Honor P20 Lite Review - Honor P20 Lite is a trimmed down version of the P20 Pro

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Honor P20 Lite is a trimmed down version of the P20 Pro. It looks similar but nothing about the internals is the same. It comes with a weaker processor to keep the price down but still maintaining the trendy looking design. Also, it does pack a Dual camera unit but uses more affordable sensors for it. To know more, check out the complete Honor P20 Lite review below.

Honor P20 Lite Design and Build

The Honor P20 Lite being a mid-range device has a premium looking aesthetics. It has a metal frame and the back is made of Plastic unlike Glass on the more expensive P20 Pro. The Plastic back looks great but is prone to scratches and fingerprint smudges which makes it hard to keep the device clean. Although, it looks better compared to other metal-unibody devices in the mid-range segment.

Even though it has a big screen, the overall footprint of the device is pretty compact and pocketable. It has a thickness of 7.4mm and weighs 145 gram which is surprisingly light. Not only does it make the device comfortable to hold and use, but it also looks clean and minimal. Honor devices are mostly known for their trendy color profiles and the P20 Lite does have some good color options. It is available in Klein Blue, Sakura Pink, and Midnight Black.

Upfront, most of the space is filled by a 19:9 screen which has a notch up top. The notch houses an earpiece, selfie camera, and proximity sensor. Moving to the right, you will find the Power key and the Volume rocker and on the left, there is a Hybrid SIM tray. The modern Type-C charging port is at the bottom flanked by 3.5mm audio jack and a speaker. Moving to the back, you will find a vertically stacked Dual Camera unit with Flash and a Fingerprint scanner. The back of the device is not removable and it doesn’t have an IP rating or support for wireless charging. Overall, the Honor P20 Lite is a gorgeous looking and sturdy mid-range smartphone.

Big Screen with A Notch

One of the main attractions of the Honor P20 Lite is its display. It packs a big screen providing immersive content consumption experience. Talking about the actual number, it sports 5.84 inch LTPS IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen which has a resolution of 1080 x 2280 pixels and a pixel density of 432 pixels-per-inch. There is also a notch which isn’t too big and looks quite similar to the notch on OnePlus 6.

Moving on, the screen quality is definitely good. The colors are saturated and the color accuracy is spot-on. Also, the viewing angles are great and the brightness is high enough making the screen viewable under direct sunlight. Talking about the notch, it’s small but if you really hate notch, you can Turn it OFF in the settings. This will put blacks bars on either side of the notch, although, the bars are noticeable since the screen is LCD and not OLED.

The bezels around the screen are slim but the chin is quite big and has the “Honor” logo in it. Apart from that, the media consumption experience is great. During the review, we watched a couple of videos and the experience was immersive with punchy colors. The display also comes with features like Eye-Comfort and you can manually adjust the color tone in the Display settings. Overall, it’s a pleasant display to watch media on the go.

Performance and EMUI Software

Since the Honor P20 Lite is a trimmed down version of the P20 Pro, the same horsepower haven’t made its way to keep the cost down. For the P20 Lite, Honor is relying on a 2-year-old processor which powered the Honor 7X. To be more specific, it packs Kirin 659 which is an Octa-core processor clocked at 2.3 GHz. It uses Mali-T830 MP2 GPU isn’t super powerful as well. The device is available is only a single configuration which has 4GB RAM and 64GB of internal storage.

Talking about the performance, the P20 Lite manages to a score of around 85,000 in AnTuTu Benchmarks. These numbers aren’t super high and there other other smartphones in the same price range with more powerful processors. With that being said, the performance is quite good as long as you stick with a simple task like playing casual games. It can manage to run PUBG mobile at Medium graphics settings but there are noticeable frame drops here and there. We recommend Low graphics setting for a much better and smoother gaming experience. The good thing is that the device doesn’t heat up even with heavy gaming. Talking about multitasking, the 4GB RAM helps and quite a number of app stays in memory allowing faster switching between apps. Also, the internal storage is quite much but you can sacrifice the second SIM for a MicroSD card of up to 256 GB.

The Honor P20 Lite runs on Android Oreo with Honor’s own EMUI 8.0 skin on top. Even though the EMUI is much refined and responsive now, the software still needs some improvement. For starters, it still comes with pre-installed apps like Truecaller, UC browser etc. Also, the setting menu isn’t straight forward and if you are new to EMUI, it might take some time for getting used to. Also, the is no app drawer and all the apps are scattered on the different pages of Home Screen. There are a couple of features like gestures, Wifi+, message filter etc. Overall, the experience is far from stock but still quite smooth and responsive.

Camera Performance and Battery Life

Talking about the camera, the Honor P20 Lite packs a Dual camera unit on the back which houses a 16 Megapixel sensor with f/2.0 aperture and a 2 Megapixel depth sensor. On the front, there is a 24 Megapixel selfie camera with f/2.0 aperture. The camera app is simple to use and come with features like a full-fledged manual mode, Panorama, HDR, Portrait mode, Night Mode, and AR stickers.

The rear camera on the P20 Lite captures some great photos in good light. Images captured contains a high amount of details with good color reproduction and dynamic range. The Portrait mode shots are also good creating a natural depth-of-field, however, the edge-detection is quite average at best. In low light, the images quality takes a nose-dive with heavy noise in the images. To get better results, we recommend using the Night Shot mode. The front camera due to its high megapixel count captures great and high detailed selfies in good light. But same as the rear camera, the quality degrades in low light with very less amount of detail and high amount of noise. Both the front and rear cameras can record 1080p videos at 30fps but there is no stabilization like OIS or EIS.

One thing that I really disliked about the Honor P20 Lite is the 3000 mAh non-removable battery. Though the number look decent on paper, the device can hardly last a full day of usage. With a full charge in the morning, you will end up looking for a charger around 8–9 P.M. Although, it’s not the worst battery life that we’ve seen but it’s straight average. Apart from that, the Honor P20 Lite does come with support for Fast charging.

Honor P20 Lite: More Features

The Honor P20 Pro Lite does support Dual SIM and Dual-standby, although, it comes with a Hybrid SIM slot. This means you have to sacrifice the second SIM if you want to use a Micro SD card. Also, only one SIM can run 4G while the other one is limited to 3G only. Other connectivity features include WIFI, Bluetooth, and GPS. It comes with all the necessary sensors including Fingerprint (rear-mounted), accelerometer, gyroscope, proximity, and compass.

The Fingerprint scanner is located on the back and it easy to reach and identify. It is quite fast, unlocking the device under 1 second, and is secure as well. Apart from this, there is also an option for Face Unlock, which is a less secure method of unlocking your device by pointing the front camera toward your face.

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