Western cultures.

We found that taking selfies with both HDR and AI turned off didn't give us very good results, particularly when sky is involved - images were underexposed and losing details in the shadows. Turning only HDR on was an improvement, but improved exposure about half a step. Kicking the AI toggle in addition to the HDR mode helped tremendously and colors were slightly boosted as an added bonus. We recommend shooting with both AI and HDR enabled when using the selfie camera.

The front camera on the View 20 took surprisingly good video. Sharpness and contrast were good and there was even an HDR selfie video mode which raised contrast and warmed colors a bit. 1080p video is the max resolution and the electronic image stabilization could potentially take nice-looking vlog footage. The only downside is the crop factor is very apparent and your face will barely fit the frame.

The focal distance of the selfie cameras is pretty good so you shouldn't have any issue with your selfies being out of focus, unless you the camera is too close to your face.

As opposed to with selfie stills, we recommend shooting selfie video with HDR and AI turned OFF. HDR and AI requires more processing and EIS took a noticeable hit in performance. In the second video above, you can see the shake is noticeably more apparent.

Frustrations, annoyances

Gripes with Gesture controls and third-party launchers

Magic UI lets you change the launcher, but the process to do so isn't as straightforward as on other Android skins. You need to go into the Settings > Apps > Default Apps > Launcher. Any third party launcher works excellently on the View 20 - as long as you're not using gesture controls.

The stock launcher is the one that works best with these controls because the behavior is consistent. When you have gesture navigation enabled and are using a third-party launcher, entering and exiting the "Recent apps" window acts strangely. Normally, if you open recent apps by swiping up and holding, you'd swipe up again to go back home. This isn't the case when using a third party launcher.

Weak vibrate motor

The vibration motor isn't anything to write home about. If you have taptic typing enabled, the vibrations aren't firm and precise. Frankly, the motor feels like it belongs on an Android flagship from 2011. This isn't a deal breaker, more so an observation.

Tiny notification LED

We appreciate that there's a notification LED on the View 20. However, its placement right behind the earpiece grille makes it difficult to see when it's sitting on a table across the room. You'll only be able to see the LED in a dark or dimly lit room.

It is placed in such a way that you can't see if the top of the phone isn't facing towards you. It feels like the LED was an afterthought.

Loudspeaker

The bottom firing loudpeaker is average at best. Watching videos is loud enough, but a fan in the room can easily drown its volume.

Gimmicks

Party mode

This app comes preinstalled on the View 20 and its premise and purpose is very simple. With this app, you can play a locally stored MP3 across two or more Honor phones' loudspeakers to amplify the sound. While it might be fun to use when your friends with Honor phones are nearby, this feature is limited to playing back MP3 files.

Party Mode

You are better off investing in a portable Bluetooth speaker for a more practical use-case.

HiTouch

HiTouch is a sort of Google Lens feature that's built into the UI. Whenever you see something or interest or something you'd like to buy, you can tap and hold two fingers on the image and HiTouch will show you suggestions for what the item is and where you can buy it.

It could work fairly well to find similar-looking pieces of clothing that an Instagram model is wearing, but the feature is more hit-or-miss for us. The same can be said about Google Lens... yeah, perhaps they are both a little gimmicky.

HiTouch

3D motion games

Honor has showed one of these games off at the View 20's launch event and during CES. Hooking the phone up to a physical HDMI connection or a wireless Miracast mirroring session, the phone's ToF sensor can be used to input body movement into a video game.

The idea is cool on paper, but even while watching the initial demos we could tell this was going to be a novelty feature that would quickly run out of gas. There's a noticeable lag between the action of the player and the input of the game and there are only two games that support the ToF sensor. A downhill skiing one and a dart-throwing game.

AR Body Skiing

Though this is the first device of its kind from Honor, we're not sure that a Kinect-style-gaming experience is anything worth our long-term attention, particularly when Microsoft discontinued its more sophisticated Xbox Kinect platform about a year and a half ago.

AR Lens and 3D QMoji

The View 20's camera comes with an AR Lens mode which offers silly Snapchat-style filters that work directly in the camera app. There are backgrounds filters - which don't work well in the first place, and there are also foreground filtes which do things like add kitty cat ears or sunglasses.

Finally, there's 3D QMoji, which is Huawei's answer to the iPhone's Memoji. It doesn't actually work well at all unless you're in a well-lit room. Even then, characters just don't move very smoothly and you can only use it with the front camera, which doesn't have any kind of 3D sensing ability like the main camera and its ToF sensor.

AR Lens: QMoji • Effects • Background

Hole-punch camera (kind of)

This one is arguable. The hole-punch camera is a new trend in smartphones where a front-facing camera keeps its location above a display, but while maximizing usable area and minimizing bezels. In the case of the View 20, the hole-punch camera doesn't sacrifice anything in functionality and has no need to use an unsightly notch.

The only downside is the execution, which isn't 100% perfect. Aside from the dimly-placed LED notification light, there's the topic of the slight fading around the front camera to prevent light from leaking in. This doesn't excuse why the fading could also be seen along the bottom edge of the phone.

It isn't to say that none of these features will ever be useful to you. We're sure there are a few people who really rely on using HiVoice or who might use Party Mode on a daily basis. What we're saying is that Magic UI could afford to discontinue some of these features while still keeping the overall experience it intended.