Huawei, finally, has launched its latest P-series smartphone at an event in Paris. The new line-up includes Huawei P20 and P20 Pro. Along with them a lite-edition in the series is Huawei P20 lite. There is a lot of things Huawei wants you to know about, some of them you might be witnessing the very first time.
The new P-series come with the familiar full-view notched (cutout) display and significant improvements in camera. The latter is of course something which is not surprise when you talk about any newer P-series smartphone. As it mainly targets photography experience, Huawei has to add something new in it. If we talk apparently, the Huawei P20 Pro features the very unique Triple-Camera configuration on the back.
What’s the Leica Triple Camera?
At quick, you can take this just like another gimmick, but seriously it has something holding inside which is not just a gimmick, it instantly reminds you of Nokia Lumia 1020 or Nokia 808 PureView with a 40-megapixel main camera. Well, it’s not just megapixels, the phone keeps a physically large sensor inside that is 1.74″ which is just closer to Lumia 1020. That’s obvious, only the slim profile of Huawei P20 Pro restricted to go beyond that this size of an image sensor. However, this sensor is quite bigger than any smartphone currently in the market.
Huawei P20 Pro features a combo configuration of both Color/Monochrome and Wide/Telephoto camera. Previously Huawei has mostly adapted to go with former color/monochrome combination for its dual-camera system. It looks like Huawei didn’t want to give up on its setup – after all it’s a good configuration to bring detailed images with much less noise, it added a third unit of telephoto camera to deal with everything in the market separately. Well’s it deserves a tap first of all – appreciable.
The combination goes with three camera units on the back. The main RGB camera boasts with 40MP image sensor of 1/1.7 inches, a monochrome secondary camera with 20MP image sensor, and a third 8MP telephoto camera.
FullView Display with a Notch
The P20 line-up features the new FullView display with a notch on the top of it. Similar to what we have seen on iPhone X but it’s less wider on P20 Pro. Interestingly, it’s not something Huawei has forced you to keep. The EMUI gives you the option to hide the notch by disguising into a black status bar. That status bar keeps the visual elements intact, but wears a black background color to camouflage the notch.
Huawei P20 Pro
Huawei P20 Pro, being the top of the line, features a 6.1-inch FullView AMOLED display with FHD+ resolution of 2240×1080 pixels. That’s 2.07:1 in aspect ratio or more familiar in displays 18.6:9 aspect ratio. The phone serves at the pixel density of ~408ppi. Below the screen the phone keeps the multi-function key with embedded always-on fingerprint sensor.
P20 Pro has a powerful Kirin 970 processor with octa-core CPU (4x A73 cores 2.36 GHz and 4x A53 cores 1.8 GHz) and Mali-G72MP12 GPU. The chips has the same NPU for all that AI and machine learning capabilities that we have seen in Mate 10. With respect to memory configuration, the P20 Pro comes with 6GB of RAM and 128GB internal storage.
Basics of the triple camera configuration has already mentioned above. To add a little more into this Tri-lens camera, the main RGB camera is combined with an f/1.8 aperture lens with OIS (optical image stabilization), the secondary monochrome camera is bundled with an even larger f/1.6 aperture lens and the third camera wears a telephoto lens with f/2.4 aperture.
More interestingly, the camera on this smartphone can go to maximum ISO sensitivity of 102400 (not out of the box though, it will come with an HOTA update later). With a 4-way autofocus, there is an embedded color temperature sensor for better color production. Thanks to telephoto lens, that the camera features a 3x optical zoom with an additional 5x hybrid zoom.
What else there is about the camera is that it can record those slow-mo footage with 960 frames per second as well as you have seen recently from other smartphones. The feature is limited to 720p videos, however the phone can support up to 4k resolution videos at standard fps.
On the front, P20 Pro features an additional 24MP camera with f/2.0 lens aperture. It features 3D facial modeling technology with a bundle of portrait lighting modes including the studio-lighting. The front camera is also used for Face unlocking.
Huawei P20 Pro has a 4000 mAh battery with proprietary SuperCharge feature. The phone runs Android 8.1 out of the box.
Huawei P20
Huawei P20 is a smaller variant with 5.8-inch FullView LCD display. It keeps the FHD+ resolution of 2240×1080 pixels with 18.6:9 aspect ratio hence serves at a greater pixel density of ~429ppi. The fingerprint sensor is also below the display.
Like P20 Pro, the P20 also runs on Kirin 970 SoC with an octa-core CPU and Mali-G72MP12 GPU. It features 4GB of RAM and 64GB internal storage.
The camera on P20 follows previous principle of dual-cam configuration. However it indeed has improvements on hardware selection. P20 has a large 1/2.3″ type sensor behind the main camera that is RGB with 1.55µm sized-pixels. The main camera also has an OIS and f/1.6 lens aperture like Pro. Secondary camera keeps a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor behind the f/1.6 aperture lens.
Super slow-mo videos with 960 fps are also supported on Huawei P20 with 720p resolution. The camera features 2x loss-less zoom as well as previous iterations. 24MP front-camera on P20 is just same as in P20 Pro.
Huawei P20 Pro has a 3400 mAh battery with proprietary SuperCharge feature.
Pricing and Availability
Huawei P20 is available immediately and costs EUR 649 (~$800). Huawei P20 Pro, on the other hand, will go on sale from April 6th and will cost you EUR 899 (~$1100).
The pricing is only limited to Europe. According to our estimation, based on previous pricing mechanism of Huawei, both the phones may cost around $650 and $900 in global markets including Pakistan. You may expect both to cost PKR 75000/- and PKR 105,000/- respectively.
