The 12 months of the notch continues, with the Huawei P20 Professional the newest flagship system to sport one; though to distract from its adopting the design now synonymous with Apple’s iPhone X, Huawei is specializing in the P20 Professional’s rear digital camera prowess.
Introduced alongside the Huawei P20, the P20 Professional comes with a a lot larger spec, together with three cameras on the rear which are set to be a giant a part of the advertising and marketing for the brand new handset.
In addition to these three cameras, all the pieces else right here seems high-end too. We’ve had a bit of time to check out the handset, and we’ve put collectively our first ideas on this Huawei P20 Professional hands-on evaluation.
Watch our arms on video evaluation of the Huawei P20 Professional under
Huawei P20 Professional launch date and worth
The Huawei P20 Professional will likely be on sale within the UK from April 6, however the firm has no plans to carry the cellphone to the US. We do not presently know if it’s going to be coming to Australia both.
It is costly at £799 (about $1,110, AU$1,450) with offers for the cellphone beginning at across the £40 a month with 1GB of information to make use of. We have seen offers within the UK from the primary networks like EE, Three, Vodafone and O2, plus you can even purchase it instantly from Carphone Warehouse too.
Design and show
The Huawei P20 Professional is undeniably one of many best-looking and best-built telephones the corporate has ever made.
In contrast to the Huawei P10 Plus, the P20 Professional encompasses a glass again that sits comfortably within the hand. It has rounded edges on the rear so it properly sits in your palm, and it feels just like the optimum measurement for a smartphone.
It’s a contact greater than the Huawei P20, however we discovered it simpler to carry due to the curved rear and a neatly thought-out design. There are metallic edges to the system, however these are additionally rounded, and don’t poke into your hand.
The ability button sits on the right-hand edge and the again of the cellphone is apparent, aside from the branding emblazoned down the sting and the three cameras on the high of the handset.
In contrast to the Huawei P20, this cellphone is waterproof, with an IP67 score. Which means it’ll survive the odd unintentional dunk within the sink, however Huawei has additionally given this as an excuse for not together with a three.5mm headphone jack.
If you wish to use wired headsets with the cellphone, you’ll have to make use of a dongle that’ll be included within the field.
Colour choices are black and midnight blue for the usual design, whereas there’s a ‘gradient’ end on each the twilight and pink gold choices. That is Huawei’s identify for the end, which reveals a spectrum of colours relying on what angle you are wanting on the system from, and the lighting.
We notably appreciated the twilight model, because it seems completely different to something we’ve seen on a cellphone earlier than, and the gradient impact is not as spectacular on the pink gold model.
The P20 Professional has an enormous 6.1-inch 18:9 facet ratio OLED show, however due to its nearly bezel-less design it doesn’t really feel like a cellphone with that enormous a display. The show is Full HD+, so it doesn’t look as beautiful because the Samsung Galaxy S9 show, nevertheless it’s nonetheless a looker, and grabs your eye instantly when it’s turned on.
On the high of the display is the notch, which homes the front-facing digital camera and speaker. If you need you possibly can conceal the notch by changing the display on both aspect of it with an on-screen black bezel on which the time and your notifications are displayed; you may lose a bit of by way of general display measurement, however you might choose the cleaner look.
Efficiency and specs
Contained in the Huawei P20 Professional there’s a Kirin 970 chipset. We noticed this carry out nicely in final 12 months’s Huawei Mate 10 Pro, so we hope its successor will have the ability to preserve tempo with the opposite flagship telephones introduced this 12 months.
That chipset features a neural processing unit, which Huawei is placing a giant give attention to for each the P20 and P20 Professional, because it’s on the coronary heart of the substitute intelligence options inside the brand new telephones.
A whole lot of the AI enhancements listed here are throughout the digital camera, permitting it, for instance, to routinely detect the kind of scene you’re taking pictures.
We famous that the cellphone itself was snappy in our restricted checks, however we are able to’t presently touch upon how briskly it’ll work for each day taking pictures.
There’s just one model of the P20 Professional around the globe, and it comes with an enormous 6GB of RAM working away behind the scenes and 128GB of storage, so you need to have loads of house for all of your media and apps.
Huawei confirmed to TechSwitch that there will likely be microSD assist, however proper now we don’t know the way excessive capability playing cards will likely be supported.
Android eight.1 Oreo software program is on board right here, nevertheless it seems completely different to what you’ll see on different telephones because it comes within the type of Huawei’s personal Emotion UI eight.1.
That’s a really particular overlay that comes with just a few additional options, together with apps like Huawei Share (which lets you switch knowledge between your cellphone and PC simply), but additionally has a really particular look that not everybody loves.
There’s a four,000mAh battery contained in the P20 Professional, which ought to carry out nicely contemplating the cellphone has a well-optimized chipset, so we’ll be sure you push it to its limits when it’s time for our full evaluation.
Huawei’s Tremendous Cost fast-charging know-how is packed in right here too, so you need to have the ability to cost your cellphone up speedily as with earlier Huawei handsets.
Digital camera
Huawei is placing plenty of its eggs into the camera-shaped basket with the P20 Professional. The Leica partnership is continuous, so the setup right here is inbuilt collaboration with that firm, and it is the primary time we’ve seen three cameras on the rear of a cellphone.
Why would you want three cameras you might nicely ask? The considering is much like that behind the P10 and different telephones earlier than it, however now Huawei has added a telephoto lens as nicely.
Huawei has constructed quite a few cameras with each a colour and black and white sensor working in tandem to get pictures with improved depth and definition, and now that telephoto lens may even allow you to zoom with no lack of picture high quality.
The RGB (that’s colour) lens is a whopping 40MP this time round, and that works alongside a 20MP monochrome sensor. To your regular, common automated mode image it’ll mix the photographs from the 2 lenses.
Above the RGB lens, which sits in the midst of the array, you’ll discover an 8MP telephoto sensor. This permits for as much as 5x lossless zoom, and whereas we’ve seen comparable lenses on earlier handsets from completely different corporations, in our restricted testing the P20 Professional’s take appeared spectacular.
We performed round with the zoom function, which is simple to entry throughout the digital camera app, and we have been unable to see a high quality distinction in zoomed photographs in comparison with wide-angle ones on the cellphone display.
We’ll dig into the opposite digital camera enhancements throughout our full evaluation, however if you’d like the top-end digital camera from Huawei you’ll must go for the P20 Professional moderately than the P20.
There’s an enormous 24MP selfie shooter on the entrance of the cellphone, however we’ve not had a lot alternative to mess around with it but to find the way it compares to different front-facing cameras.
Early verdict
The Huawei P20 Professional is placing such a giant give attention to the digital camera enhancements that the opposite parts of the cellphone appear comparatively restricted by way of upgrades. That mentioned, all the pieces seems as much as scratch, and that is the best-looking cellphone from Huawei but.
The digital camera is the star right here although, and if you’d like among the best shooters on an Android cellphone the P20 Professional might be the cellphone to go for – we’ll must do some additional testing first to search out out what it might actually obtain.