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Huawei
LifestyleGadgets

Honor View 20 first look: hole-punch selfie camera replaces notch, and a 48-megapixel main camera

  • Huawei sub-brand is first to market with front-facing camera housed in a hole punched in display instead of a notch, a trend likely to stick in 2019
  • Its main camera can take ultra-bright 12-megapixel photos or huge-resolution images and, LCD display aside, handset’s specs match flagship phones

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The Honor View 20 has a 6.4-inch, 1080p LCD display, with a “hole-punch” housing in the screen’s top left-hand corner for a selfie camera. It is the first phone with this technology to come to market. Photo: Ben Sin
Ben Sin
In 2018 we saw makers of Android phones either copy the iPhone’s notch – that tiny black cut-out at the top of the Apple handset’s edge-to-edge screen – or adopt extreme measures to avoid it. A second screen on the back, for example, or an entire top chassis that moves up and down.

This year, the trend appears to be to drill a “hole” into the screen where a selfie camera can be placed.

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This is a trend that will probably stick because both Huawei and Samsung – the two largest phone brands by handsets sold last year – have committed to it. Samsung recently unveiled a mid-tier handset with the design, and its next flagship, the Galaxy S10, will also have it.

As has been the case lately, China’s Huawei beat the South Korean manufacturer to the punch. Launched under its sub-brand Honor, the View 20 is the first phone to hit the market with this so-called “hole-punch” design.

One of the few compromises the mid-tier Honor View 20 makes is with the display, which has an LCD panel rather than an OLED one. Photo: Ben Sin
One of the few compromises the mid-tier Honor View 20 makes is with the display, which has an LCD panel rather than an OLED one. Photo: Ben Sin

Inside the View 20’s hole is a 25-megapixel selfie camera; with a diameter of 4.6mm, Honor says its is a “smaller hole” than Samsung is offering. Personally, the notch has never bothered me much, and there’s debate to be had about whether a hole in the corner of the screen looks better than a small, centrally placed notch connected to the top chassis.

However, objectively speaking, the hole does mean less screen space is wasted; the View 20’s 6.4-inch LCD display has a screen-to-body ratio of more than 91 per cent.

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