Honor View 20 long-term review

Introduction

For every flagship smartphone, there's always a watered-down alternative that doesn't deliver exactly all the same features but ends up being much cheaper. You can say that the Honor View 20 is technically a watered-down Huawei Mate 20 Pro, but the features that are "watered down" don't dilute the overall experience that we loved on the Mate 20 Pro. This is the closest you'll get to the Mate 20 pro while spending about half as much.

Honor is a sub-brand of Huawei that repacks Huawei phones into cheaper versions, often with the same specifications but with a few key differences: Honor's cameras are not co-branded with Leica as Huawei's are, Honor uses lower-cost displays, and Honor phones don't have premium features like waterproofing or wireless charging.

Honor rebranded its V-series to "View" outside of China starting with the View 10. It had similar specs to the Mate 10 Pro but its appearance was boring and dated by contrast. The View 20 feels as though the View 10 blossomed into a modern premium flagship by comparison.

The Honor View 20 also implements a hole-punch front-facing camera into the display, which further thrust it into modern edge-to-edge designs. We don't have major gripes with this hole-punch camera, but we can't say it's any less obtrusive than a dewdrop-shaped notch.

In this long-term review, we're going to see how the Honor View 20 has held up over the last few months and find out whether any initial concerns were addressed in firmware updates. We also think it's a good chance for the United States audience to take a look and see what they are missing - since the Honor View 20 and most other Chinese phones aren't being sold in the US.

We've taken an extended period of time to really get to know the Honor View 20 - its bright sides along with its quirks and shortcomings. On the next page, we'll get into the design and display of the phone and tell you how they've held up in everyday use.

Design

The Honor View 20 is undeniably a very attractive phone. The most notable thing about it is the ultra-shiny rear glass with a distinct design. It is certainly a topic for conversation, particularly in the US where some of the people we've shown this phone to have never seen or heard of the brand and proceeded to ooh and ahh over how sparkly the back of the phone is.

We're seeing more Chinese phones adopt these ultra-reflective rear glass covers so we're going to look past this for the remainder of this review. The rear glass of the phone is tapered all the way down the edges of the phone which makes it easy to hold and the aluminum frame wraps all the way around the phone, holding its rigidity and sturdiness.

Between the frame and front display panel is a thin plastic buffer that maintains continuity between the frame and the display glass. This buffer is where the ear-piece is placed since there is no upper bezel on the display. There's even a tiny RGB notification LED behind the grille, but it's not very easy to see if your phone is sitting on a coffee table in a bright room. Despite its delicate placement, the earpiece has ample volume. We found ourselves wishing it was a bit louder when trying to make a call at a noisy cafe.

Honor used the View 20 to showcase how well it could put a hole-punch camera into the View 20's camera. This was both Huawei and Honor's first attempt at a display with a hole for the purpose of placing a camera behind it. The execution of the feature isn't perfect as we can see some slight discoloration of pixels around the camera hole, but it does work as intended and could potentially be used in Huawei phones in the future.

Honor explained that this discoloration was intended to keep the LCD's backlight from leaking into the camera. We're glad to say that this hasn't been an issue during our extended time with the phone. You'll only notice the discoloration against white backgrounds and only if you really stare at it. At the end of the day, this phone doesn't have a notch and we find the hole-punch camera to be a wee bit less intrusive to the continuity of the display.

The keys and their positioning are great. The power key is just over halfway up the phone and the volume rocker is just above. When we first used the phone, we found ourselves pressing the space right in between both the power and Vol(-) key and took accidental screenshots this way but accuracy to hit the power key will improve in time.

The placement of the fingerprint scanner on the back is great. It's far enough away from the camera so you won't ever smudge it when unlocking the phone. Like any Huawei or Honor device, the fingerprint is both reliable and snappy. Above the fingerprint scanner is the dual camera comprised of a ToF sensor and a 48MP camera which takes really amazing 12MP shots after pixel binning. We'll talk more about the camera's performance in a dedicated section.

We appreciate a well-designed phone and the View 20 is designed well with no major complaints. We only wish it was water-resistant, but we can forgive that with the price.

Display

The Honor View 20 has an amply sized 6.4-inch IPS LCD and in our initial review, we praised it for its sunlight visibility despite the somewhat average brightness of 479 nits. Huawei's method for improving sunlight legibility is by shifting the colors' intensity to make them more visible in direct sunlight. While it might be okay to see black text on a white background, it's much more difficult to see photos in direct sunlight.

What may be inconvenient for some is the display's incompatibility with polarized sunglasses while in the landscape orientation. The issue doesn't exist when the phone is in the upright portrait orientation, though, so you'd need to flip your navigation setup to portrait.

We prefer editing photos on our computers, but some of us tend to prefer a near-accurate color profile on our devices as well. The Honor View 20 had deeply saturated colors with very cool whites out of the box. We were glad that we could tweak it to a nearly-accurate setting that we liked.

We understand not everyone has a color calibration tool, so simply switching from the "Vivid" profile to the "Normal" one is enough to offset the highly saturated profile that comes by default. We'd imagine the average person would be okay with the default profile. After all, it is vibrant and pleasant to the eye to see photos and videos.

Color temperature settings

The View 20's automatic brightness adjustment works okay. It sometimes doesn't get brightness right as you walk outside and sometimes we need to manually push it to max.

We're glad that this phone doesn't have an ugly notch and while the arguments about this are truly subjective, we prefer a hole-punch to a notch that ruins the continuity of the screen, of course, the same can be said about the hole-punch but the latter is not as obtrusive as the former.

We do have to talk about the execution of the hole-punch camera. As mentioned in the initial review, there is a noticeable darkening of the area immediately surrounding the hole-punch camera. Honor explained this was to prevent the LCD's backlight from leaking into the camera and interfering with the camera.

This isn't ever distracting and you can only see it against a white background. There is also a similar fading at the bottom edge of the display and while this isn't a deal breaker, we expect Honor will address these kind of imperfections in future devices. Perhaps AMOLED displays might be easier implement a hole-punch since the pixels are lit individually.

Notch settings

There's an option to black out the upper section of the display throughout the UI so that it can look like a normal bezel. While it brings symmetry to the display, it does so only in portrait mode. When you watch a YouTube video in the full screen mode, there's no longer a hole in the video - but the radius of the bar doesn't coincide with the radius of the display's lower corners, so it looks a little off.

We're mostly satisfied with the display, but we didn't like how outrageously vivid the colors are out of the box. The display could certainly be sharper and the viewing angles could be a bit better in terms of light shifting - thankfully there's no terrible color shifting. The display is definitely above average but nothing exceptional.

Software

The Honor View 20 is among the first Honor devices to come with the newly-rebranded "Magic UI". The UI was rebranded from EMUI with a new look and new features in China with its Yoyo Assistant. Otherwise, there aren't any drastic changes to Magic UI, it feels and behaves like EMUI did on the Mate 20 Pro.

Magic UI takes a very utilitarian approach to Android with lots of options, settings and features to play with while also keeping a simplified surface layer for those who aren't power users. Some might be put off by the UI's look-alikeness to iOS but it has been better about this over the years.

The launcher still feels very much like Android but Magic UI hasn't gone as far as implementing a swipe-up gesture to open the app drawer. The "drawer' button is used here (should you choose the option) and a vertically scrolling drawer pops up. Though it's far from stock Android, the stock Magic UI launcher has quick access to your Google Feed just like the Pixel - one swipe left from the homescreen.

Home screen • App drawer • Google Feed

Since we started using the View 20, we've got the gesture controls down pat. They are similar to the iPhone's: swipe up from the bottom edge to go home, swipe from either the left or right edge, to go back, and swipe up and hold for recent apps. This indirectly makes it easy for anyone with an iPhone X or newer to switch to a Huawei phone. Oh yeah, and swiping up from either corner of the bottom edge will summon Google Assistant.

What we do miss with gesture controls is quickly switching between two apps by double tapping the Recents nav button. It's not a huge disadvantage because you can still swipe up + hold, and tap in the center, but it requires more thumb travel. No biggie, though because the trade-off is that you get to use the entire length of the screen.

Gesture navigation

Magic UI offers extensive battery settings but the one we're going to look at is the "App Launch" settings. It's the page where you can select which specific apps to manually or automatically manage in terms of when to allow the app to launch itself or manage whether it should run in the background.

Quoted from this page: "When Manage automatically is enabled, some app launches will be prevented based on scenario to save power." This means the UI will judge apps based on their drain and might disable them from running in the background. This is a double edged sword because it could potentially stop any important apps from running in the background like workout or messaging apps. It would be a good idea to check these settings and manually manage important apps so you don't miss important functions or notifications.

App Launch controls

The phone offers the "Digital balance" app which is integrated into the phone and lets you set time limits to apps and as set a bedtime period which turns your display to monochrome to help encourage you to head to sleep. You can also set a separate limits for weekdays and weekends. You can see a visual graph that lets you see how much you've used an individual app in a day or over the last week.

You can also set a screen time limit so you can see your overall screen time and you can see how many times you unlock the device throughout the day so you can perhaps become aware of this and set goals to reduce your unlocks per hour.

Other manufacturers like Apple and Google have built a time management feature into their phones and we feel like Magic UI's implementation is a bit simple. Is it still usable? Yes, but it doesn't have as many other features and visual graphs as other executions of the feature.

Digital Balance

After using a few phones with in-display fingerprint sensors, we came back to the rear-mounted fingerprint on the View 20 and concluded that it is much quicker and more accurate to unlock. There's also face unlock, which isn't as secure, but does offer a "smart notification" feature which hides notifications while the phone is locked but will display them if the front camera sees the registered face.

Lock screen notifications have also come a long way and we're glad they finally behave as they should. In previous EMUI versions, lock screen notifications were annoying, unpredictable, and performable actions on notifications from the lock screen were very limited.

Smart notifications setting

Notable software features

Huawei Share

We like that Huawei has the closest thing to Apple's AirDrop and its called Huawei Share. It works very well and consistently, but it only works among other Honor or Huawei phones or computers. We like that we can instantly see those nearby with Huawei Share enabled and that we can very quickly send full resolution photos and videos.

Huawei Share features

Huawei Share also makes it much easier to print documents directly from your phone onto printers connected to your network. This is especially useful when you need to print boarding passes from your email and would rather not have to pull it up from a desktop.

Huawei Easy Projection

One of the more underrated features of the latest version of Magic UI (or EMUI, for that matter) is the ability to use the device in a desktop interface on higher-end phones. Huawei Easy Projection offers the choice to either mirror the screen's contents or open a desktop interface when connected to an external display, either wireless via Miracast, or an HDMI connection via the USB-C port's TV out.

Huawei Desktop mode

A notification lets you switch between "Desktop mode" and "Phone mode", but the best feature is being able to use both the phone and desktop simultaneously so you can still check your phone while working on a larger display.

Huawei Desktop controls

Although this isn't a feature that everyone would use, we love that Honor decided to keep it for the View 20. Honor could have cut corners by not allowing TV-Out via the USB-C port to save cost but kept it anyway.

One-handed mode

There's a nifty one-handed mode that's easy to access whether you're using nav buttons or gesture controls. Given the phone's large display, this makes it easier to reach everything being shown on the screen while your other hand might be busy holding other things or if you'd just rather want to do some one-handed operation.

Some phone makers don't bother to put any kind of one-handed operation mode so this is nice to see in such a simple implementation.

Performance

We've used smartphones that tend to slow down as time goes on. As you download and use more apps, the operating system tends to bog down to the point where you're forced to use some clean-up or performance booster app that alleviates lag for a couple of days.

Not the Honor View 20. EMUI has incorporated background maintenance and optimization of apps since the Huawei Mate 10 when it first coined the phrase: "Born fast, stay fast". So far, we've not seen any slowdowns that we'd typically begin experiencing with a Samsung, Google, or Apple device after about a month of demanding usage.

This phone doesn't "think", it does everything without hesitation or even stutter. The View 20 even performs well after using a bunch of apps. It feels like the OS is one step ahead of you, just waiting for you to perform the action.

The Kirin 980 is the same 7nm CPU as on the Huawei Mate 20 Pro so it's a seriously powerful yet future-proof chipset. Honestly, Honor could have gotten away with using the previous-generation Kirin 970 and it still might be worth its price, but there would then be that tradeoff. Honor/Huawei never put recycled chips in their more expensive devices because it believes the consumer deserves the best available hardware at that moment.

Although our unit is an 8GB RAM + 256GB model, we have no doubt that the 6GB variant will run just as quickly and smoothly. In terms of gaming performance, there is no game that the View 20 can't handle. If you're chasing higher benchmark scores, the Kirin 980 isn't a chart-topper among 7nm chips by Samsung, Apple, and Qualcomm, but it will deliver excellent real-world performance and the deca-core Mali G76-MP10 GPU will handle any mobile game.

Battery

Our proprietary battery test serves one main purpose: It's an objective test used to compare battery life across devices. Actual power consumption, on the other hand, is subjective. We're not retesting scores here, but we'll talk about some aspects of battery life that are worth revisiting.

In real-world usage, the Honor View 20 performed exceptionally well. With a full battery charge, we didn't have to worry about battery life for at least 24 hours. Not only this, but we found an average endurance of about a day and a half of use, averaging between 5 to 6 hours of screen-on time.

Real world usage was roughly along the lines of the following:

• One hour of google maps navigation and/or simultaneously streaming Spotify over Bluetooth
• Two hours of scrolling through social media apps.
• Two hours of messaging apps: Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp
• One hour watching videos on YouTube or on workout apps

We love that the View 20 supports both Huawei Super Charge and Qualcomm Quick Charge because you at least have an alternative that isn't as slow as molasses. With the Super Charger, a 10 to 20 minute top-up can make a great difference if you're quickly getting ready to head out the door.

We tested this exact scenario and from a 10% battery and after the first 10 minutes, we were at 27% capacity, which should be enough to comfortably last you through a few hours on a night out. We charged it for 10 more minutes and it reached 44%. With light to moderate usage, you could easily make it through a work shift with this much charge.

During our time with the View 20, on one occasion we were able to go out to a music show at a bar and headed there with 21% battery. We were out for no more than three hours, during which we were taking photos, videos, and posting some Instagram stories - we made it back with 10% to spare.

Camera

We had high expectations from the View 20's camera, particularly since the Huawei Mate 20 Pro has a triple camera with a 40MP sensor and the View 20's has a higher-res 48MP one. We're happy to say that this camera does not disappoint. At the price point, it certainly has its advantages over the OnePlus 6T, an identically priced competitor.

The camera itself uses a new kind of depth sensor that we're seeing more smartphones implement for depth mapping. This is the ToF or "time of flight" sensor. The verdict on whether the ToF sensor can synthesize a better bokeh effect is in: it doesn't make it much better than before. The View 20 camera does have a feature that makes use of the ToF sensor and that's body shaping.

The camera can make you appear to be thinner in your full body pictures. This feature only works in portrait mode when shooting in the main camera. We're not too fond of doing this, but perhaps Honor's Asian demographic is more likely to use this.

The View 20 has Huawei's proper Night mode, which allows the user to take a long-exposure shot while electronically stabilizing handheld motions. Of course you have to keep it somewhat still and the results are pretty consistent.

Although there is a second camera, the View 20 doesn't offer any hybrid zoom feature. It does have a zoom button to toggle between 1X and 2X zoom, but the 2X zoom frame is actually a crop of the high-resolution 48MP sensor. The zoomed pictures still look okay but noticeably inferior in details since there's no pixel binning.

The View 20 lets you shoot in two full-resolution 48MP modes, and the default 12MP mode, which uses pixel binning. Since the main camera is 48MP, shooting in 2X will simply be a crop of the full 48MP resolution. We recommend not zooming, but walking up closer to the subject.

There's otherwise the 48MP Ultra Clarity mode, which takes a few images in full resolution and stacks them together to capture more details, but the drawback to this is that it takes several seconds to shoot in this mode so your scene and subject should have no movement.

Samples

In everyday camera shooting, we never found ourselves switching from the default 12MP mode. It offers the best dynamic range and the best clarity. Even full resolution 48MP images look kind of soft by comparison. We've compiled a few daylight shots with each shooting mode so you can compare the final result between the resolution modes.

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Day Samples: 12MP • 48MP • 48MP Ultra Clarity

In some of the samples we shot, we found inconsistent white balance when switching between the different resolutions modes. Otherwise, we find that the most consistent image with the best dynamic range, exposure, and sharpness will be with the standard 12MP mode.

Shooting in the 48MP mode makes images look softer and the other Ultra AI Clarity mode takes several seconds to capture a still. We'd recommend using either full resolution mode with a tripod and use the 12MP mode in all other scenarios.

Since most people are going to upload these photos to social media, you will not see a benefit to shooting in a softer 48MP mode only for the image to be further compressed. Stick to the 12MP mode.

Low-Light samples

There are actually two approaches to shooting in night mode. Since the 48MP camera is binning four pixels into one, it is able to capture ample amounts of light. Because of this, you can shoot in either standard automatic mode or the proper Night mode.

The mode you should use will depend on the amount of light available at the scene, and whether there's movement in the scene or not. The easiest way to see is to shoot a regular photos and see if you got the shot. If not, proceed to shoot with Night Mode. Check out samples from both modes below.

Low light: Auto • Night mode

When shooting in night mode, you can manually select a shutter speed or ISO. We found that Night mode can be too aggressive and the resulting photos look too unrealistic. If you have time, you should play with the ISO level when taking a night mode shot, depending on the available light, you can shoot somewhere between 400 and 1000 ISO and get a shot that was more convincingly taken at night.

Selfie

We were mostly satisfied with the selfie camera on the Honor View 20. There's a good amount of detail thanks to the 25MP camera, while sharpness and contrast are okay. Depending on the person you are, it might annoy you that the selfie camera's default shooting mode is portrait mode.

If this bothers you, you can always turn off the beautification features and you can take a normal selfie. The point of this is so that selfie takers who like to use beautification all the time can take advantage of it every time the selfie camera is opened. It won't apply a blur effect unless you select one.

Selfie beautification: Off • 5/10

Resolved details are above average, but details in the background of the selfie taker suffer a different fate. If you'd rather take vanity selfies, beautification mode works well enough, but those who zoom into the image might be able to tell the extra processing noise throughout. Also, dynamic range is not very good with the light coming in from outside the windows.

Selfie: HDR and AI OFF • HDR ON • HDR and AI ON

We found that the selfie camera is lacking in dynamic range. Toggling HDR on does have a noticable improvement, but it still wasn't enough to avoid highlights getting clipped. Toggling AI in addition to HDR will slightly boost colors depending on what the AI sees, but that's about it. Depending on the lighting, the selfie camera may also over expose areas of your face.

In bright light, we found selfies to wash out skin color, even on darker-skinned people. This always tends to be the case with Chinese selfie cameras, however. This wasn't as much of an issue with in warmer lighting like indoors or at dusk. The Chinese market has different camera needs and different standards of beauty than Western cultures.

We found that taking selfies with both HDR and AI turned off didn't give us very good results, particularly when sky is involved - images were underexposed and losing details in the shadows. Turning only HDR on was an improvement, but improved exposure about half a step. Kicking the AI toggle in addition to the HDR mode helped tremendously and colors were slightly boosted as an added bonus. We recommend shooting with both AI and HDR enabled when using the selfie camera.

The front camera on the View 20 took surprisingly good video. Sharpness and contrast were good and there was even an HDR selfie video mode which raised contrast and warmed colors a bit. 1080p video is the max resolution and the electronic image stabilization could potentially take nice-looking vlog footage. The only downside is the crop factor is very apparent and your face will barely fit the frame.

The focal distance of the selfie cameras is pretty good so you shouldn't have any issue with your selfies being out of focus, unless you the camera is too close to your face.

As opposed to with selfie stills, we recommend shooting selfie video with HDR and AI turned OFF. HDR and AI requires more processing and EIS took a noticeable hit in performance. In the second video above, you can see the shake is noticeably more apparent.

Frustrations, annoyances

Gripes with Gesture controls and third-party launchers

Magic UI lets you change the launcher, but the process to do so isn't as straightforward as on other Android skins. You need to go into the Settings > Apps > Default Apps > Launcher. Any third party launcher works excellently on the View 20 - as long as you're not using gesture controls.

The stock launcher is the one that works best with these controls because the behavior is consistent. When you have gesture navigation enabled and are using a third-party launcher, entering and exiting the "Recent apps" window acts strangely. Normally, if you open recent apps by swiping up and holding, you'd swipe up again to go back home. This isn't the case when using a third party launcher.

Weak vibrate motor

The vibration motor isn't anything to write home about. If you have taptic typing enabled, the vibrations aren't firm and precise. Frankly, the motor feels like it belongs on an Android flagship from 2011. This isn't a deal breaker, more so an observation.

Tiny notification LED

We appreciate that there's a notification LED on the View 20. However, its placement right behind the earpiece grille makes it difficult to see when it's sitting on a table across the room. You'll only be able to see the LED in a dark or dimly lit room.

It is placed in such a way that you can't see if the top of the phone isn't facing towards you. It feels like the LED was an afterthought.

Loudspeaker

The bottom firing loudpeaker is average at best. Watching videos is loud enough, but a fan in the room can easily drown its volume.

Gimmicks

Party mode

This app comes preinstalled on the View 20 and its premise and purpose is very simple. With this app, you can play a locally stored MP3 across two or more Honor phones' loudspeakers to amplify the sound. While it might be fun to use when your friends with Honor phones are nearby, this feature is limited to playing back MP3 files.

Party Mode

You are better off investing in a portable Bluetooth speaker for a more practical use-case.

HiTouch

HiTouch is a sort of Google Lens feature that's built into the UI. Whenever you see something or interest or something you'd like to buy, you can tap and hold two fingers on the image and HiTouch will show you suggestions for what the item is and where you can buy it.

It could work fairly well to find similar-looking pieces of clothing that an Instagram model is wearing, but the feature is more hit-or-miss for us. The same can be said about Google Lens... yeah, perhaps they are both a little gimmicky.

HiTouch

3D motion games

Honor has showed one of these games off at the View 20's launch event and during CES. Hooking the phone up to a physical HDMI connection or a wireless Miracast mirroring session, the phone's ToF sensor can be used to input body movement into a video game.

The idea is cool on paper, but even while watching the initial demos we could tell this was going to be a novelty feature that would quickly run out of gas. There's a noticeable lag between the action of the player and the input of the game and there are only two games that support the ToF sensor. A downhill skiing one and a dart-throwing game.

AR Body Skiing

Though this is the first device of its kind from Honor, we're not sure that a Kinect-style-gaming experience is anything worth our long-term attention, particularly when Microsoft discontinued its more sophisticated Xbox Kinect platform about a year and a half ago.

AR Lens and 3D QMoji

The View 20's camera comes with an AR Lens mode which offers silly Snapchat-style filters that work directly in the camera app. There are backgrounds filters - which don't work well in the first place, and there are also foreground filtes which do things like add kitty cat ears or sunglasses.

Finally, there's 3D QMoji, which is Huawei's answer to the iPhone's Memoji. It doesn't actually work well at all unless you're in a well-lit room. Even then, characters just don't move very smoothly and you can only use it with the front camera, which doesn't have any kind of 3D sensing ability like the main camera and its ToF sensor.

AR Lens: QMoji • Effects • Background

Hole-punch camera (kind of)

This one is arguable. The hole-punch camera is a new trend in smartphones where a front-facing camera keeps its location above a display, but while maximizing usable area and minimizing bezels. In the case of the View 20, the hole-punch camera doesn't sacrifice anything in functionality and has no need to use an unsightly notch.

The only downside is the execution, which isn't 100% perfect. Aside from the dimly-placed LED notification light, there's the topic of the slight fading around the front camera to prevent light from leaking in. This doesn't excuse why the fading could also be seen along the bottom edge of the phone.

It isn't to say that none of these features will ever be useful to you. We're sure there are a few people who really rely on using HiVoice or who might use Party Mode on a daily basis. What we're saying is that Magic UI could afford to discontinue some of these features while still keeping the overall experience it intended.

Conclusion

Honor's numerically numbered phone (Honor 8, Honor 9, Honor 10) used to be the company's global flagship. Then it decided to shift direction with its portfolio and put a higher-end device that would be even closer to Huawei's currently reigning premium flagships ever since the View 10 with its similarities to the Mate 10 Pro at that time.

Honor knows what it's doing. It has all the resources it needs to really push the limits of what to expect in the price range that the View 20 competes in. It sits between the $500 and $600 price range but could easily push $600 if it offered a couple more features like waterproofing and wireless charging.

The Honor View 20 has a slightly smaller battery (still 4,000 mAh), it has a lower-resolution display (still just as large), it doesn't have wireless charging (still supports Super Charge), and it doesn't have the triple camera for zoom or wide angles (but a higher resolution sensor with comparable performance and night mode).

Our point here is that Huawei could have trimmed even more of the Mate 20 Pro features like Night Mode, Desktop mode, and NFC but they didn't. We're amazed that the View 20 Pro has full desktop interface support like the Mate 20 Pro which can even be performed over a Miracast connection.

Those extra features don't matter to most people, which is why this is a great phone for those who don't care about the more unnecessary (arguably luxury) features. As we've said throughout this long-term review: this phone is a far more affordable version of the Mate 20 Pro without the features that most people don't need.

The Mate 20 Pro comparison aside, this phone is an excellent competitor to the OnePlus 6T. After all, it's priced identically and has similar features. Each one has different software experiences, but the camera sets the View 20 apart with more versatility and a superior selfie camera.

As for the phone's predecessor, the View 10, this one was more difficult to be excited about due to its bland looks. But Honor and other lower-cost Chinese phone companies have begun to address the boring metal jacket design in favor of a flashy glass sandwich design, which we aren't complaining about, but it's possible the market might become bored of flashy glass, which will set off a new design trend set over the next few years.

We test a lot of phones, and as a result, our attention span of excitement between devices has diminished. The View 20 changes this. Although it's a cheaper phone, it didn't feel like one, it felt like it was right up there with the more expensive flagship phones.

Are there places where the View 20 could have improved? Yeah, but not too many. Is the View 20 going to satisfy everyone? Perhaps not. Magic UI isn't everyone's favorite UI whether it's because of its appearance or more specific UI behaviors. But if you are coming from an iPhone, Magic UI/EMUI is a great Android skin to start with since it somewhat feels like iOS and yet, it is very much Android in most other aspects. The likeness to iOS is much less apparent now than in previous versions of EMUI.

Those who buy the View 20 will not be disappointed. If the View 20 isn't your cup of joe, check out the OnePlus 6T or the Xiaomi Mi 9. If you're after something that isn't Chinese, then you can perhaps take a look between Samsung and Apple's major offerings like most people in the US already do. The United States market doesn't know what it's missing.

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