Huawei P20 Lite Review – Mid Range Beast of 2018?

Huawei’s Honor series has been quite popular in India but they don’t have too many devices under the branding. The Chinese manufacturer Huawei, recently added P20 lite the mid-range smartphone with a notch to their list. The P20 lite has a same Kirin 659 processor, a chip as in the Honor 9 lite and Huawei Nova 2. Huawei P20 lite comes with 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal storage, priced at Rs. 19,999 in India.

Huawei P20 Lite Review – Mid Range Beast of 2018?

The Huawei P20 Lite is a phone that gets appreciated on its own merits.  Here is our detailed review of Huawei P20 lite.

Design

With its notched edge to edge screen, the p20 light brings to mind much more expensive phones like iPhone 10 model. We are not sure if the back is plastic or glass but it feels nice and we like the shiny highlights around the rear-mounted fingerprint reader and the dual camera one thing we did notice is that there is a pretty big gap between the back and the frame which could collect lint or dust over time and needless to say this phone isn’t waterproof it is quite lightweight though and the raised edges on this metal frame give it a decent grip.

We tried out the fingerprint reader is fast and responsive and always ready to wake up the phone you can also use facial recognition to unlock the p20 light and it works well there’s a notification LED too. On the left side, Huawei P20 lite have a hybrid slot which can be used to expand the 32 or 64 gigs of internal storage for audio there is a single bottom firing speaker next to the USB-C ports. It’s quite loud even rivaling the speaker of the regular P20. If you plug your headphones into the 3.5 mm jack you can even listen to FM radio both of which you can’t do on the more expensive P20.

Display

The Huawei P20 lite has a 5.84-inch IPS LCD with the minimal bezels in at all 19:9 aspect ratio. It has really deep blacks for an LCD and the notch doesn’t get in the way of content which is nice. If you want you can choose to hide the notch by turning the upper strip of the screen black. Unfortunately, although this display is pretty bright around 418 its sunlight legibility is not a strong point and it is barely average. It has the option to turn off the top notch in the settings.

Performance and Battery

The UI of the P20 lite is EMUI 8.0 which is based on Android 8.0. It runs pretty smoothly and it isn’t nearly stock Android though Huawei provides its own proprietary apps instead of relying on those from Google you can choose between having apps on the home screen or in an app drawer as well as change themes and transition effects and updates will roll out. According to Huawei schedule unlike phones in the Android One program, the p20 lite has a Keren 659 chipset in 4 gigs of ram it does a decent job but the 659 has been around for about 2 years already in benchmarks it trails behind some of the newer mid-range competition, especially in graphics performance. But in the games, we didn’t notice any glaring issues and the phone doesn’t run too hot or throttle under stress battery. Huawei P20 lite isn’t a champion but it does all right in 3000 milliamp-hour battery. With Huawei P20 Lite’s fast charging we got a mixed experience with the charging speed and getting between 19 and 30 percent in the first half hour. Charging the entire battery took anywhere between 2 to 3 hours.

Camera

The Huawei p20 lite has a dual camera setup. There is a 16-megapixel main camera with face detection and autofocus and it will make a pixel secondary camera which is only there to support bokeh mode. In good light condition, the main camera of Huawei P20 lite does a nice job. Shots have great contrast, accurate colors and above-average dynamic range. There is some visible noise but it doesn’t get in the way in low-light photos come out normal. There is little noise and colors come out fine but a bit washed out they’re little soft too we were sort of disappointed with the cameras night mode.

It comes loaded with plenty of camera features like pro mode, lens stickers, HDR, night shot, panoramas, light painting, moving picture, time-lapse in slow-mo. To name a few there is the wide aperture mode which simulates apertures of f- 0.95 to f-16 but limits the resolution to 8 megapixels selfies. On the other hand, P20 lite handled by a 16-megapixel camera with fewer features like panorama layer lens, time lapse filter, and watermark. It doesn’t have the same camera-assisted white aperture mode but has bokeh effect and portrait mode with Beauty levels.

Camera performance of Huawei P20 lite is good as autofocus is fast and captures quickly. Photos generated by P20 lite have vibrant colors with sharp details and good dynamic range, especially in bright conditions. We got decent results from the white aperture effect even when the subject is close to the background selfies. When it comes to video, the p20 lite maxes at 1080p resolution at 30 FPS with stereo audio. It is sharp with good dynamic range and decent colors but doesn’t offer video stabilization.

Huawei P20 Lite – Worth Buying?

Huawei P20 lite owns all the premium features that a mid-range device can have. All we can say is, Huawei P20 lite is a good looking smartphone with an average camera.  The Huawei P20 lite offers decent performance for day-to-day usage. If you consider the design and the camera, the price tag of Huawei P20 lite is justified. Still, if we talk about the negative side, it doesn’t have a strong battery backup, that is the much-needed thing for many. And also, the chipset Kirin 659 is not at all the best chipset. For a pricing of 20k, a better chipset could have been better.