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Watch out OnePlus 6T, the Honor View 20 isn’t messing around [hands-on]

By John Velasco

Published: Jan 11, 2019, 2:51 AM

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Kicking off the new year, Honor is taking much of the attention during a relatively low-key affair for mobile at CES 2019. After the impressive release of the Huawei Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro over the crucial holiday season, the Honor View 20 seems to be delivering many of the same experiences found with those two phones, but it’s aiming to be priced at a significantly more aggressive price point to appeal to a wider reach of people!

An utterly beautiful design

Honor’s flagship is one stunning looking smartphone that’ll garner attention the moment it’s out and in view of the public, mainly in part to how the rear glass surface dazzles in this “V” pattern as light bounces off it. The effect is quite hypnotic, mesmerizing to the eyes because it’s something we don’t typically see in a smartphone. Best of all, the overall construction is just as solid as Huawei’s flagships – while still being fashioned with a 3.5mm headphone jack, rear planted fingerprint sensor, and an IR blaster.

Say adios to the notch

Another intriguing aspect about the Honor View 20’s design is that it doesn’t feature a traditional notch, an aesthetic that some users go bonkers about! Going with the hole-punch notch instead, where the 25MP front-facing camera is positioned towards the upper left corner of the display, it results in a uniform bezel all around the display. And yeah, this new implementation definitely enhances the phone’s aesthetics, as the 6.4-inch Full HD+ FullView Display 3.0 results with a 91.8% screen to body ratio! Not only are the bezels uniform around the display, but the hole-punch notch doesn’t impede the way apps are laid out. Notifications, in particular, are shifted to the right of the notch and don’t technically scroll through it.

A powerhouse like its close siblings

Looking into the specs of the Honor View 20, there’s no denying that it shares a lot with the Huawei Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro. Leveraging the same chipset, the Kirin 980 and coupled with a whopping 8GB of RAM, the phone performs nicely out of the box and should be more than capable of handling just about anything you’ll throw at it. Even though our particular model is accompanied with 256GB of storage, a tally that’s more than ample, there’s no expansion whatsoever. We feel just a smidgen bummed by this, but when you’re dealing with 256GB of storage, or even 128GB with the base model, it shouldn’t be too much of a concern because these are storage options that’ll be more than plentiful for the average person.

Stepping up to the plate with a 48MP camera

Say hello to the world’s first 48MP camera in the smartphone. The Honor View 20’s camera is leveraging the Sony IMX586 sensor paired with an f/1.8 aperture lens. It’s also equipped an advanced rear 3D camera, which not only delivers the same portrait effects we get in many other phones, but it’s unique because this 3D TOF (time-of-flight) sensor can also be tapped into and offer 3D motion-controlled gaming – similar to Microsoft’s Kinect. Even though we’re not totally sold on this idea of gaming, it’s there and available nonetheless if the situation presents itself.

Teased during CES 2019, the Honor View 20’s official unveiling is set for January 22nd in Paris, France. We’ll know more about the phone’s pricing, but we can expect it to be considerably less than its Mate 20 counterparts. In a way, the Honor View 20 is going to compete in almost the same range as the OnePlus 6T. So far, the Honor View 20 seems like another impressive outing for the Chinese company. It may not have all the cool tricks and features that the Mate 20 Pro offers, but we’re betting that many people would settle for having less – just as long as the price is right!