Today, the Huawei P20 gets an official unveiling, becoming the company’s new flagship and this year’s most exciting new phone. There are 3 variants in the P20 family of phone, including; Huawei regular P20 and a P20 Lite — is full of design and camera novelties that feel fresh and different from the rest of the market. Well, the new phones have notches, too, but those can be hidden if thats not your kind of thing.
The premium phone — the Huawei P20 Pro features two things: a triple-camera system and a dual-tone paint job that shifts color depending on how it catches the light.
Three Camera system
Just as we reported before, the new epic new camera system features a third lens to the back of the P20 Pro, which provides an 8-megapixel, optically stabilized telephoto camera. This allows for 3x optical zoom or a 5x hybrid zoom. Huawei’s traditional setup of combining the data from a monochrome and a color sensor is still in place, but this time, the color sensor weighs in at a whopping 40 megapixels. You’ll have the option to use that entire resolution to take photos, though the default setting will be to combine the data from four adjacent pixels into one and thus generate clearer, brighter 10-megapixel shots.
We’ve seen this technique, which Huawei calls Light Fusion, in the past on devices like the Nokia Lumia 1020 and its “super pixels.” One of these quad-pixel pixels inside the P20 Pro measures in at 2µm, which is huge for a smartphone sensor. Google’s Pixel 2, for comparison, has 1.4µm pixels, while the regular P20, which has a 12-megapixel main sensor, comes with 1.55µm pixels.
Huawei’s AI object recognition has grown in awareness to now not only recognize food, but to know what sort of food it is that you’re trying to photograph. The company’s worked with food photographers from around the world, and now when it detects a particular style of cuisine, it will apply the image processing tweaks it believes are best suited to it.
For the selfie camera, Huawei has a 24-megapixel sensor that also uses Light Fusion. The front-facing camera is housed in the notch at the top of the phone’s display — which is a 6.1-inch Full HD+ OLED panel on the P20 and a smaller 5.8-inch LCD on the P20 — next to a cute circular earpiece.
Has the iPhone X notch
Familiar home button
At the bottom of the phone, Huawei retains its familiar home button and fingerprint sensor combo. The company claims its users really like it, and that capacitive button — which is more of a touchpad, to be fair — accepts gestures that can make the usual Android navigation bar superfluous (and thus open up more space on the screen).
As with the Mate 10 Pro, Huawei omits the headphone jack on the P20 and P20 Pro, though the company supports LDAC for higher-bitrate Bluetooth audio streaming. Other pertinent specs include the Kirin 970 processor, which Huawei makes itself, a 4,000mAh battery and 6GB of RAM on the P20 Pro and a 3,400mAh cell and 4GB of RAM on the P20, plus 128GB of storage on both. Both will have dual-SIM variants and include an IR blaster. No wireless charging, though. The latest version of Huawei’s EMUI, built atop Android 8.1 Oreo, comes preloaded on the company’s new phones.
Huawei’s also launching an accompanying Porsche Design Huawei Mate RS, which is a fancied-up P20 Pro. The 6-inch Porsche Design variant has a higher-res 2880 x 1440 display and 256GB or, wait for it, 512GB of storage, plus it has an in-display fingerprint sensor (together with a second fingerprint sensor on the rear). Otherwise, the Porsche Design shares all the features of the P20 Pro.
The P20 goes on sale today for €649 with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. The P20 Pro will follow on the 6th of April for €899 with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. And the Porsche Design with 512GB? That’s €2,095, available on April 12th.
