Review | Honor 20 Pro full review: telephoto, wide angle lenses welcome – but should you buy one?

New handset has a lot in common with the Honor View 20 launched five months ago, and the latter could be a better option unless you need 20 Pro for its camera

Quite apart from these similarities, if US government’s war on parent Huawei continues and Google won’t service it, don’t buy Honor 20 if you’re outside China

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Front and back views of Chinese tech giant Huawei’s new Honor 20 Pro smartphone. With a 6.3-inch screen, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of memory, the handset is impressive. Photo: Ben Sin

Published: 9:15am, 25 May 2019Updated: 7:20pm, 26 May 2019

Huawei sub-brand Honor launched its 20 series smartphones two days after Google announced it would suspend business with the Chinese technology giant to comply with a United States government directive, casting a big shadow over its future.

Despite efforts to quell the concerns of consumers, there’s no getting around the fact that, unless the US government stops its all-out assault on Huawei, Honor would be better off shelving its new phone or it will be dead on arrival.

That would be a shame, because there’s quite a bit to like about the Honor 20 Pro, although it is very similar to a model released just five months ago.

The Honor 20 series comprises three devices – something that’s fast becoming the norm for phone brands: the top-tier “Pro” model, an entry-level “Lite”, and a standard device that strikes a happy medium. It’s the Honor 20 Pro that’s being tested in this review.

The camera bump on the Honor 20 Pro is quite large by 2019 standards. Photo: Ben Sin

The Honor 20 Pro has many similarities with the brand’s previous release, the View 20, which went on sale in January. Both phones have the same screen: a 1080-pixel LCD panel with a hole drilled into the upper left corner to house the selfie camera; the same Kirin 980 chipset; and the same 48-megapixel main camera sourced from Sony.

The back is still glass, and there’s a graduated colour-shifting paint job – a trend that’s becoming tiring, and one that Huawei started.