Gadgetory

hey what does if cuz mkbhd here so nowadays it seems like it's never quite enough to just nail all the pillars of a great smartphone and put it out it seems like not only do you have to do all of that but you have to take one of them and push it to the absolute extreme the maximum and so this is what it looks like when you nail all the pillars have a great smartphone and then take one of them and take it to the next level this is the Huawei P 20 Pro so this is one of those phones you've either heard a lot about recently or never heard of definitely two camps with this one this is not coming to the US and usually that stops me from even trying a phone in the first place because I know I can't recommend it for a lot of people but this caught my attention obviously like Huawei phones in general have just been getting my attention more and more lately but this one just captured it completely it's crazy new color triple cameras on the back 4000 milliamp hour battery a hundred and nine score on DxO mark so I picked it up I used it here's my thoughts so on the outside aesthetics wise I do like this phone a lot it has a couple flaws it's not perfect but it's one of the few really unique looking phones out there of course mainly because of this back this gradient color I mean it's a crazy looking awesome back of the phone it blends from like this aqua green to blue to purple and in different amounts depending on where you look at it from it looks different in everyone's video I'm kind of trying to do my best with the camera I have but there's other colors of the p20 and p20 Pro I wouldn't even consider them this is definitely the coolest looking one it's called Twilight it's just weird that there's a lot of text on the back of the phone I would think it would look way cleaner if all that wasn't here it might even look sick with like a logo toss on there but it wouldn't be the end of the world this just is what it is it's a super unique colorful and also fingerprint and dust magnet phone I got your power button and your volume rocker on the same side I know that doesn't count as a colored power button Huawei and I have a little bar there but you have to have the whole button with some color good try though but the rest of this body is prime it's what you'd expect from a high-end 20-18 flagship which it is so metal rails curved edges its ip67 water-resistant which is always nice it's definitely not too thin you know feel solid in the hand nice weight yeah an IR blaster which not every phone does now but also no expandable storage and no headphone jack this camera bump is also mildly annoying to me because it sticks out enough from the phone that it will rock on a table I just I got to point that out not all phones have that problem but it's not a deal-breaker eat it but really design-wise my biggest question mark is on the front of this phone so it has a notch so when notch is what you do in a phone in 2018 when you want to get rid of all the bezels but you don't quite have the technology to fully do so so you know the front facing speaker the selfie camera you got to keep them just make a little cutout around them fine I get it but this phone also has a finger for reader on the front and then a huge empty chin bezel with nothing else in it no buttons just a bezel like you're either trying to get rid of the bezel or you're not it's weird that they would put a notch like they're trying to go totally bezel this but then also have a chin kind of make up your mind there I feel like you could have made this look way better with an even top and bottom bezel there's even an option in the software to do exactly that and it doesn't look that bad but yeah the fingerprint reader is on the front it's still super fast I don't mind it being here why wait does that maybe better than anyone still and it also acts as a gesture pad if you want to disable the on-screen buttons and get some extra screen real estate back you can do that to your call but above it all is that pretty nice 6.1 inch OLED display with of course that notch that we talked about it's a 20 to 40 by 1080 panel so it's a 18 point 7 by 9 aspect ratio slightly taller than the normal tall but the OLED panel itself is pretty good it gets bright enough to see outdoors with no problem there's no shift issues it's just not quite to the greatness level of like a Samsung phone it's not quite as bright or as vibrant but it's right in line with what you'd expect from a flagship oh and then it also packs in a four thousand milliamp hour battery in a phone that's not that thick so that's pretty great this has been consistently five plus hours of screen on time which for my use is excellent so there's no problem with battery here and I've been preaching like if you want to make a phone make it as thick as you want no one really wants the phone to be that razor thin and adding a couple extra millimeters for a sizable battery is a great choice I mean look at that this phone is definitely not thick at all Bravo to huawei definitely keep doing that so for the hardware look it's it's all pretty damn good the specs inside pretty good you know we're looking at six eggs Aram 128 gigs of storage the chipset is all right we definitely have better things out here with Qualcomm but it's still good enough and the experience of using this phone again it'll come down to what you do with Android I won't talk too long about emui but those of you familiar with Huawei know that this is their skin on top of Android here with this one it's emui 8.1 based on top of Android 8.1 so using it everyday I gave it a shot again and it the more I use it the more it kind of reminds me of what Samsung felt like a couple years ago worth they're just basically throwing as many features as possible at you because really there are a lot of features in here whether you use them all or not you know there's backup and restore features there's big screen features multitasking features there's multiple Power Save modes with different intensities you can adjust the screen resolution which is in battery settings for some reason instead of display settings there's even a smart screen shot feature that won't stop interrupting me even though I've turned it off it still randomly thinks some of my swipes and knocks our screen shot attempts and starts doing the magic animation please stop doing that overall you can fix or not use pretty much any of the things you don't like except for the visual changes I've been using it with Nova Launcher as you can tell but yeah they're still gonna have Huawei's icons and Huawei's quick settings and their multitasking UI and all that and also you're gonna be waiting for a couple apps like Instagram for example to play nice with that knotch Android P when it gets released is supposed to help a lot with that but for now there's definitely some bugs but alright alright I'm sure you knew when you saw this phone came out with a 40 megapixel main camera you knew it would grab my attention you know why I'm here you knew when you put out a phone with not one not two but three cameras on the back that it would turn my head you don't wanna hear and you knew when this thing got a DxO mark score of a hundred and nine that I just couldn't resist picking it up and actually seeing what it's all about so let's take a deep look at why I was even interested in this phone in the first place the cameras so yes the Huawei p20 Pro has three cameras on the back the main sensor is a 40 megapixel sensor with optical stabilization and an F 1.8 aperture the secondary is a 20 megapixel monochrome sensor also with optical image stabilization and an F 1.6 aperture and the third is an 8 megapixel 3x telephoto lens again stabilized this time F 2.4 so that's a lot of numbers the 14 megapixel sensor is huge and I don't just mean like the megapixel count is huge I mean the actual physical size of the sensor it's a 1 over 1 point 7 inch sensor diagonally that's about twice the size of the galaxy s 9 and the pixel 2 in the iPhone 10 sensors that's half an inch diagonally damn there are a lot of potential advantages to a physically larger sensor I use in my main shooting a camera with a massive sensor you get better low-light sensitivity bigger pixels better overall performance less gain a wider field of view so I love the concept I love the idea of putting a big sensor in a smart phone camera so how'd it turn out well right off the bat the photos look pretty good not only is it a big sensor it is a good sensor so you get accurate colors a nice dynamic range plenty of detail and that's really the main characteristic you're gonna notice about the p20 pro photos lots of detail thanks to the sensor and the sharpening being aggressive as hell and then a shallow ish depth of field thanks to the sensor size and the fixed wide aperture but here's some notes for you to consider about these cameras besides just pointing and shooting in auto mode so number one the main camera uses a quad of bayer structure when taking photos which means it's a 40 megapixel sensor but it's outputting data bend in 2 by 2 blocks of pixels so you're getting an output image of 10 mega images still super sharp and detailed but ten megapixel photos number two the video mode is really not that great some might say trash like it can shoot stabilized 1080p video with decent color and detail but because of the chip its using it can't keep up with the stabilization of 4k the 4k video really looks bad off of this phone sadly I wish it was as completely the video camera as it was a photo camera but it's not but number three this whole camera is just fast the whole experience of taking photos of it is fast which I love it has laser autofocus it's super quick the time to open the camera and actually grab a shot is super snappy and you can even double press volume down to take a snapshot of what you're pointing at in like 0.3 seconds but then you don't really know like what you're taking a picture of so that's maybe a little extreme but the point is it's fast once you're in the app you hit the telephoto zoom button you get 3x or 5x with a single touch it all works for me and then a I okay I there's a lot of people keep asking about the AI all over this phone but especially in the camera about you know why don't people give it enough credit in the videos it's a big deal and makes better than others I'll tell you exactly why I've used it it's pretty straightforward basically there's a trigger to turn on AI and the camera so on by default and when it's on if you give it a second in the viewfinder it tries to identify everything you take a photo of and then automatically enhance some predetermined things it thinks you'll like about that photo and it's right about identifying what you're trying to take a photo of more often than not like you take a photo of the sky it puts it in blue sky mode take a picture of greenery puts it in greenery mode flower mode pet mode everything it just it knows pretty much instantly but then it's the improvements that it decides to make once it knows what you're taking a photo of that are pretty basic like in greenery mode for example if you're taking a photo of a plant and it has green in it it turns on green remote and it just basically blasts the green Channel in the plants and makes it look more green cool in blue sky mode it does the same thing if you point it at like a sky line and there's blue in the sky it knows it's blue sky and it just blasts the blue Channel makes the sky really blue like I cool that's I'm glad it worked but maybe I don't even want that to be more blue I just want a picture of what I'm taking a picture of I don't know maybe I'm not the normal smartphone photo taker but I don't want automatic enhancement has never been my thing I I turned it off pretty quick I usually just want to take a photo straight from the sensor which looks pretty good and maybe use that AI later for like sorting through my photos or making them easier to find but yeah a lot of the p20 pros photos you know they don't need any editing or enhancing because they look great straight off the sensor I mean I'm talking effortless shallow depth-of-field a plus detail like I said from all those megapixels I just wish the processing wasn't so aggressive sometimes it looks a little too sharp such a big sensor should also have a great advantage in low-light but when you compare it to smaller censored cameras like I did the low-light photos are cleaner yes but they also have a ton of smoothing and noise reduction because the processing is so aggressive it almost feels like the software is holding back the hardware so what I'm comparing like these two and I'm after the absolute best smartphone camera the pixel is taking often much better photos more consistently because of the software I mean there's definitely still things p20 Pro can do that pixel can't especially with that 3x telephoto zoom that can be really great but if what you're after is the best overall smartphone photos the answer is still pixel - and I think anyone who shot with both of these would agree so at the end of the day p20 pro is my favorite Huawei phone yet obviously no doubt it's kind of a bummer that is not coming to the u.s. it would be cool to see I'm still a fan of a lot of the choices they've made here design wise build quality wise and I got to say even emui is better than it's ever been but it's not quite enough to convince me to switch to it full-time if the camera and the software and the build are the biggest draws to this phone it's definitely gonna have the build beat I mean this is a one-of-a-kind like back of a phone for sure but if the camera and software are both better on another phone it's remarkable how many times I keep going back to pixel - but for now I'll give p20 pro like a 45-degree thumbs up pretty good not bad I'm a fan of the decisions I'm looking forward to p30 till the next one thanks for watching doc see guys later peace