Huawei P20 Lite review...
Introduction
The lite series used to be the new minis, but then people voted against the compact phones sharing nothing with the headliner but the name. So, today the latest Huawei P20 Lite isn't just a fancy name bearer - it has what it takes to be worthy of the P20 branding - the notched screen, the glass design with gradient paint, a dual-camera on the back, Face Unlock as well.
The so-called bezel-less notched screens have just made it to the mid-range, but they are becoming the next big thing there. And while we don't exactly fancy those, they surely look modern. Whether the aesthetics of the notch appeal to you will be up to personal preference.
The P20 Lite also packs a dual-camera and there is a high-res selfie snapper at the front, capable of defocusing backgrounds, too.
One thing that hasn't changed for a while in the Lite series is the Kirin chip. It's two-years-old already and it might become outdated sooner rather than later. We'll keep a closer eye on that in the performance section.
Huawei P20 Lite specs
- Body: Front glass, aluminum frame, (probably) plastic back
- Screen: 5.84" IPS LCD of 1,080 x 2,280px resolution (432ppi)
- Camera: 16MP + 2MP dual-camera with phase-detection AF, f/2.2 aperture; LED flash; 1080p video capture @ 30 fps;
- Selfie cam: 16MP (Global) or 24MP (India, China); f/2.0; 1080p @ 30fps video
- Chipset: 16nm Kirin 659, octa-core CPU (4xCortex-A53@2.36GHz + 4xCortex-A53@1.7GHz), dual-core Mali-T830 GPU
- Memory: 4GB of RAM, 32GB / 64GB of storage; hybrid microSD slot
- OS: Android 8.0 Oreo with Huawei EMUI 8.0
- Battery: 3,000mAh Li-Po (sealed)
- Connectivity: Dual-SIM; LTE-A (Cat.6 300/50Mbps); microUSB; Wi-Fi b/g/n; GPS/GLONASS; Bluetooth 4.2; FM radio; NFC (region-dependent)
- Misc: Rear-mounted fingerprint reader
You might think the hype is equally shared between the P20 phones, but Huawei is actually widely advertising the Lite and Pro models, while often leaving the P20 out of the spotlight. And there is a reason for that - the Pro has the Leica Triple Camera, while the Lite has many trendy features on the cheap. Then there is the P20 that is, well, just ordinary.
Today we welcome the Huawei P20 Lite and we'll see how it stacks against the already overcrowded mid-range segment.
Huawei P20 Lite Unboxing
Huawei has treated the P20 Lite quite well - the phone comes bundled with an 18W fast charger, a USB Type-C cable, and a headset.
A case isn't included as it was with many other Huawei and Honor phones, but we appreciate the provided fast charger even though we had mixed experience with it. But more on that in the battery section.
Now let's see what the phone looks like on the outside.
Design and spin
Huawei P20 Lite impresses with a large, almost bezel-less, screen with a notch. And that has affected the overall design.
Huawei has gone with a simple, no-nonsense design - the internals are sandwiched between two flat panels and there is a metal frame to bind them together all adding to smooth and streamlined lines. And it has worked really well for the P20 Lite.
The P20 Lite is as large as the P20, but weighs 20g less at 145g probably due to the choice of materials, smaller camera modules and battery.
Speaking of materials, we already mentioned the two flat panels. The front one glass alright, but we can only guess what material the back is made of. The thing is that we can't easily tell - it looks like glass, it feels like glass, but Huawei never confirmed it's indeed glass.
The aluminium frame has a grippy matte finish balancing the slippery panels. Huawei also scooped out two tiny canals throughout the entire frame adding even more grip to the P20 Lite. And while the phone doesn't feel very secure when held in hand the Lite design is among the better ones when it comes to grip.
It's hard to tell the P20 phones apart, though it's rather easy to spot the Lite if you have a joker - it's the only one without a fingerprint sensor under the screen.
P20 Pro vs. P20 vs. P20 Lite
It's even easier at the back, the Pro has the triple camera, while the Lite is the only one with the fingerprint reader at the back.
P20 Pro vs. P20 vs. P20 Lite
A closer look at the P20 Lite's front reveals a centred earpiece, flanked by a bunch of sensors and the selfie camera. There is also a tiny notification LED around.
The P20 Lite has a USB Type-C port and a hybrid dual-SIM slot, just like the flagship P20s, but unlike its siblings, it also offers an analog audio jack.
Finally, the bulging dual-camera looks like the same setup as seen on the P20, but it isn't. Huawei has put a 16MP sensor with f/2.2 lens and a secondary 2MP cam for depth information. A single LED flash is around too.
The Huawei P20 Lite is a solid phone with good choice of materials and attractive color options. While the Sakura Pink may not be everybody's cup of tea, and the Midnight Black looks rather ordinary, Huawei also offers the so-called Klein Blue, which reflects light differently and makes up for a gradient effect.
We have just one complaint, though - while the P20 Lite isn't waterproof, not even splash-resistant, Huawei could have still done a better job at the back. There is a noticeable gap between the plastic (or glass) back and the frame, which is bound to accumulate lots of grime over time.
Display
Huawei P20 Lite comes with the season's favorite notched screen featuring minimal bezels. The panel on the Lite is 5.84" big in diagonal and contains 1,080 x 2,280 pixels (432 ppi). That's probably the same unit found on the recently released Honor 10.
The screen on the flagship P20 might look identical to the Lite's, too, but it is not. The P20 has a bit smaller 5.8" display of 1,080 x 2,240 pixels and that 0.04" difference probably accounts for the missing 40 rows of pixels.
Our tools measured a maximum brightness of 480 nits for the Huawei P20 Lite display, which is a respectable number but not among the best we've seen. The black levels turned out quite impressive, though, and with the help of those the P20 Lite screen achieved an excellent contrast ratio of 1785:1.
Display test | 100% brightness | ||
Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | ||
0.27 | 482 | 1785 | |
0.328 | 477 | 1454 | |
0.481 | 695 | 1445 | |
0.257 | 476 | 1852 | |
0 | 410 | ∞ | |
0.228 | 446 | 1956 | |
0.254 | 432 | 1701 | |
0.356 | 531 | 1492 | |
0.548 | 555 | 1013 | |
0.418 | 610 | 1459 | |
0.564 | 776 | 1376 | |
0.367 | 469 | 1278 | |
0.401 | 532 | 1327 |
The sunlight legibility is just average. If you don't mind some washed-out colors and loss of contrast, the screen should remain readable when you're out and about on a bright sunny day.
Sunlight contrast ratio
The screen displays fairly accurate colors by default with an average deltaE of 5.7 and a maximum of 10.3 at point white. The whites and grays have a bluish tint, but other than that, the default mode offers pretty accurate colors, with just a little extra punch. You can opt for the Warm Color mode from Settings, which will reduce the blue tint and will lower the average deltaE down to 4.2.
Battery life
The Huawei P20 Lite is powered by a 3,000mAh battery (Li-Po) sealed inside its body. The Lite lacks support for Huawei's fast 22.5W Super Charging - the best it can do is 18W, which is not that bad. In our tests, it reached a 30% charge (from flat) in half an hour, and a full charge - in about two hours and twenty minutes. That's not what we expected from an 18W plug, but we found out that phone charges mostly at 10W, and the current rarely goes beyond that. The worst part about the charging is that on a few occasions we got much slower charging (19% in 30min and 100% in 3h) though we couldn't quite put our proverbial finger on what the reson for this might be.
The Huawei P20 Lite posted a good battery score of 77 hours in our standardized test - better than the Mate 10 Lite (with a larger battery) and P10 Lite (same battery). Given that all three devices feature the same Kirin chipset, it seems EMUI 8 is indeed more power-efficient than v5 and v5.1.
The Lite scored good numbers on the individual tests, in line with the old Lites, but it has an improved standby endurance.
Our endurance rating denotes how long a single battery charge will last you if you use the Huawei P20 Lite for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. We've established this usage pattern, so our battery results are comparable across devices in the most common day-to-day tasks. The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in the nitty-gritties. You can also check out our complete battery test table, where you can see how all of the smartphones we've tested will compare under your own typical use.
Loudspeaker
There is one speaker on the P20 Lite, and it's at the bottom. It scored a Very Good mark in our loudness test. The sound quality is very good, too, but not as impressive as on the bigger P20 models. The sound is a bit shallow, but we've heard a lot worse, so for the mid-range class we'd say the P20 Lite does just great.
Speakerphone test | Voice, dB | Ringing | Overall score | |
66.7 | 66.0 | 68.5 | Average | |
66.5 | 66.6 | 75.7 | Good | |
64.8 | 69.8 | 82.5 | Good | |
68.7 | 72.7 | 78.3 | Very Good | |
68.5 | 72.5 | 80.1 | Very Good | |
67.7 | 70.0 | 83.6 | Very Good | |
65.9 | 70.8 | 85.8 | Very Good | |
66.3 | 71.5 | 84.9 | Very Good | |
67.8 | 71.0 | 84.5 | Very Good | |
66.6 | 69.8 | 90.0 | Very Good | |
68.0 | 73.8 | 84.8 | Very Good | |
71.1 | 72.7 | 87.7 | Excellent | |
71.8 | 69.2 | 91.0 | Excellent |
Audio quality
When we plugged in a cable in the phone's 3.5mm audio jack, Huawei P20 lite did reasonably well in the active external amplifier part of our audio quality test. Its audio output was as accurate as we expect from any decent smartphone these days, but its loudness was well below average.
Volume wasn't any better with headphones, but at least the additional load they introduce didn't affect the clarity negatively. Stereo crosstalk remained impressively low, and a tiny bit of intermodulation distortion crept in, but overall the output is among the cleanest we've seen. A solid performance all in all, but if you own high impedance headphones, you might find the P20 lite a bit too quiet.
Test | Frequency response | Noise level | Dynamic range | THD | IMD + Noise | Stereo crosstalk |
+0.03, -0.03 | -87.9 | 87.8 | 0.011 | 0.022 | -82.1 | |
+0.16, -0.03 | -87.6 | 87.6 | 0.020 | 0.102 | -77.5 | |
+0.00, -0.03 | -93.6 | 93.5 | 0.0050 | 0.011 | -94.6 | |
+0.02, -0.02 | -93.5 | 93.4 | 0.0067 | 0.033 | -81.0 | |
+0.01, -0.10 | -92.5 | 92.7 | 0.0019 | 0.0077 | -91.2 | |
+0.50, -0.20 | -91.4 | 91.8 | 0.0079 | 0.402 | -51.5 | |
+0.10, -0.20 | -37.5 | 80.4 | 0.0018 | 4.735 | -93.3 | |
+0.05, -0.03 | -94.3 | 90.2 | 0.0027 | 0.019 | -58.6 | |
+0.02, -0.31 | -38.8 | 81.7 | 0.0013 | 4.690 | -95.9 | |
+0.25, -0.23 | -93.3 | 90.4 | 0.0045 | 0.227 | -53.9 | |
+0.02, -0.01 | -92.6 | 92.6 | 0.0021 | 0.012 | -94.4 | |
+0.17, -0.03 | -92.0 | 92.1 | 0.0023 | 0.092 | -52.8 |
You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.
Android 8 with EMUI 8
The Huawei P20 Lite ships with Android Oreo and Huawei's EMUI 8.0 skin over it. Emotion UI is constantly getting better, with behind-the-scenes improvements, like better RAM management, sophisticated battery management, improved miss-touch detection and higher touch accuracy, to name a few. And we appreciate the constantly shrinking amount of bloat, bundled in the ROM, the sheer number and the added convenience of the baked-in features.
Out of the box, there is no app drawer on the EMUI 8 - it's a single tier interface like on the iPhone. However, if you miss it, you can enable it back in the Display settings. There is also a handy search feature, which can be accessed by flicking down on any empty area of any home screen.
EMUI has something called Magazine lock screen, which rotates through a bunch of wallpapers, so you see a different one every time you fire up the display.
EMUI offers plenty of customization and features like face unlock, smart rotation, and lift to wake. Themes are supported, too, and there is a lot to choose from. There are a few themes to choose from with the option to change the icons, the skin, and wallpaper.
From the Phone Manager app, you can access shortcuts to storage cleanup, battery settings, blocked numbers, Virus scan powered by Avast, and mobile data usage.
The notification shade is pretty much a standard affair. There's a brightness bar with an Auto toggle - pull down again for more toggles.
Multitasking is pretty standard as well. Tap-holding the Recents key will let you activate split screen.
Huawei's own Music app is here and offers a way to listen to stored MP3s. An FM radio app is present, and the Gallery is here to stay.
Huawei's Health app is also pre-installed. It offers Google Fit syncing and step counting. There's a file manager app and a note-taking app. There is an abundance of replacements for these in the Play Store, however.
Performance
The Huawei P20 Lite employs the same Kirin 659 chipset as the P10 Lite and Mate 10 Lite, as well as the Honor 7X. Those already offered some benchmark numbers and painted a clear picture of what can be expected from the chipset. The P20 Lite fell in line with those expectations. Its scores are pretty much the same (within margin of error).
The Kirin 659 has a total of eight Cortex-A53 cores. Four of those take the heavy lifting and work at 2.36GHz, while the other four take care of less power-intensive tasks while ticking at 1.7GHz. The CPU is up to the task of handling everything, though it seriously trails behind the A73 cores inside the Oppo F7 (Helio P60), for instance.
GeekBench 4.1 (single-core)
Higher is better
GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)
Higher is better
There are only two Mali-T830 GPU cores inside the P20 Lite, as on the rest of the budget Huawei phones, and those really struggle with modern graphics loads. But just to be on the safe side, those are still enough to run a huge chunk of the games on the Play Store, but hiccups, low-quality textures, or low fps are to be expected in the more demanding ones.
GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)
Higher is better
Basemark X
Higher is better
While the GPU scores might be dismal, the compound benchmarks show the Huawei P20 Lite and its Kirin 659 to be as capable as the best of mid-rangers - read Nokia 6 and Moto G6 Plus with their Snapdragon 630 silicon. So, yes, the Kirin 659 is still a balanced and capable chip even now, 2 years into active service.
AnTuTu 7
Higher is better
Basemark OS 2.0
Higher is better
The P20 Lite runs cool even at full throttle, so don't expect any heat issues no matter how you use it. It isn't a chart-topper, sure, not even next to fellow mid-ranges, but the Lite offers some nicely calculated balanced performance.
The thing is balanced scores won't do it for long. The Kirin 659 has been around for two years already and while offering enough punch, it's hardly future-proof. It's about time Huawei comes up with something new, because its mid-rangers are seriously behind the competition in terms of theoretical performance and it will become an issue sooner rather than later.
Lackluster dual camera, but with a few tricks in the bag
Huawei P20 Lite has a 16MP main camera with f/2.2 lens on the back, accompanied by a 2MP sensor for depth information, and a single LED flash. There is no optical stabilization and no hybrid zoom.
Portrait mode with and without beautify is available, Variable Aperture is here to stay, too.
The camera interface is familiar as we have already seen it on the P10 and Mate 10 series. The options are hidden in menus you can bring up by swiping left or right from the screen (assuming you hold the camera in portrait mode). This may be confusing at first, but you quickly get used to it. The main menu houses all the available shooting modes - Photo, Night Shot, HDR, Panorama, Pro, Beauty, Light Painting, among others. There is also an advanced settings menu, summoned by a swipe from the top.
The Huawei camera app offers a Manual (Pro) mode, which manual focus, shutter speed (up to 8s), ISO, and a few other options. The Pro camera interface is very easy to use.
The Night Shot should have been the same mode we saw on the P20 and P20 Pro - the phone takes a couple of snaps with different exposure and combines them in one picture. And it works amazing, sometimes jaw-dropping on the P20s. But it just doesn't work on the P20 Lite, so don't get your hopes up.
For starters, it requires about 20s instead of just 4s. And your phone should be on a tripod the whole time - handheld is not an option unless really messy is what you are after. And if you comply with everything, you will still end up with one quite dark picture.
So, if you have a tripod lying around, or something to keep the phone stable, just use the Manual mode with long shutter setting or the Light Painting mode (though it's not that good, either).
Image quality
The 16MP samples we snapped during the day came out with enough resolved detail and accurate and pleasant colors. Those could have benefited from a bit more detail for this class, though, and they came a bit soft but with over-sharpening halos around the buildings. The dynamic range is barely average. The noise levels are mostly kept reasonably low, but they sometimes spike in shadowy spots.
The samples are fine, but not among the best we've seen.
The HDR mode rescues most of the blown highlights and reveals more detail in the shadows. It really helps in the demanding scenes and we wholeheartedly recommend it for those occasions.
The low-light images are nothing special on the Huawei P20 Lite. They are often noisy and soft, the colors are washed out, too. But the occasional low-light snaps will do fine for the social networks. And frankly - we've seen a lot worse, especially lacking in detail, blurry and unusable, so the P20 Lite actually does alright. Nothing special, as we said, just alright.
You can get two different types of high-quality low-light samples on the 20 Lite, just like with any other recent Huawei smartphone. If you have a tripod, that is.
You can either use the Light Painting mode, where the Lite takes a picture with default settings and then captures only the moving lights imitating a professional looking long-exposure shot of say, streaks of car lights speeding along the road. Oddly, the car trails are somewhat worse than on the previous models as the trails came out interrupted.
Or use the Pro (manual) mode to tweak all settings by yourself using some long shutter speeds (up to 8s) and get a bright and detailed low-light image.
The Night shot requires a tripod and up to 20s of waiting and in the end will give you one very dark photo, so we advise against using it - it's a complete waste of time.
Light Painting - Car Trails • Manual mode - 4s shutter • Night shot - handheld • Night shot - tripod
You can check out the Huawei P20 Lite in our photo compare tool for more pixel-peeping action.
Panorama
The panorama mode is one of the better implementations, switching automatically between portrait and landscape. When shooting in portrait, panoramic images turn out just over 3,100 pixels tall and the sample below is about 20MP. Stitching is good, exposure is even, dynamic range is good, and the captured detail is above the average.
Variable aperture
Wide aperture, as Huawei call it, utilizes the depth information from the second 2MP camera. It lets you simulate the background defocusing wide apertures would give you and you can adjust the effect to simulate between f/0.95 and f/16.
As with most such implementations, the effect is far from perfect and the shots don't exactly hold up to pixel scrutiny. Other Huawei phones do a better job of isolating the subject from the background. With the P20 Lite, however, the effect is more trigger-happy than it should be and eats some parts of the subject.
Portrait
The Portrait Mode is available, naturally. It combines the Variable Aperture with Beautification and should offer Portrait shots with simultaneously enhanced faces and bokeh background effects. The portrait shots always come in 8MP images.
The recognition isn't perfect, and you can see traces of the background or some chopped details from the person. This mode isn't as professional grade as on the flagships, but we expected a bit more. Still, those would do for the social networks. Probably.
Selfies
The selfie camera on the international Huawei P20 Lite has a 16MP sensor behind f/2.0 lens. It also comes with portrait shooting mode albeit the lack of an assistive cam. The Indian and Chinese models will benefit from a 24MP selfie cam, also behind f/2.0 lens.
The regular 16MP samples turned out fine, detailed and with pleasing colors, but not as sharp as we'd like them to be. The colors are fine, while noise is present here and there. We've seen better, but we've seen a lot worse, so the Lite samples are above the average in quality. It just takes a few shots to find the sweet spot of the fixed focus and you are good to go.
The Portrait Mode simulates bokeh alright, while it can also applies beautification effects on your face. The algorithm does a mostly fine job at recognizing your face and blurring the background, sometimes better than the supposedly high-quality portrait shots we got from the main shooter.
Video camera
The Huawei P20 Lite can record 1080p videos at 30fps. That's it - there's no 1080p @ 60fps or 4K recording. The clips are recorded in MP4 files with a bitrate of 17Mbps. Audio is captured at a good 192Kbps (48kHz) rate, in stereo of course.
The video quality doesn't quite live up to our expectations. The image isn't as sharp as some competing phones in this class, nor is the resolved detail high enough. The dynamic range is rather wide, better than it was on the still images, though. The noise is kept low, and the colors and contrast are rather good.
As usual, we've provided an unedited sample straight out of the camera for you to download - 1080@30fps (10s, 22.5MB).
Be sure to head over to our video compare tool to check where the Huawei P 20 Lite stands against the Mate 10 Lite and the P Smart 1080p videos. You can choose other cameras if you like.
The Competition
The Huawei P20 Lite retails for €300 at launch, which seems a reasonable price for a premium mid-ranger, especially for one with such a trendy display. This is nearly half the P20 price, so the Lite is off to a good start.
The in-house competition is quite intense and this is where we stop first when we look for potential alternatives. The recently released Huawei P Smart is the same phone as P20 Lite sans the horns and the notch. But the P Smart costs €100 less than the P20 Lite, so it's up to you to decide how much those infamous screen spots are worth to you.
Then there is the Huawei Mate 10 Lite, which has a perfectly rectangular screen and adds a fourth camera to the mix - a secondary 2MP helper next to the selfie snapper. The Mate Lite is €50 cheaper, so there is that.
There is also the aging but still available Huawei P10, which recently received Android 8 with EMUI 8. Its price has dropped down to the very tempting €360 at various retailers. The P10 has a much better camera at its back, with a monochrome shooter, Leica lens, and the works. The processor and graphics performance are light-years ahead of the Kirin 659 inside the P20 Lite, too. The P10 has a smaller and rectangular screen but is that a bad thing?
Or you can throw an extra €99 and get the €399 Honor 10, which is just like the Huawei P20 minus the Leica involvement.
Moving on, the Oppo F7 is quite an attractive champ with the same notched screen and a more powerful Helio P60 chipset. It lacks a second camera but makes up for that with the highest-resolution selfie camera to date. Oh, and it's cheaper than the Lite.
And if you are on the budget, then Xiaomi has you covered with the Redmi Note 5 Pro. It has a nice 6" 1080p screen and runs on the Snapdragon 636 chip - read more punch than the P20 Lite. There is a dual-camera on the back and a 20MP selfie shooter with LED flash at the front. You also get a 4,000 mAh battery as is the case with any Redmi Note. All of that - at €200 or less.
Huawei P smart • Huawei Mate 10 Lite • Huawei P10 • Huawei Honor 10 • Oppo F7 • Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro
The Verdict
The Huawei P20 Lite is a thoughtful addition to the P20 series that succeeds in capturing the P20 essence and puts it to good work in the mid-range. There are also the glass-like design and notched screen, a dual-camera on the back and the latest EMUI.
Huawei P20 lineup: Pro vs. Regular vs. Lite
There is room for improvement, though. Some ingress protection would have been appreciated, or the Night mode could have at least worked as on the P20 flagships. Or we'd easily swallow those if only there were a new mid-range Kirin inside the Lite instead of the recycled chip from 2016.
Pros
- Attractive design and an all-screen front
- Good display quality
- Good camera with lots of creative effects
- High-res selfies
- Good battery life
Cons
- Dated and underperforming chipset (for the price range)
- Not even splash protection and there are visible gaps on the chassis
- The camera's Night mode is not the same as on P20
- Overall, the launch price of €300 is not competitive
The Huawei P20 Lite is riding the P20 hype wave, that's for sure. The screen with minimal bezels is probably enough to win lots of fans on its side as Huawei is among the few makers to offer such a high-quality piece in this segment. And if you fancy that, the P20 Lite is probably the smart choice.
The Lite delivers on most of its promises although it just can't impress with performance. But if you look beyond that captivating display, you may want to check a few other options before placing your order as some of those will perhaps give you better value. That said, if you really love how the P20 lite looks, there is no reason not to get it.
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Huawei P20 Lite review...
Reviewed by TECHNICAL DHIMAN
on
May 27, 2018
Rating:
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