Huawei has announced their mid-range phone and the cheapest in the P20 series, the P20 Lite in India along with P20 Pro. The P20 Lite packs a 5.84-inch Full HD+ display and is powered by Kirin 659 Octa-Core processor with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage along with Android 8.0 and 3000mAh battery. The device also comes with a dual rear camera and a 24MP selfie camera in India. The device is priced at Rs 19,999. So how does the device compete in this price segment? Let’s find out in this detailed Huawei P20 Lite review.
Here is the video review of the device.
Design and Build Quality:
The design is something you will fall in love with the Huawei P20 Lite. It is a looker with glass and metal construction. The device looks premium and elegant, thanks to the glossy glass finish on the front and back panel with the metal chassis. Since it is 5.84 inch in screen size, the device is also compact to hold and use. It gives a good feel altogether using the phone. The power and volume keys are on the right side, while the left side houses the SIM tray. The bottom panel has 3.5mm audio jack, USB type C port, and a speaker unit.
The rear panel has the dual camera set up with LED flash, fingerprint scanner, and Huawei logo. While the glass finish looks premium it is also a fingerprint magnet. The front panel has the bezel-less design with notch and 5.84-inch display and Huawei logo below the display. Overall, if looks matter, the Huawei P20 Lite is a stunner.
Display:
Huawei P20 Lite packs a 5.84-inch Full HD+ display with 2.5D glass. The display aspect ratio is 19:9 because of the notch. The notch includes the 24MP camera, earpiece, and the sensors. There is also an option to disable the notch in the display settings. The display quality is pretty good with excellent touch response. The colors are vivid and feel good. The viewing angles are also good but there is no protection offered on the display which is quite a disappointing thing for this price segment.
Software:
Similar to any Honor or Huawei smartphones, the P20 Lite comes with EMUI 8.0 along with Android Oreo out of the box. EMUI is one of the highly customizable UI available and offers tons of features and tools to make your experience better. The settings panel and notification toggles are customized.
Since the navigational keys are on screen, you also get the option to customize the layout from the settings. You also get dual apps feature. With dual apps, you can run two instances of an app, which means you can run two instances of social apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. There is also App Twin feature which allows you to run two instances of the same app.
Other additional features include motion control, floating dock, voice control and also gloves mode. It also features the themes app. The software also comes bundled with some Huawei apps like Torch, sound recorder, phone manager, etc. The fingerprint scanner supports a lot of functions including locking apps and gestures for viewing the gallery. Another interesting option in the UI is File Safe which is security options and works with pin and fingerprint.
Performance:
Huawei P20 Lite is powered by Kirin 659 which is an octa-core chipset with a maximum clock speed of 2.3Ghz. It is coupled with Mali T830MP2 GPU and 4GB of RAM. This is the same processor which powers the Honor devices in India, namely the Honor 7X, 9i and 9 Lite. The P20 Lite does a really good job in the day to day performance and it was responsive to almost all tasks it was put to and the app performance with EMUI 8.0 was really good. The memory management of the device was quite decent while there is room for improvement.
The biggest disappointment is the gaming experience and similar to Honor devices, the Mali GPU is not capable to handle heavy games and it lags in performance. For a phone priced Rs 20000, the gaming experience is a serious letdown.
The speaker performance of the device is quite decent and the phone comes with dual SIM card and hybrid SD card slot with 4G LTE and VoLTE support.
Camera:
The P20 Lite comes with a dual camera set up and packs a 16MP primary camera with f/2.2 and a secondary 2MP depth-sensing camera. On the front panel, we have a 24MP selfie camera in India while rest of the world gets a 16MP camera. The camera interface is largely unchanged and packs all the modes and settings you will see on Honor devices. The camera samples taken in daylight conditions looked good with good overall details and colors are also ok for the most part. Unlike Honor 9i the images aren’t over saturated. The close-up images also came out well. But when it comes to low light samples, the camera was quite an average performer. The selfie camera performance was good and it did a good job with details although the portrait selfies need to improve a bit with edge detection. Here are some of the samples taken with the device.
Battery:
The device packs a 3000mAh battery and Huawei has included type C port on this device which is definitely a welcome move. But unfortunately ,the Indian variant does not come with fast charging support. The phone takes around 2 hours to charge the battery. Talking about the battery performance, you can get around 4-5 hours of screen on time on an average on this device which we feel is quite decent performance for a 3000mAh battery.
Verdict:
The Huawei P20 Lite is priced Rs 19,999 and comes in both blue and back colors. P20 Lite is a good phone if looks are your primary criteria along with camera and selfie experience. The software is quite good with Oreo and EMUI, but where the device falls short is gaming experience and weaker GPU along with lack of fast charging and display protection at this price segment.
