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Introduction
It was an exciting flagship season this spring, yes, but once the dust has settled, there was only a handful of devices that left lasting impressions. On top of that shortlist is the tri-eyed beast that is the Huawei P20 Pro and it was high time we do a long-term review of this one while using it as a daily driver.
The P20 Pro stole the show a few months ago by being first to employ three primary snappers on the back of a device co-developed with Leica, with native 3x and hybrid 5x zoom, handheld long-exposure shots, among others high-tech features. The phone has also a unique and instantly recognizable paint job, and a flagship-grade AMOLED screen - even if with a notch.

We launched the long-term review section not that long ago, but it's already proven to be useful for the readers, and, well, fun for the writers. So, we assigned the Huawei P20 Pro to one of our editors, and two months later the review is here.
this particular editor had to give up on the iPhone X to test the Huawei P20 Pro but it seems the trade-off was worth it. The phone turned out to be a trusty sidekick and saw a lot of action with calls, games, business trips, lots of sightseeing, fun times, organizing hassle, and everything in between. During those weeks Huawei has updated the P20 Pro twice with security patches, UI refinements, and even new features - something you don't see every day even from reputable makers. Off to a good start, then.
Huawei's partnership with Leica has proven the cornerstone for a generation of flagships and the Huawei P20 Pro managed to innovate the smartphone imaging skills yet again. But not everything is about the snappers as even the best of camera skills can be ruined by lack of attention elsewhere. And we made sure this long-term review won't end up being just another camera test.
The summary of our two-month journey with the Huawei P20 Pro follows right after the break.
Design, handling, usability
The Twilight signature color will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the key features of this device. While there were massive hardware upgrades compared to the P10, the design is a defining feature for every new smartphone today, and the P20 Pro has the looks of a winner.
The Twilight P20 Pro is an eyecatcher in a market ruled by some somewhat unoriginal designs. Samsung has had the curvy futuristic shape for a few years already, Apple is a heavy recycler when it comes to design too, while other makers like LG and Xiaomi (excl. G5 and Mi Mix) often follow the trends instead of setting them.

And we are glad Huawei decided to spice things up with the new colors, as the P20 Pro looks unique even though it's the same dual-glass phone we've seen since the iPhone 4, just larger and thinner. There is also the notch, which just a few phones have today, but their number is increasing in leaps and bounds.
Switching from an iPhone X to Huawei P20 Pro was easy for the eyes. The Huawei felt like a visual upgrade, because let's face it - the black or white Apple uses for their phones has become rather boring already.

We like to enjoy a smartphone completely, and that's the reason why we don't use cases. Yes, phones get dropped, screens break, but that's life. The first thing we noticed is that the P20 is as slippery as the iPhone, but due to its bigger footprint the Pro actually felt looser in hand.

Eventually we found the P20 Pro to have a good enough grip for a daily driver, even when using the camera with a single hand. We found grip in the metal frame, which might appear glossy, but has some sort of coating that makes it less slippery than the glass surfaces.
The front is where the 6.1" notched screen is, but in contrast to the iPhone, there is also a small chin with the fingerprint scanner. And this is the spot where we felt the most significant upgrade over the iPhone X, which we put away. The Apple phone might have been all-screen, but it failed to utilize the bottom pixels, and we continued to miss the fingerprint sensor even several months of use later. So, having back the biometric scanner back on board felt great.

Huawei's all-in-one Home key has been one of our favorite control tools, we can't deny that, and we continue to love it on the P20 Pro. Tap for back, hold for home, swipe for recent apps - it's the most convenient thing, and it made way more sense than the Apple's way of gesturing across the screen. Gotta give credit where it's due, right?

The offset earpiece at the front bugged us only for a day or two, and unless you have an acute OCD, you probably won't have any issues with it either.
The back of the Huawei P20 Pro is as stunning as it looked on the press photos, if not more, and as impressive as it was the first day we got it for a review. If you opt for the Twilight P20 Pro, it would be a outrageous to slap an opaque case on it. And the triple camera - the highlight feature of the Pro - does not need any highlighting - it just completes the awesome back.

We found the Huawei P20 Pro a perfectly usable phone, designed thoughtfully, with no-nonsense decisions. It fits well in hand, provides enough grip, and won't get you frustrated in any way for the months to come. Quite the opposite, we found ourselves appreciating the chin and its Home key, the overall size of the P20 Pro, even how solid yet not heavy it felt.

We didn't feel the absence of the audio jack, as it was already absent on our previous flagship phones, and we guess we just got used to that. For the most of our time spent with the Huawei P20 Pro, the only headphones we used were the wireless Samsung Gear Icon X. But we can side with those of you who miss the analog port, and we in no way advocating its retiring on all phones.

And since we migrated from an iPhone X to the P20 Pro, we found the speakers on the Apple's device to be executed better. While Apple's stereo setup sounded balanced, the secondary speaker on the P20 Pro (the earpiece, that is) isn't on par with the primary one at all. It's weaker, squeakier, and while it does for the promised stereo effect, it's miles behind the iPhone's setup.
Display and its notch
Apple was first to cut a notch into the display and most of the makers followed suit soon after. We are not fans of this blind adoption of controversial trends, but this happens more often than not, so we can't do anything but mention it for the record.
The P20 Pro has a 6.1" AMOLED screen of 1080p resolution and enough pixel density at 401ppi. Last year we could get the P10 Plus with 1440p display, but that's reserved for the next Mate now. We found the pixels more than enough for our taste though as we never saw any pixelization or felt lack of resolution. At some point, we even forgot it's 'only' a 1080p screen. That says a lot.

Huawei has provided lots of options for display color tuning, but it ships the phone set on the Vivid setting by default. This will give you a very vibrant display, which some people still think is the definition of OLED. Anyway, we opted for the Normal saturation - the option offers a very accurate color presentation.
Huawei also offers the so-called Natural Tone option, turned on by default, which is the same thing as Apple's True Tone display - it adjusts the color temperature based on the ambient light. That's different from Eye Comfort - this one filters the blue light at night.
Now, about that notch. Coming from an iPhone X it was an easy thing to swallow, but the cutout opposition is as strong. We learned to live with it, but we'd understand those who won't. The two infamous horns aren't as large as on the iPhone X, because Huawei had much less hardware to fit in there, but for the most part, they are equally useless.
At least you can opt to hide them visually. This way no apps will extend their interface on there, the background will always stay black (and that looks great on an OLED), but the status icons and the clock will remain visible.

Another way to make the notch less intrusive is to opt for the dark UI theme and a wallpaper than ends on something black at the top. This way you'll see the buggers only in specific apps and games.
Options for the notch • Hide the notch • Show the notch • Further customizations
The screen here is among the class-leading ones. The AMOLED panel, the resolution, contrast, even the sunlight legibility, are among the best we've seen. Thanks to the phone's chin, there weren't any wasted pixels at the bottom of the screen, which was the case for the most part on the iPhone X, its apps and keyboards.

And being an AMOLED panel, it offers great blacks and contrast, and no matter what we were looking at the P20 Pro screen - messages, photos, web pages, or videos - it was a feast for the eyes. So, at the end of the day, we didn't mind the notch or the 1080p resolution, but that's just our two cents.

While we are at it, the notch hides one very tiny multi-color LED notification light, which is beyond helpful if you have opted out from the Always-on screen like us to save some battery.
Software
EMUI 8.1 based on Android 8.1 is among the best software packages you can get today. Yet it is far away from vanilla Android. The extra features over Android are a lot, and we eventually grew fond of it.
First, there are rich security features on the P20 Pro. Fingerprint unlock is the obvious choice - you can register up to five fingertips, and you can use it as an authenticator for various apps that operate with your money. You can also use it for app lock, private space, and for the file safe. The sensor is always on and really fast to react.

Face Unlock is available, as it is another trend to follow these days, but it's not among the best implementations and can be fooled with a picture of you. It's easy to setup face unlock, and it can work side by side with the fingerprint unlock.
The lockscreen • Fingerprint security • Security options
You would expect face unlock to speed up unlocking, but it is so trigger happy that it unlocked the phone all the time even when you didn't need it too. Say, you receive a notification, the screen lights up, the camera searches for your face, you are nearby sitting on a chair or a couch - and the phone gets unlocked. Nope, that's not what we wanted, yet half of the unlocks happened this way. So, if your privacy is of any concern, we'd recommend sticking to using only the fingerprint scanner.
EMUI just like iOS puts every app on your homescreen. You can opt for an app drawer, but we didn't. Folders are enough for organizing all those apps. The notification area and its toggles are as Android-like as possible, nothing to talk about here.
Homescreen • Homescreen • Folder • Notification area and toggles • Recent apps • System navigation
What we love in EMUI is the one-key navigation, which we already mentioned in our hardware section. It's one of the most intuitive ways to control the OS, and we got used to it in mere minutes. Tap for back, hold for home, swipe for recents. That's it, and it works flawlessly.
EMUI's Themes is another place where one ends up at some point. Once the icons, color scheme, and wallpapers get boring, you can spice the whole UI with different themes. Pair those themes with the Magazine Unlock, which puts a different picture on your lockscreen each time you lock the P20 Pro, and you will never be bored again by the how UI looks.
Theme store • Different themes
There is a ton of different customization options within the Settings menu, and even more in the Phone Manager app. But we never really dug in those unless it was a prompt for a power-intensive app and we needed to see which app drains the battery.
Having so many settings is a double-edged sword though, as bugs are inevitable. For example, to this very day we can't see the notifications' content on the lockscreen, even though we have enabled this option from every place we could find it (and believe us, it was buried quite deep).
Coming from iOS, it will take some time to setup everything, but it can happen. Things work in a similar way and while there are a lot more customization options, you can easily ignore them if you can't be bothered.
Coming from any other Android phone, the Huawei P20 Pro and its EMUI will feel as flagship as possible. All contemporary features you may expect are covered, there are even some advanced settings for the power users. But if you are one (a power user, we mean) - you would already know how to add whatever you may find missing.
Android and EMUI complete the Huawei P20 Pro experience and we had no issues with those. Sure, some apps needed updates in the beginning, other crashed or slowed the phone down, but those weren't phone-related bugs, the fault is in the Play Store, its app quality and the gigantic Android fragmentation.
Performance
Huawei's Kirin 970 is not exactly the latest system-on-chip around. Since its introduction within the Mate 10 series last October, we've seen newer Snapdragon and Exynos chips come out and top the benchmark charts. This was to be expected, as Huawei has a different hardware cycle, which doesn't necessarily coincide with the competition.
But regardless, it all comes to the real-life performance. And it's buttery smooth as you could expect from a flagship phone in 2018. Android and EMUI work together flawlessly, there were no hiccups, lag, crashes or stutters whatsoever. The native EMUI apps are great.

The Kirin 970 is packing an octa-core processor with 4x Cortex-A73 cores clocked at up to 2.4GHz and another 4x Cortex-A53 cores capped at 1.8GHz. The GPU is a twelve-core Mali-G72 MP12. There's a generous 6GB of RAM.
Six gigs of RAM are more than enough to fill the Android Recents rolodex with running apps and not to worry about anything. Even apps that continue to work in the background aren't a problem for the Huawei P20 Pro.
It's Android and there are apps, which could cause the whole phone to stutter, or even crash the system. But that's not Huawei's fault - once again - this concerns the Store and its app quality, often affected by the huge Android fragmentation.
We tried various games, they all ran perfectly. Even though the 12-core Mali G72 isn't the most powerful GPU on the market, the 1080p resolution makes up for the performance gap pretty well. We couldn't find a single app or game that wouldn't run smoothly and worthy of the cash you've paid for a P20 Pro.
Heating isn't an issue for the P20 Pro, unless it's a very stressful benchmark that will run a couple of times. In theory the phone could apply some throttling, but would you really do this all the time? Nope.
So, even after hours of gaming, or shooting, or navigating, the P20 Pro kept its cool and ran everything as a flagship is supposed to do - hiccup-free.
It may take couple of days for a new Huawei P20 Pro to learn your behaviour before optimizing the apps, the background refresh, and even the garbage collector to adjust to your work style (Huawei calls that AI), and before this process goes through, you may encounter some longer than usual loading times with apps. We know for sure this would bug any iOS user. But once it picks up your routine, the P20 Pro will become as fast and smooth as the latest iPhone. Or close enough anyway.
Battery life
We have a standardized battery test here in GSMArena that will spit a specific number. It does have a meaning behind it, but its primary purpose is help you compare the phone's battery performance against other phones.
But for our long-term reviews we focus on how a phone performs in real life. Of course, these impressions would depend entirely on the editor's pattern, but should shed some more light on the actual battery life.
Here is what our Huawei P20 Pro usual did each day over the course of this review.
- 1 hour or so of Pokemon Go gaming.
- 2-3 hours of music streaming with Bluetooth headphones.
- 2 hours of social networks or web browsing.
- About 1 hour of calls.
With this usage pattern, the phone was usually at about 50% battery charge come bedtime. As you can imagine, it provided two full days of use on a single charge. Even more on weekends. This would naturally change when we used it for navigation or used the camera actively.
The supplied charger is super-fast, but we usually charged overnight with a generic charger so we barely used it. Still, if we had just 15 minutes to charge an almost flat battery, we'd gladly plug the Huawei's Super Charger - it's among the best solutions we've used so far.
Powerful camera setup
The triple camera on the Huawei P20 Pro is what the phone will be remembered for. It has an RGB and monochrome snappers, while the third one is an 8MP cam with 3x zoom lens. Teardowns revealed all three imagers feature some sort of optical stabilization, but the 3x one has the best among those and is the only one officially marketed as having OIS.

Huawei made shooting much easier than it sounds though. First there is this Master AI that's turned on by default - it recognizes the scenes automatically and tunes everything - from shooting parameters to color saturation.
Then you can opt for switching to the optical 3x or hybrid 5x zoom, but that's about it.
The Master AI also decides when to use the Night Mode - this requires up to 6 seconds and will give you a handheld long-exposure shot. The Night Mode is one of this cameras highlights and it works exactly as advertised. The results it produces seemed impossible without a tripod until the P20 series arrived.
And you can use the P20 Pro just like that, no need for further tweaking or digging in menus or settings. And the results will be mostly awesome.
Huawei P20 Pro 10MP camera samples
And here are the 3x zoomed samples.












Huawei P20 Pro 10MP 3x zoomed camera samples
Our only complaint is that the Master AI tends to oversaturate and oversharpen some of the photos, especially the ones recognized as Blue Sky and Greenery. But the good news is that when a scene is identified, and the settings are tuned, you can opt out from the Mater AI's decisions by hitting the X at the bottom of the viewfinder. This way you'll get the Auto shot, which will have much more natural colors, contrast, and sharpness.
And before we give you the AI and no-AI shots, we just want to mention that Huawei must have seen the bad feedback about this aggressive enhancement of the blue skies and green grass, but yet, they haven't issued an update to bring things to more tolerable levels. And that's the only bad thing we can say about this camera.
Master AI • Auto • Master AI • Auto
Master AI • Auto • Master AI • Auto
Well, while we are are still at raning, we have to point out that sometimes when we hit the 3x switch, the camera would do digital zoom instead of switching to the native 3x camera. You can easily identify if that happened by the very shaky viewfinder - the 3x cam is the one with the best stabilization and its video feed is normally quite steady.
And you should be careful about this misfire as it can ruin otherwise good scenes with shots like these:
Optical 3x zoom • Digital 3x zoom • Optical 3x zoom* Digital 3x zoom
Huawei offers hybrid 2x and 5x zoom for the P20 Pro. We've already seen the telephoto zoom in action on previous Mate and P series, and it worked pretty great. Now we can confirm the same for the 5x one. While you can tell that's not native optical zoom, the 5x shots still look much better than any other digitally zoomed ones.
Huawei P20 Pro 2x zoomed camera samples
Huawei P20 Pro 5x zoomed camera samples
Another thing about the Master AI - it tends to use Blue Sky instead HDR often when HDR is really needed, so you may need to switch manually to HDR mode from the Mode selector. But the HDR photos are excellent, so it's worth the hassle.
The camera's Night Mode is your go-to place when the light gets low. If you still haven't turned off the Master AI, it would switch the camera to this mode automatically after dark but you can pick it manually too. This special low-light mode is near-magical and can present you with some stunning results in spite of the few limitations it comes with.
The Night Mode creates pseudo long exposures by stacking multiple frames gathering light along the way. We're talking three-, sometimes six-second, hand-held exposures which would otherwise result in a blurry mess. This is what Huawei claimed as tripod-free long-exposure shots and while somewhat correct, the Night Mode can't be used for blurring car lights which normal longer exposures can captire. There are other modes for that - Light Painting or Manual, but a tripod is a must there.
We found ourselves resorting to Night Mode quite often. Most of the produced shots were great, if not stunning, and we consider this one of the best achievements in the low-light photography on a smartphone. You have to see it to believe it, so here come the samples.
Huawei P20 Pro 10MP Night Mode
For the artsy users there is a native monochrome camera. It supports portraits and manual mode, and while we rarely used those, this snapper also captures some very nice pictures.
Huawei P20 Pro 20MP monochrome samples
Finally, you can't go on a vacation without snapping at least a couple of selfies. The Huawei P20 Pro packs one very capable 24MP selfie camera behind f/2.0 lens, but there is no autofocus. There is no secondary shooter for depth info either, but selfies with defocused backgrounds are available thanks to some software trickery.
There is one big issue with the selfie cam - it always defaults to Portrait mode. Which seemed fine at first - the Portraits are the big thing now and everybody is keen on shooting them. But when you are in front of a popular landmark and you want to snap your face next to it, because, you know, the selfies were invented for exactly this occasion, your face will be there, but the landmark would be lost in the blur. No, no, no. That's not how things should be.
So, each time we had to snap our face next to some popular tourist attraction on our trips, we had to:
- open the camera app
- hit the selfie switch
- swipe the UI until we reach Photo mode
And if you forget to switch to Photo, you won't get your face next to the Eiffel Tower, but to some unrecognizable blurry thing.
Anyway, having that in mind, the Huawei P20 Pro shoots wonderful selfie shoots, it does HDR when needed, and we are very happy with the snaps we took.
Huawei P20 Pro 24MP selfie samples
The camera app has a lot more shooting modes available - from the professional (manual) mode, to various long-exposure modes, portraits, and variable aperture. The settings and modes aren't organized that well, but you get used to them eventually. But for the most part you'll probably capture what we shot for this review and the P20 Pro is a master in those jobs.
Is there room for improvement?
There are no perfect smartphones out there and the Huawei P20 Pro is no exception. There are some aspects that could have been better, both hardware and software, but for some reason (or deadlines) they weren't as polished.

Now let's take a closer look at what we found out during these two months that keeps reminding us of the P20 Pro imperfections.
Hardware
Many of our readers were quick to criticize the display for its 1080p horizontal resolution. But we found the OLED display one of the best among the flagship smartphones today and even though it's not a 1440p one, we just didn't mind. At all.
The notch wasn't an issue either, as we've already accepted it with the iPhone X. Same for the audio jack - we've migrated to mostly wireless earbuds, so we had no beef with Huawei and its decision to drop the analogue port.

The speakers on the other hand were something we used often for watching YouTube clips or just playing music when alone at the office, or at home. And the stereo setup is just no on par with the competition, notably the iPhone X. It's like Huawei just allowed the tiny earpiece to double as a speaker, without investing into a better speaker. The sound coming from that earpiece is feeble, squeaky, and it didn't improve the quality from the primary speaker, it made it sound worse at times. And since we used the speakers quite often, it's one of the things to stick in our minds.
We also had some issues with the autofocus on the monochrome snapper. While the situation seemed to improve with the two updates, it's still a hit and miss at night. This is actually a widespread issue among the Mate 9, Mate 10, P10 and P20 series, so Huawei needs to find what's causing it.
Software
Most of the issues are always software-related, and the Huawei P20 Pro has an abundance of those.
For starters, we still can't figure out what's wrong with the notifications on the lockscreen. Even though we have enabled fully those, some apps won't show them at all, while others like Phone and Messages would only show that you have a notification.
We searched within the Settings menu, enabled pretty much everything we could find, but no matter what we did, we can't still fully enjoy proper notifications on the lockscreen.
Lockscreen notification settings
During the first month with the Huawei P20 Pro we found out that an update to the Google Play Services managed to break some apps and we had to wait for more updates from their respective developers. And this took time, of course. Which is in no way Huawei's fault, but it's an issue every early adopter must deal with at some point.
We already mentioned the trigger-happy Face Unlock, but we really want to stress on that again. The phone unlocks every time you are nearby, and its screen lights up from a notification. Add the fact that it can be unlocked with a picture of you, and the Face Unlock begins to look dangerously unsecure. We think Huawei has already updated its algorithms to prevent the picture unlock, as we couldn't replicate that, but there are videos on YouTube of users who do it, so we'd still advice against using the Face "security".
Camera software
The camera interface has seen some improvement since the Huawei P9, but it's still miles away of thoughtful and polished.

The available modes on the slider Aperture, Night, and Portrait - bottom of Photo, and Video, Pro (Photo), and More - on top of the Photo mode. So far, so good.
Over at the More section you get Monochrome, Panorama, HDR, Light Painting, Slow-mo, Time-lapse - all of those mixed, so you have to think twice which is for pictures, and which for video.
Then the Monochrome has four different modes inside it - Normal, Aperture, Portrait and Pro. But there is no monochrome video.
Monochrome shooting • More monochrome modes on the left
Finally, the Master AI switch is hidden in Settings, and if it were perfect - we wouldn't mind this. But it's not - it often triggers Blue Sky instead of HDR, and the Blue Sky is way too oversaturated and contrasty than it should be. Same for Greenery. Even worse - the Portrait mode is also chosen in a variety of cases where it shouldn't be - like taking a picture of a baby in its crib (no background here), or a sleeping dog on the floor. Or when shooting a note, or an item in a store you like to show quickly to some friend.
So, Master AI switch should have been on the viewfinder as it is on the Honor 10. Now, it's a hassle every single time on such occasions.
We already mentioned that the 3x zoom does not necessarily switch do the dedicated camera, which is an issue, too.
And once again - the selfies that always default to Portrait mode - that's horribly annoying and wrong. Huawei should add an option to change - it's long overdue already.
The whole camera interface needs reworking, while the Master AI - further tuning. And the first thing Huawei should do is to put the monochrome and AI switches on the viewfinder - this would solve lots of headaches.
The verdict
People often overthink what they'll be using a smartphone for when deciding on a purchase. The extra speed Face Unlock, animojis, all-screen, more premium camera - even one of these could be a selling factor with the right angle of self-convincing.
But the Huawei P20 Pro is really all about photography. Sure, it packs a whole lot more flagship goodies, but it all boils down to its powerful imaging skills. And if you are not that much of a photographer and in dire need of optical zoom, there are other Android phones to get (the P20 comes in mind), much cheaper even, that'll offer similarly good experience.

Cutting-edge describes best the Huawei P20 Pro photography skills, at least in the smartphone universe. And we found them as good as advertised, with lots of tiny bits left for you to discover in settings. It's the best all-in-one device for vacations and we rarely resorted to the big camera in our backpack.
Using the Huawei P20 Pro left us with nothing but positive impressions. Sure, there were some software caveats, but nothing is really that perfect, and eventually, everyone would learn how to use the P20 Pro camera app and its less than logical interface.
The Huawei P20 Pro has never failed us once when it comes to screen quality, the speed of operation and it did impress quite a few people with those dazzling looks. Games and apps ran smoothly, the Pro didn't get hot during long gaming sessions, and the battery life turned out pretty great in real life.

We also found the Huawei P20 Pro to be the perfect substitute for the iPhone X and we think users looking for a break from iOS should consider it as well. It's a great match to Apple's top phone in terms of feature set (sans FaceID), and whatever may be missing, the far better camera and the always-on fingerprint scanner should make up for it.
Two months later and we are loving the Huawei P20 Pro. We would recommend it to anyone looking for the best camera experience in a smartphone, but otherwise, Huawei's own P20 would do just fine. Yet, it's so easy to convince yourself into getting the Pro and we may not try to change your mind after all. It's a great device which is easily worth recommending!
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