I’ve spent every waking moment of the past 10 days in the company of the Huawei P20 Pro. This phone has surprised and delighted me like few others, and what you are about to read is a collection of happy words about it. I don’t think the P20 Pro is perfect, nor the best phone ever released, but I do believe it’s one of the most important devices we’ve seen in the mobile world for years.
In spite of its massive networking and telecommunications business, and the millions of phones it sells in its native China, Huawei has remained an underdog in other smartphone markets. The P20 Pro changes that. This phone is as powerful, refined, fast, stylish, and desirable as anything we’ve seen from Samsung, LG, and HTC at their best. At a time when US spy agencies are warning Americans off Huawei phones due to (so far unsubstantiated) espionage fears, Huawei is responding in the best possible way: by making amazing phones.
Huawei is releasing the P20 Pro today for a price of €899 in Europe with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. That places it in direct confrontation with Samsung’s Galaxy S9 and Apple’s iPhone X. And the remarkable thing is how well Huawei’s phone competes in that rarified class of super flagships.
The P20 Pro is a typical Chinese phone in that it has an overwhelmingly rich spec sheet and an eye-catching design. But it’s different in how effectively it capitalizes on its high specs and in how subtly beautiful it is. Instead of one color, Huawei has given this phone an iridescent gradient paint job that exudes sophistication. The combination of beauty and brawn here is topped off with IP67 certification for water and dust resistance. Every phone company wants to imbue its devices with a premium feel, but few succeed as well as Huawei has done with the P20 Pro.
It starts as soon as you take the phone out of the box, with its perfectly contoured sides resting softly in the palm of your hand. For a phone with glass on both the front and back, the P20 Pro feels surprisingly rigid and durable. With a huge 4,000mAh battery inside, it also conveys a satisfying sense of density that only Apple’s iPhone X can match. There’s a litany of subtle design details and pleasing symmetries in this Huawei design that add up to create a positive first impression. I love the inconsequential but cool accent color on the power button, for instance. It’s fair to say that I liked the P20 Pro before I even turned it on.
The dimensions and ergonomics of this phone approach perfection
Coming from a Google Pixel 2 XL, I find the P20 Pro to be an ergonomic upgrade. Huawei’s phone has a slightly larger screen, at 6.1 inches, but is physically smaller. That’s something that notch detractors will have to consider before they criticize the notch on the P20 Pro: it does provide more screen real estate than an un-notched design. But more to the point, the P20 Pro is easy to pick up and to grip securely. The glass surfaces can feel slippery, however I haven’t come close to dropping the phone even once during all my testing (which is unusual).
My two complaints about the P20 Pro’s industrial design are minor. One is that the rear glass picks up fingerprints with the same ease as the Galaxy S9 and iPhone X that Huawei is competing against. And the other downside is the size of the camera bump, which is roughly the same as Apple’s on the iPhone X and leads to similar issues of the phone being imbalanced when laid on a flat surface.
Huawei’s decision to retain the fingerprint sensor at the front of the phone was peculiar to me, given how everyone else has either removed it (Apple), shifted it to the back (Samsung), or integrated it directly into the display (Vivo). But it took me only moments of using the P20 Pro’s fingerprint reader to realize that keeping it was the right move. It is astonishingly fast and accurate, and the way it feels under my thumb is great. It takes no more than a glancing tap to unlock the phone, and I appreciate still having a home button for exiting full-screen apps with a single tap. In-display fingerprint sensors can’t yet compete with the quickness of a discrete solution like Huawei’s, while rear-mounted ones just aren’t as easy and intuitive to use as those at the front.
Huawei’s Face Unlock is fast, and it even works in the dark
As if the fingerprint ID system wasn’t swift enough, Huawei has also added a Face Unlock option to the P20 Pro, which uses the front-facing 24-megapixel camera. I was again skeptical that this would be anything other than an Apple-chasing spec gimmick, but my skepticism was quelled by the experience. Face Unlock on this phone is instant in almost all circumstances. Even when I locked myself in an unlit bathroom, the phone took less than a second to identify me. Is this system as secure as Apple’s more sophisticated Face ID? No. But its speed and accuracy are at least as good, if not better.
Like the majority of its Android rivals this year, Huawei will be criticized for having a notch at the top of its display and a “chin” at the bottom. The P20 Pro can shrug off those complaints on the strength of its awesome fingerprint reader and genuinely useful face-unlocking technology. I even love the circular earpiece and the loud, crisp sound that it produces during calls. Nothing about this design is superfluous or perfunctory. And if you truly hate the notch, Huawei gives you the option to hide it away.
The notch is a non-issue
The 6.1-inch, Full HD+ display on the Huawei P20 Pro is excellent. There are a couple of color modes to choose from, and once I switched to the Natural one, I got colors that had just the right amount of saturation and vividness. Not perfectly accurate, perhaps, but perfectly suited to consumer mobile use. The Pixel 2 XL feels drab by comparison, while the recent HTC U11+ appears lurid and oversaturated. Only the two phones that Huawei is trying to overcome, the iPhone X and Galaxy S9, can claim to have displays as good as the P20 Pro. All three are OLED, all three can be used comfortably in bright outdoor conditions, and all three provide plenty of sharpness, contrast, and accuracy. Huawei has its own version of Apple’s True Tone tech, which adjusts color temperature in accordance with ambient light around the phone: it’s subtle and works brilliantly well.
The cameras are intended to be the Huawei P20 Pro’s biggest differentiating feature. The 24-megapixel selfie cam is joined by a 40-megapixel f/1.8 main camera, a 20-megapixel f/1.6 monochrome camera, and an 8-megapixel f/2.4 telephoto camera on the back. If you’re in the mood for math, that’s 92 megapixels of image-processing might.
Nokia’s PureView legacy endures
Huawei makes smart use of all those pixels by combining four of them into one, similarly to what Nokia previously did with its PureView cameras on the 808 and Lumia 1020 (incidentally, Huawei’s head of imaging, Eero Salmelin, is a veteran of Nokia’s PureView team). This approach produces sharper, cleaner images at a lower resolution. You can still shoot 40-megapixel stills if you insist on it, but the default (and the highest quality) setting is a 10-megapixel shot with the combined light information from the whole sensor.
The P20 Pro’s main camera sensor is extra large to match its extreme resolution, coming in at 1/1.7 of an inch. That’s more than double what you’d get with a Galaxy S9 or an iPhone X, and it leads to some shockingly impressive low-light performance. One of the Huawei P20 Pro’s quad-pixel pixels would measure 2μm, easily outshining even the 1.4μm pixels of the superb Google Pixel 2 camera. What all of these numbers ultimately add up to is a formidably capable camera that I’m not sure I’ve come close to making the most of yet.
Image quality from the P20 Pro is, by a great margin, the best that Huawei has ever produced. Huawei’s new camera system is, in my judgment, superior to those on the Galaxy S9 and iPhone X, though personal preference or a fondness for particular features may sway that decision. For my liking, I still see too much processing, too many small details lost in the battle to eliminate image noise and imperfections, to crown the P20 Pro my favorite camera. The Pixel 2 XL spits out much more noise than the Pro — and if you look at the Gare du Nord comparison image, Huawei’s shot retains sharpness all the way to the edges of the frame, whereas the Pixel’s periphery is soft — but with that noise I get a more realistic and faithful sense of the scene captured. The flaws in the Pixel’s image help it produce more credible results, or at least results that feel more photographic.
It’s difficult to know where to begin to encapsulate Huawei’s camera software, which is certainly comprehensive. You can shoot panoramas, portraits, monochrome, burst, a simulated f/0.95 aperture, at 40 megapixels, or handheld long exposures. And the Pro mode lets you go wild with manually tweaking every possible parameter. This is an overwhelming diversity of options, but you can just lean on Huawei’s new Master AI system to make all the adjustments on your behalf.
Master AI is a trained-up image recognition system that quickly (usually instantly) recognizes the circumstances of what you’re trying to capture and adjusts the camera’s processing accordingly. When I was photographing the Eiffel Tower, for example, the P20 Pro camera sensed a blue sky and amped up its saturation. Green leaves reliably triggered the camera’s “greenery” adjustments, and any receipts I presented to it were handled by a built-in document scanner. Huawei claims this year’s iteration is smart enough to not only detect food, but to know the particular style of cooking, whether it’s Chinese, Italian, Indian, or whatever else.
Huawei tries to make all the photographic decisions for you, and it’s right more often than not
The philosophy underpinning Master AI is about producing the most pleasing, not necessarily the most realistic, photos. You can think of it as the AI intelligently applying subtle filters to all your shots. Apple already does something similar behind the scenes in the processing of iPhone photos. Huawei’s Master AI is optional, because it applies more aggressive alterations and doesn’t always get things right, though its judgment is good enough for me to be okay with keeping it on all the time. I suspect the vast majority of people will feel the same way — and photography purists can dismiss the suggested scene-detection tweaks or switch to Pro mode.
Matching features with the Galaxy S9, the Huawei P20 Pro also has a 960fps super slow-mo at 720p. It’s a fun novelty. Also keeping up with the iPhone, the Pro has a “studio lighting” setting on its front-facing camera that tries to isolate your face from the background and generate a dramatic look. As with the iPhone, it’s terribly imprecise and should be avoided at all costs.
The third camera on the P20 Pro is used to provide a 3x optical zoom or a 5x so-called hybrid zoom. Photographing Parisian landmarks in the daytime, I found both zoom options useful, giving me greater compositional flexibility and delivering crisp detail. The telephoto lens is the only one that’s optically stabilized on the P20 Pro, though I can’t say I’ve seen any hand shake in the hundreds of photos I’ve shot with any of the cameras on this phone. Huawei has a thing it calls AI stabilization, which evidently does a wonderful job of neutralizing clumsiness or unsteadiness on the part of the user.
Huawei’s night mode in the P20 Pro is a unique and remarkable new feature. Exposing the shot for a full four seconds, it somehow manages to produce handheld photos that remain sharp, accurate, and practically noise-free. No other phone can match the P20 Pro’s night photography, which makes even the Pixel’s low-light photos appear flat, washed-out, and noisy. This advance might get lost in the deluge of camera options, but I think it’s the single biggest advantage that Huawei now enjoys over its competition. For more on how it works and a side-by-side comparison with the Pixel, see my earlier in-depth article on the P20 Pro’s night mode.
There are no image processing delays on the P20 Pro, and that smooth and assured speed of operation extends to the entire user experience. As with the premium feel on the outside, the responsiveness inside the P20 Pro is top notch. Shipping with the latest Android 8.1 Oreo software on board, the Pro is also super reliable — I’ve had more app crashes on the Pixel 2 XL than I’ve had stutters with Huawei’s phone.
There is room for improvement, though. For some strange reason, Huawei doesn’t offer the widely used shortcut of double-tapping the power button to launch the camera. Instead, I have to map that to the volume-down key, which is mostly fine — unless I’m listening to music or a podcast, and then I end up turning the volume down.
The P20 Pro’s EMUI is the least offensive that Huawei’s software has ever been
EMUI, Huawei’s skin atop Android, has evolved from being a clumsy iOS rip-off a couple of years ago to a quite acceptable user experience today. I can’t say I’m in love with it, and I’d have preferred to see an always-on display option (update: it’s in there, just buried in the privacy & security options), but the mere fact that EMUI doesn’t upset me with its weirdness or unreliability is a major step forward for Huawei. The company’s deviations from Google’s original Android design can mostly be sidestepped or disabled, and I appreciate having a dark mode, an increasingly valuable feature for phones with OLED displays.
Like Samsung, Huawei now offers a feature called App Twin, which lets you run multiple instances of the same app and thus be logged in to multiple accounts of the same social or messaging service. Huawei has split-screen too, of course, and a sophisticated screenshot tool. The EMUI lock screen also has a handy set of quick shortcuts, accessible by swiping up from the bottom: there’s a voice recorder, flashlight, calculator, timer, and a QR code reader. Like Apple, Huawei also offers a raise-to-wake function, which together with its fast Face Unlock does a great job of emulating the iPhone X’s seamless unlocking.
Huawei has adjusted its notifications bar to accommodate the display’s notch, but not in a way that I like. The clock feels cramped up against the right curve of the screen, while the cellular and Wi-Fi status icons have jumped across the notch to the left. Putting those permanent icons in the space usually occupied by transient notifications creates a dissonance: every time I glance at that corner, I keep thinking I have unread messages.
Most Android apps play nicely with the notch already, although there are a few niche incompatibilities, such as the “waiting for network...” message on Telegram appearing immediately below (and thus mostly obscured by) the notch. Huawei offers the option to mask the notch by keeping the display around it blacked out, except for notification and status icons. I like that option, but I don’t find it necessary because the notch never offends or distracts me while using the phone.
Huawei’s biggest sin with the notch is in the imperfect way it masks the top corners of the screen when playing back YouTube videos, as illustrated by the image above. There’s a tiny sliver of the video that’s left uncovered, which I find to be an annoying oversight.
The P20 Pro is outstanding in three fundamental aspects of modern smartphones: audio, battery life, and wireless performance. Firstly, the speaker on this phone gets loud without ever becoming shrill or distorted. I love it. Listening to podcasts on this phone is a joy, and its ringtones and notifications come through with authority. The absence of a headphone jack is still an issue, but at least Huawei supports LDAC for higher-bitrate Bluetooth streaming. Even without many headphones compatible with that standard, I was super impressed with the strength and reliability of Bluetooth connections with the P20 Pro. Only Apple’s own iPhone can sustain as good a connection to the AirPods as the P20 Pro achieves.
The battery defies belief
Pairing wireless headphones and speakers was faster with this Huawei phone than any other Android device I’ve used, and the P20 Pro maintained a strong signal no matter how I gripped, cupped, or hugged it. The same is true for cellular signal: I found the P20 Pro delivered the best possible mobile data speeds wherever I was, and I had no dropped calls even in areas of spotty coverage.
The battery of the P20 Pro makes me laugh. It lasts for a preposterously long time. Right now, the phone’s been away from a charger for 32 hours and I’ve still got 52 percent of the battery to play with. On a busier day that might include an hour of YouTube videos, hours of streaming audio, and immoderate amounts of time browsing Twitter and triaging emails, I’d still only bring the battery down to 40-something percent after 24 hours. Huawei claims two days of battery life with the P20 Pro, and the phone duly delivers. The absence of wireless charging from this phone, which would be a competitive disadvantage for others in 2018, is a non-issue for me because of how rarely I need to charge it.
The synergy between the excellent ergonomics, display, camera, and responsiveness of the Huawei P20 Pro shouldn’t be underestimated. I probably like each individual aspect of this phone more because of the quality of its surrounding components. Huawei has matured to the point of emulating the iPhone’s integrated and fluid user experience instead of merely imitating the iPhone’s basic features. Having spent a month with Samsung’s Galaxy S9 Plus, I absolutely prefer the P20 Pro over Samsung’s 2018 flagship. Huawei offers the more potent camera, better ergonomics, longer battery life, and hell, it even has a less irritating Android skin. The gap is even wider when comparing the P20 Pro to Huawei’s most recent Mate 10 Pro flagship, which never attracted me the way the P20 Pro does. The new phone’s design is truly unique and delightful to hold, and its camera has shed most of the artificiality of its predecessor.
Comparisons against Apple’s iPhone X and Google’s Pixel 2 XL are harder to make. The iPhone has an entirely different ecosystem, and odds are that you’ll make the Android-iOS choice before you decide on the actual device you buy. As to the Pixel, I still favor it on the strength of its unique camera and clean Android experience, but the P20 Pro beats it on every other criterion. More to the point, the P20 Pro will be available to buy in far more places around the world (US unfortunately excepted) than Google’s boutique product.
Instead of gimmicks and gaudiness, the Huawei P20 Pro delivers refinement and efficiency. That’s a major change for Huawei, which could previously be relied upon to be the fastest iPhone copycat in the East. With Huawei’s rapid improvement, Apple and Samsung now have a credible third competitor in the contest for super flagship phone supremacy. It’s time for the entire world to sit up and take notice, because Huawei is now the maker of 2018’s best phone and one of the best phones overall.
Photography by Vlad Savov
8.5 Verge Score Huawei P20 Pro Good Stuff Epic battery life
Lovely, sophisticated design
Exceptional camera system
High-quality display Bad Stuff Software adaptations to the notch could be better
No headphone jack
Master AI image processing isn’t perfectly consistent
No wireless charging
8 / 10
Huawei has to try harder than Samsung or Apple to find its fans. Its traditional technique was aggressive pricing. The Huawei P20 Pro is not an affordable phone by any sane metric, though. It costs £799 SIM-free.
While it still has a cost edge over the iPhone X and Samsung Galaxy S9+, the appeal here is camera technology, not value. As WIRED wrote in March, camera tech is the one area of real innovation in phones at present.
Andrew Williams
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Read the WIRED Recommends guide to the best smartphones to see how the Huawei P20 Pro compares to rivals
Camera
The Huawei P20 Pro rear cameras offer the most interesting developments. There are three of them. One is a 40-megapixel camera with an f/1.8 Leica lens, another a 3x “zoom” camera with an f/2.4 lens. These are supported by a 20-megapixel tertiary camera with a black and white sensor. This is used to aid processing, cut down noise and boost dynamic range. It can do this because a B&W sensor has higher native sensitivity than a standard one. It doesn’t need a colour filter, increasing the amount of light that gets to the sensor.
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We’ve seen several of these tricks before, though. Nokia made phone cameras in the 40-megapixel range half a decade ago, the Nokia 808 PureView and Lumia 1020. And Huawei started using B&W sensors in 2016.
Andrew Williams
Some of these ideas have been seen before
Just like the older Lumias, the P20 Pro uses pixel binning, combining the read-out of four sensor pixels to create one pixel in the final image. You end up with very sharp 10-megapixel photos that are low on noise.
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The Huawei P20 Pro can also shoot 40MP shots, and even 76.2MB RAW images. But unless they are cropped into beyond the point where the 10MP shots appear dramatically pixellated, they look softer than their lower-res counterparts.
Andrew Williams
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This is a 40-megapixel phone designed to shoot at 10-megapixel resolution. So why is it interesting? Advanced processing. The Huawei P20 Pro is far faster at taking photos than the old Lumia phones ever were, with shooting speed and autofocus to rival the Galaxy S9 and iPhone X.
It also has low-light abilities that outclass every other phone, which is a surprise when increasing the megapixel count in a camera normally reduces low-light image quality. Shoot using the standard auto mode and the Huawei P20 Pro takes images that rival the iPhone X, if not quite the Galaxy S9.
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Andrew Williams
However, it also has a dedicated night mode that merges a series of exposures over three to six seconds depending on light conditions. You can use this handheld, which is the most impressive technical achievement. A robot may be able to hold a camera perfectly still for that length of time, but a human cannot.
The Huawei P20 Pro uses the neural processing unit of its Kirin 970 CPU to merge these images even if their view of the scene is slightly different, due to natural hand shake. It even appears to re-shoot any sub-frames where an anomalous object passes through the scene.
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Andrew Williams
Night mode produces photos with dynamic range far better than any other phone shooting in similar conditions, rivalling an APS-C compact system camera shooting on a tripod at low ISO settings. This is similar to the computational photography dream the Light L16 promises with its 16 sensor modules on its front - a pocket camera only an inch thick that claims to be able to match the image quality of a full-rame DSLR.
The only issue is you still have to stay reasonably still for several seconds. And fine detail is only decent, not revolutionary. There’s still a disparity between dream and reality, but it is progress.
Artificial Intelligence
Huawei likes to label every smart new thing it does “AI”. It calls its approach to low-light shooting “Artificial Intelligence Stabilization”. But it is really just intelligent processing.
It’s used throughout the camera. The Huawei P20 Pro recognises “food” and “nature” scenes, and bumps-up colour saturation when it does. This often goes overboard if natural colour is the aim, resulting in some near-radioactive tones, but it can be turned off.
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Andrew Williams
“AI” is used to a degree in the Huawei P20 Pro’s camera zoom, too. A “native” 3x lens allows for sharp zoomed images with greater magnification than the iPhone X. And at 5x zoom the phone recognises text and sharpens it, as well as using more intense processing to clean up the image. Huawei also claims the other sensors are used to improve image quality at 5x zoom, too.
There’s more going on in the background than most will appreciate. The P20 Pro gives Huawei a chance for a few moments of glory before we all take such improvements for granted.
Its images won’t beat the Samsung Galaxy S9, iPhone X and Pixel 2 in all situations, though. The Pixel has better HDR processing, the Galaxy S9’s optical image stabilisation still outclasses the processing approach at times, and the iPhone’s colour is often more natural-looking. It’s not the best for macro photography either. However, the Huawei P20 Pro is a master at handling extreme conditions. The night mode can even be used in the day to boost dynamic range.
Video
There are advanced video features, too, but nothing to shake the phone world up like the P20 Pro’s low-light mode. It will shoot at 4K resolution, but without stabilisation. It can shoot at ultra slo-mo 960fps, slowing footage down by 30x. But as this is only at 720p resolution, its cinematic effect is only Twitter-grade. The best results come from shooting 1080p 30fps video, as the software stabilisation is excellent.
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Face Unlock and Selfies
Initially the Huawei P20 Pro’s front 24-megapixel camera seems like another potential star. However, its images are surprisingly familiar, matching rather than decimating the better lower-resolution alternatives. The Pixel 2 takes better selfies.
It does excel in low light once again, though. Selfies in poor lighting are so clear we have to wonder whether Huawei uses some of the same pixel-binning techniques seen in the rear camera.
Andrew Williams
The front camera is also used for face unlocking. It doesn’t use the clever infra-red techniques of the iPhone X, but is extremely fast and even works in low light. Just pick the P20 Pro up and you’re taken to the home screen within a half-second. Again, this suggests the front camera uses some form of sensitivity boosting procedures as a small 24-megapixel camera sensor should, in theory, struggle with poor lighting. This one does not.
Huawei has also attempted to ape the light effects off the iPhone X, emulating different kinds of lighting in the Portrait mode. However, its take is a poor impersonation, with none of the impact of its low-light shooting.
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The Notch and Battery Life
Andrew Williams
This front camera, and to an extent an unfortunate mobile design fad, is responsible for the Huawei P20 Pro’s notch. It’s smaller than the iPhone X’s, though.
There are no obvious benefits other than a contemporary look and a filling-out of the front with display. However, the Huawei P20 Pro automatically blocks off the surrounding screen area with black bars when many apps are run to avoid interface issues. And this can be set as standard across the interface if a screen with a black mound at its top does not appeal.
Battery life is the other Huawei P20 Pro stand-out feature. The phone is only 7.6mm thick but has a 4,000mAh cell, significantly larger than those of the Galaxy S9+ (3500mAh) or iPhone X (2716mAh). This is the same capacity as last year’s Mate 10 Pro, simply providing more scope for abuse. Draining it in a day is a sign you use your phone too much.
Other features
There’s little else to truly excite in the P20 Pro if the gradient finish seen here doesn’t have a visceral appeal. Depending on your taste it may look like the finish of a supercar, or the background to a badly Photoshopped children’s party invitation.
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Andrew Williams
Elsewhere, the phone slaloms between following current trends and continuing quirky Huawei design habits. There’s glass on its front and back, with typically attention-grabbing polished metal on its sides. The headphone jack has been left out, but there’s an IR transmitter, last seen in a top-end Samsung in 2015. This lets the Huawei P20 Pro act as a universal remote.
It has a trendy 18:9 screen (18.7:9 to be exact), but like all but the largest Huawei phones has a Full HD-class screen rather than an ultra-high resolution one. Purists may notice, others probably won’t. This is an OLED screen made by Samsung: bright, colourful and with perfect contrast, if not quite perfect sharpness. This is a great screen for video streaming, although like previous Huawei phones it doesn’t seem able to stream Netflix at 1080p.
The Huawei P20 Pro is also not the most powerful phone around. Its Kirin 970 CPU is not as quick as the iPhone X’s A11 Bionic or Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845. However, only those who spend their time putting their phones through abstract benchmark tests are likely to care.
Andrew Williams
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Outside of its camera the P20 Pro doesn’t set new standards, but meets ones that fit the high price well enough. There are a teething problems issues with the software, though. Huawei's EMUI interface has been maligned more than almost any other over the years, but today it’s a worthy replacement for those of Samsung and LG.
However, a mid-test update introduced several annoying bugs including one that killed inertial scrolling in apps and another that appears to stop background processes too readily. That gets annoying when you are just trying to listen to a podcast, and it keeps cutting out.
Given the many bugs that have affected Apple’s iOS 11, perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on Huawei about a few launch issues.
Verdict
Andrew Williams
There are three features that make the Huawei P20 Pro special, its battery life, 3x “optical zoom” and the camera’s ability to deal with very low-light scenes.
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However, this is enough to make this one of the more interesting phones of the year to date. No other phone can handle holiday shots of city vistas at night quite as well, without a tripod at any rate. In other situations Huawei’s image processing is borderline juvenile. But it can be tamed, and this is one of the most adaptable phone cameras available.
Outside of the camera there’s little to thrill, but frankly this is a problem facing all high-end phone makers at present.
The Huawei P20 is the Chinese company’s latest flagship stunner, bringing bleeding-edge design (you’ve seen the gradient finish, right?) and high-end optics to the market.
Available in the smaller 5.8-inch P20 model or the 6.1-inch Huawei P20 Pro, both options feature the same general look: an all-glass affair that’s deserving of your tender, loving care.
Though limited to regions outside of the US, there are plenty of people around the globe who are going to want to preserve the Huawei P20’s slick design qualities. To do that, you’ll need a case.
Below, you’ll find several recommendations that cover a wide range of budgets and style preferences. While some of these options are untested, they are each a cut above the rest due to their value and design, and are backed by positive consumer feedback.
Note: we’ve ranked these from cheapest to most expensive at the time of writing
Olixar Ultra-Thin case
If you want a case that’s barely there visually, but of course, is able to take the brunt of would-be scratches, dings and other unfortunate happenings, Olixar’s Ultra-Thin case looks to be tailor-made for you.
On sale for cheap as lunch at £5.99, this is a no-brainer if protecting your P20 or P20 Pro has ever come to mind.
Check out this case for the P20 and the P20 Pro
Official silicon case
Huawei’s take on the basic silicon case comes recommended, as it adds the one major design element the P20 and P20 Pro lack: the grip factor.
This silicon gives the camera sensors on the back plenty of room to get the perfect shot, and on the front, it hugs the phone’s nearly bezel-free display nicely.
This isn’t the case to invest in if absolute protection is necessary for your lifestyle. But if you just want something that will keep micro scratches, fingerprints and other unpleasantries from showing up on your P20 phone, this is one to consider.
Check out this case for the P20 (coming soon!) and P20 Pro
Spigen Rugged Armor case
For some, slipping on a case is merely a way of preventing the one-off, regrettable scratch. But if you’re someone who is worried about damage on a catastrophic level, it’s time to consider a more durable case.
The Spigen Rugged Armor model adds some bumper space around the phone’s steel frame, as well as some ridges that make holding the P20 far more secure while holding it sideways for a landscape photo.
Despite its rugged qualities, this case is still fairly slimline, and it maintains the P20’s minimalist design by not encroaching on its bezel-less display.
Check out this case for the P20 and P20 Pro
Official Smart View case
Huawei is going all in with official cases for the P20 and P20 Pro, the most suave of which is its Smart View flip case.
This billfold style case wraps the phone and cover its display. But unlike others, this one is actually smart, as the screen’s unique display mode can push through the material to show you the time and other notifications.
Surprisingly, this deluxe offering is rather cheap at £19.99 – not too bad to both protect your phone and try out this case-exclusive display feature.
Check out this case for the P20 and P20 Pro
Official Car Kit
On the road a lot? Huawei’s own Car Kit, containing a magnified case and ventilation clip, is the perfect match.
The case itself is low profile, possessing a similar design to Huawei’s silicon case. Installing the car clip is simple, too, and the magnetic mechanism attaches and detaches effortlessly. You might worry about the snap of the magnet damaging the case after time, but it seems resilient enough to withstand that pressure.
Sure, there are several compatible car mounts out there that cost far less, but Huawei’s solution is more elegant than much of what you’ll find.
You lucky, lucky people. Two of the hottest mobile phones we're expecting to be launched in 2018, the Sony Xperia XZ2 and the Huawei P20, have just become available within 24 hours of each other. And while Sony’s flagships tend to be up there with Samsung and Apple in terms of price, a new flagship from Huawei is always going to be worth a look when you consider the deals to be had.
The quality of both these new recruits to the smartphone squadron are bound to attract some insecure attention from the old majors in the guise of the Galaxy S9 and iPhone 8 – but the sheer affordability of the Huawei P20 in particular, must make that handset an even greater cause for concern for the big boys.
Okay, we're not trying to suggest that the Huawei is as good as those other phones – although we're currently beavering away with the handset to see exactly how good it is. But if you want a modern, powerful smartphone, with a great camera and a Full HD screen, it's definitely worth considering, especially at the price.
So stick with The Big Deal to see exactly how much you can save by going for a P20 deal over the costlier phones on the market. We've taken a look at the very cheapest prices out there, what you'll be spending on medium amounts of data, and then how much it costs to go for all-you-can eat. We've drawn some graphs and everything… we told you that you're lucky, didn't we?!
Just want to know today's cheapest P20 prices? Then head straight to our best Huawei P20 deals page
Cheapest mobile phone deals: save £240
We found the cheapest deal on the P20, Galaxy S9, iPhone 8 and Xperia XZ2 across the major networks (EE, O2, Vodafone and Three) where the upfront cost didn't exceed £150. If you're simply looking to spend as little as humanly possible on your new mobile, then the Huawei P20 beats the competition by some margin – almost £250 over the two-year term.
You can check out details of the very cheapest deal under the (extremely pretty) graph.
Best deals with 10GB+ data: save £158
We know, we know. You can't get through the day without having Spotify pumping into your ears and Netflix box sets lined up for your commute. A measly 1GB of data isn't going to cut it for you, and you're willing to pay for more.
Well the chasm isn't as gaping as it is at the lowest price points, but there's still more than £150 over two years to be saved if you go for the below P20 deal rather than the iPhone 8, for example. And because that P20 deal is with Mobiles.co.uk, you can enter the TechRadar-exclusive code 10OFF at the checkout for an extra tenner off.
Best all-you-can-eat data deals: save £192
In the land of unlimited data, Three remains king – still no other major network dares attempt a coup d'etat and steal its crown. But those tasty all-you-can-eat deals don't come cheap, and prices start ramping up when you want to stuff your face with data and never stop.
Go for any of the Galaxy S9, iPhone 8 or Xperia XZ2 and you can expect to pay more than £1,500 over the course of the two-year contract – think monthly payments climbing towards the £70 mark. We wouldn't call the below P20 deal cheap as such, but you can see for yourself how much financially better off you'd be if you went for it, rather than those dearer handsets.
Huawei P20 direct from Three | £79 upfront | All-you-can-eat data | Unlimited mins and texts | £54 per month Total price over 2 years: £1,375View Deal
Get the best phone deals – no matter what the mobile
If it sounds like the Huawei P20 tourist board has slipped us a few quid to promote its wares, you'll have to remove that tinfoil hat. Demonstrating that P20 deals are cheaper than the latest iPhone, Samsung Galaxy and Sony Xperia is simply stating a fact. We're not talking about fake moon landings, grassy knolls or flat Earths here.
But we've also been in this game long enough to know that price isn't everything when it comes to mobile phones. The amount of hype surrounding the newest flagship phones is remarkable, and for good reason – the quality seeping out of every inch of these handsets is staggering. Use the links below to narrow down the best prices you can get on your mobile of choice:
If you want to discuss, debate or deliberate any phone deals news and views with The Big Deal, then head over to our @TRDeals twitter feed – you'll also find the latest offers on phones, TVs, consoles, broadband and more tech. The Big Deal will now be on hiatus for a couple of weeks, but will be back towards the end of April.
