Name: Honor 20
Brand: Honor

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Battery life and camera

Battery life

3,750mAh battery
Good for two full days of moderate usage

Honor has slimmed down the battery offering from the Honor 20 Pro. A 3,750mAh unit is a little runtier than big brother’s 4,000mAh equivalent.

But it’s still more than up to the task. Honor/Huawei has been one of the best in the business when it comes to optimizing battery life in recent years, and the Honor 20 doesn’t let the side down.

With light to moderate usage, you could quite easily run through two full days in between charges. Even during a more hectic day involving lots of photo taking and a little game playing, we didn’t have to worry about finding a spare socket before bedtime. There was still plenty of juice left in the tank.

Image credit: TechRadar (Image credit: Future)

Playing lots of media will hit the battery hard, as with any phone. Our own test of a 90-minute looping 720p video with the brightness turned up to max sapped 17% on average, which isn’t particularly astounding. But nor is it remotely surprising - the Huawei P30 Pro lost 18% in the same test, even with its bigger battery.

The key here is that the Honor 20, like all Huawei phones, has been fine-tuned to be smart with its energy consumption in general conditions. It also packs in three power-saving modes of varying severity, and a help tool that will quickly identify where more savings could be made.

Even in the rare occasion that you find yourself short of power, Huawei’s generous inclusion of a 22.5W fast charger in the box will see you right. It’s good for a 0 to 50% charge in just 30 minutes.

Camera

Quad-lens camera with 48MP main and 16MP super-wide lenses
No telephoto lens, unlike the Pro
Picture quality is generally very good

We’ve come to expect a lot from our smartphone cameras, to the point where the Honor 20’s quad-lens setup feels perilously close to being par for the course.

Let’s not kid ourselves, though: a 48MP main sensor with a fast f/1.8 aperture, accompanied by a 16MP super-wide-angle unit with an f/2.2 aperture, is pretty serious stuff at this price point.

The other two camera sensors aren’t quite as impressive in isolation, with a pair of 2MP f/2.4 units providing extra depth information and macro photography. What’s lost in all this, as the eagle-eyed will have spotted, is any kind of telephoto lens.

This is one of the more notable features dropped from the Honor 20 Pro package, and it results in disappointing zoom shots. You can still select 2x shots from the Camera UI, but it will just grab you a cropped image from the main sensor. And that means more noise.

That one disappointment aside (two if you count the rather superfluous macro camera), the main Honor 20 camera takes really good, vibrant pictures. Especially when you activate the AI camera mode, which will automatically pick out a scene’s characteristics and make appropriate tweaks and changes to the image processing.

In general, this leads to brighter, more vibrantly colorful shots. Blue skies look bluer, green fields greener, and everything just pops that little bit more. Occasionally this can tend towards the garish, but in general the results are very pleasing.

Switching to the wide-angle camera gives you an interesting new option, though there’s a noticeable drop in quality and shift in tone when you do.

The Honor 20’s AI mode also works well to rein in dynamic range, brightening shade and dimming extreme bright areas without making things look uncanny or false.

You’ll want to flick into Night Mode when things get really dim, though. It’s quite effective at pulling out extra detail in low light conditions, though you’ll need to hold on for a couple of seconds for the image to process.

The 32MP selfie camera, too, can capture sharp and balanced shots - though you’ll want to ignore those tacky Beauty effects. Yuck.

All in all, the Honor 20’s camera isn’t quite as much of a home run as its performance. But that’s mainly because of a certain Google Pixel 3a, which gives you a freakishly accomplished camera experience at a similar price. Of course, that phone also gives you some major performance compromises.