$2,100 Huawei smartphone comes with 3 rear cameras, 2 fingerprint readers

last night Huawei announced its newest flagship smartphone, the P20 Pro. Whether you want to call it appealing or not is one thing, but it's definitely not your normal smartphone. First, we'll outline the normal config... and then move on to the totally insane "Porsche Design" version.

With the standard P20 Pro, it has an iPhone X-style front camera notch and a thick bottom "chin" bezel. It's also one-upping the rest of the smartphone camera world with a whopping three cameras on the back. Huawei is one of the rare smartphone manufacturers with its own SoC manufacturing business, so instead of the usual Snapdragon SoC, the heart of the P20 Pro is a HiSilicon Kirin 970.


The Kirin 970 is a 10nm, eight-core chip, with four 2.36GHz Cortex A73 cores and four 1.8GHz Cortex A53 cores providing CPU power. That is paired with a 767MHz Mali-G72 MP12 GPU, 6GB of RAM, a generous 128GB of storage, and a 4000mAh battery in the P20 Pro. There's also a USB-C port, IP67 water and dust resistance, NFC, and an IR blaster.

The display is a 6.1-inch, 2240×1080 OLED panel, which works out to an 18:9 aspect ratio and 408 pixels per inch. The front of the phone is a weird mix of design decisions. The top notch houses a front facing camera and matching round earpiece speaker. Usually notched smartphone designs seek to maximize screen space, but the P20 Pro also has a sizable bottom bezel. The bezel houses a front fingerprint reader and nothing else. For navigation, the phone uses on-screen buttons, which erroneously aren't shown in the press renders.

The real highlight here is the camera setup, which seems to be going for maximum overkill. The P20 Pro has a first-ever triple camera setup on the back. The main RGB camera is an outrageously large 40MP, 1/1.78-inch sensor with an f/1.8 aperture. This is paired with a 20MP monochrome camera with an f/1.6 aperture and an 8MP, f/2.4 telephoto camera. The overkill mentality applies to the front camera, too, which has a whopping 24MP sensor. This can no doubt render every facial imperfection and skin pore in stunning detail.

For colors, the phone comes in black, midnight blue, rose gold, and a crazy "twilight" color, which seems to color shift from purple to green. The software is Android 8.1—the latest version!—with Huawei's heavy EMUI skin slathered on top.

EOE TECH

$2,100 for phone...well done

Huwei