Huawei Unveils P20 Pro: Price, Specs, Release Date, Features

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The Huawei P20 Pro has now been announced, officially taking the spot of top flagship from the Chinese smartphone manufacturer. We’ve compiled a list of Huawei P20 Pro specifications to help you get a sense of what’s in store when the phone releases in the next few days.

One thing worth noting about the Huawei P20 Pro is how much of a departure it is from its predecessor. While Samsung chose to simply refine what they had with the S8 when they released the Galaxy S9, the Huawei P20 Pro comes with a slew of new features and upgrades that make it a clear upgrade over the previous entries in the Huawei product family. As a phone that feels fresh and different on the smartphone market – a welcome change when compared to devices that are starting to feel the same year after year.

Design

From a design standpoint, the most noticeable thing you’ll see about the Huawei P20 Pro is the Notch in the top of the phone. The iPhone X took the smartphone market by storm over the holidays, and it appears as if Huawei is trying to capitalize on that success by offering their own take on that design.

However, while the Notch is something we saw just recently with the iPhone X, the Huawei P20 Pro does innovate in several ways: one of them being the unique coloring. The P20 Pro features a dual-tone paint job that shifts color depending on how it catches the light, giving the phone a unique aesthetic that certainly stands out from a sea of black and grey smartphones. While the HTC U11 showed an iridescent design last year that was somewhat similar, Huawei brought it to the next level by using “non-conductive vacuum metalizing” in order to give us a unique gradient finish on the Huawei P20 Pro, unlike anything we’ve seen before. However, the finish does have its downside as that it’s a major attractor for fingerprints. Considering that the finish is brand new and quite beautiful, we view it as a positive thing rather than a detractor.

Camera

As mentioned above, the Huawei P20 Pro innovates in a number of ways – and another one of those innovations is with the camera. With the first triple lens system, we’re excited to see just how great the photos from this high-end flagships turns out. Huawei added a third lens to the back of the P20 Pro – providing an 8-megapixel camera with optical stabilization. It allows for 3x optical zoom or a 5x hybrid zoom – giving you the ability to take clear photos no matter the distance.

The traditional Huawei setup that includes data from a monochrome and color sensor can be expected on the Huawei P20 Pro, but the color sensor has an extremely impressive 40 megapixels. The front camera is a 24-megapixel setup that is housed in the notch at the top of the phone’s display. While the Notch on the Huawei P20 Pro doesn’t include technology that is as sophisticated as FaceID, it is the first P-series phone from the company to feature Face Unlock.

Overall, you should see incredible photos out of the Huawei P20 Pro. Whether this third lens is impressive enough to become standard in the future remains to be seen, but it certainly seems like it could be trailblazing the way towards further innovation in the future for smartphones as a whole.

Features

While the majority of phones are shrinking bezels to the point where fingerprint sensors have to move to the back of the device – a practical but somewhat inconvenient placement – the Huawei P20 Pro retains the traditional home button and fingerprint sensor combo. The capacitive button has gotten good reviews from users overall, and accepts gestures that can make the usual Android navigation bar rather useless.

Unfortunately, we’ll see the Huawei P20 Pro ship without a headphone jack – although we will see LDAC support in order to allow higher-bitrate Bluetooth audio streaming. While that doesn’t solve the problem of needing specific headphones that support Bluetooth, it does somewhat address the issue of lover audio quality.

The technical specifications include a powerful Kirin 970 processor, from Huawei themselves, a 4000 mAh battery and 6GB of RAM, and 128GB of Storage. Both phones will have dual-SIM options as well as an IR blaster. The operating system will be skinned with Huawei EMUI which has gotten mixed reviews in terms of usability and design.

The Huawei P20 Pro ships on the 6th of April for €899 (around $1100), but will not be available in the US at launch.

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