Honor V20 Reviews Well-deserved flagship at the end of the 2018 year

After removing the forehead and chin, how to continue to develop the ultimate comprehensive screen?

In the past two years, the biggest change in the appearance of mobile phones is reflected in the pursuit of the ultimate comprehensive screen by manufacturers and consumers. What is the ultimate comprehensive screen? That is, the entire front is completely screen, and no sensor blocks normal viewing. Multi-generation full screen removed the big forehead and chin, and compressed the left and right borders. After this short progress, we faced a new problem - how to further improve the screen ratio of the mobile phone screen.

Finally, the Honor hide an explosion news, quietly blasting on the tail of 2018 - the Honor V20 will hide the front camera under the hole, presenting a "full" frontal full screen design. More specifically, its aperture is 4.5mm, 5-axis high-precision ring dispensing process and custom lens, the reading content is more comprehensive, even if the horizontal screen does not affect the visual experience. Including the full-featured screen, the Honor V20 is the first to launch the three "shock" technologies launched by Honor. The others are Link Turbo and 48 million pixel cameras.

Link Turbo can detect network congestion intelligently, and simultaneously use or switch Wi-Fi/4G networks to ensure continuous network.
The 48-megapixel CMOS comes from the Sony IMX586, sensor size 1/2 inch, supports four-pixel integration (0.8μm synthesis 1.6μm) and 4x hardware HDR enhancement.
In addition, it is also equipped with the world's first 7-nanometer chip Kirin 980, in addition to its own liquid cooling system, equipped with GPUTurbo2.0, with the most extreme performance, inheriting the performance of the V series... Too much difficulty to summarize, then please see our detailed evaluation.

Almost perfect magic eye comprehensive screen / Low-key V-shaped light and shadow on the back

The Honor V20 currently offers five models of charm sea blue, charm red, magic night black, phantom red (MOSCHINO joint signature), phantom blue (MOSCHINO joint signature), we get the 8+256G phantom Blue (MOSCHINO co-signed version).

This is the outer packaging of the Honor V20, which is different from the all-black background of previous three models of the V series. After the upgrade of the Honor brand, this generation has change to the pure white background which is integrated with the packaging of other Honor products.

Different from many mobile phones that are born like a mother, the Honor V20 shows a stunning appearance at the first sight of your seeing. In the case where the front side does not cut any sensor including the camera, it achieves an ultra-high screen ratio by relying on the Honor’s first off-screen lens and micro-slit sensor.

The ultimate simplicity is the most general summary of the author's feeling of holding the Honor V20 in hands. There is no extra mechanical structure such as lifting lenses and slides, and there is no need to add a screen to the back, and the border has been greatly narrowed compared to the previous generation.

We need to that this 6.4-inch screen uses an LCD panel. LCD panels that do not have flexible features are far more difficult to process than OLED screens. And It is very difficult for the Honor V20 with LCD screen to achieve such a large visual improvement.

This is the “magic eye”, which is the first time that Honor has successfully hidden the camera in the LCD display and integrated it with the screen. Moreover, the position of the camera is on the left side of the signal bar in the upper left corner of the screen, and does not affect the core area of the screen display. There are 18 layers of screen medium hidden between the camera module and the screen. Here, the Honor V20 uses a very difficult "blind hole" solution which means the screen is not hollowed out, but the light is processed through the screen medium, compared with another solution that drills holes in the display glass, it is obvious that the V20's “magic eye” has smaller aperture and more reliability.

In the black screen state, it seems that there is only a pure screen left on the front of the Honor V20.

Under normal circumstances, the visually impactful body screen will attract most of the user's attention, this time, the Honor V20 uses a glass body, and boldly incorporates a V-shaped light and shadow design, like a pair of wings. It is worth mentioning that the glass cover on the back of the body is presented in 3D form

The Honor V20 rear camera layout is currently the first sight. The huge IMX586 main camera is placed on the edge of the body, and the TOF 3D sub camera is with flashed.

Here we move the angle of incidence of the light, and we can see that the V-shaped light and shadow hidden in the dark are also presented one by one. Here we also noticed that the old logo "honor" was replaced by the new version of the capital "HONOR", while the logo font uses a simple English font, simple but atmospheric.

Surprisingly, the Honor V20 still retains a 3.5mm headphone jack in the body, which is already rare in today's flagship model. At the same time, it can also win the favor of users who have the need for mobile phone headset.

At the bottom of the Honor V20 is a USB Type-C connector with a single row of speakers and a microphone opening on each side.

This is a card slot that supports dual Nano-SIM cards.

The Honor V20 is equipped with the Kirin 980 processor, GPU Turbo 2.0

The Honor V20 is equipped with the Kirin 980 processor, which makes its processor specifications standing at the peak of the Honor brand and even the Android camp. As we have said before, the Kirin 980 processor is the world's first flagship mobile platform with built-in dual NPU.It is equipped with the world's first Cortex-A76 Based CPU, which combines 4pcs A76 and 4pcs A55 cores. A76 is responsible for providing the ultimate performance and A55 specializes in low-load applications. Compared with the previous generation Kirin 970, the CPU performance is improved by 75% and the energy efficiency is also increased by 58%.Kirin 980 also built the world's first Mali-G76 GPU, a total of ten cores, the frequency is 720MHz, compared with the previous generation Kirin 970 GPU, the CPU performance by 46%, and the energy efficiency is increased by 178%.In terms of AI, Kirin 980 has a dual-core NPU, which is more powerful than previous generations and supports AI scenes such as face recognition, object recognition, object detection, image segmentation, and intelligent translation, and has a deeper network with higher precision.

Next, let's do running test to see if the Kirin 980 processor on the Honor V20 is full of blood.

1.Antutu Test
Antutu: The world's number one mobile phone/tablet hardware performance evaluation tool, can comprehensively examine the performance of all aspects of the device including the user experience, and visualize the ranking. Also Support multiple mainstream platforms, running points can be compared across platforms.
Antutu 's running points provides a total score and multiple sub- scores.
①Total score reflects the overall performance of the equipment.
②3D scores represent GPU graphics performance and game performance.
③The UX score represents the user experience, which is the performance in daily use.
④CPU scores represent CPU computing power and multi-core type.
⑤RAM performance represents system memory size and system optimization.

The Honor V20's Antutu running points has more than 300,000 points and is about to enter the gate of 310,000 points. This achievement has even beaten Huawei Mate 20 Pro, which is also equipped with the Kirin 980, far exceeding the models of the 845 platform.

Undoubtedly, it is easy to see that the Kirin 980 on the Honor V20 is full of blood.

2, GeekBench Test
GeekBench: A cross-platform CPU performance test tool that accurately reflects the single core and multi-core performance of the device CPU. Also can be used to test load simulates real-life application design, and the results are more meaningful, and can also measure the performance of GPU graphics.
The single core score can reflect the pros and cons of the CPU architecture design and the operating frequency. Multi-core scores reflect the efficiency of multiple CPU cores working at the same time.

The left is the Honor V20, and the right is Xiaomi MIX3.
It can be clearly seen that in terms of single-core performance, the Honor V20 presents the absolute advantage. Compared to the MIX3's 2,376 points, the leading range of the 3,303 points up to 40%. In terms of multi-core performance, the Honor V20 is also able to maintain a leading edge of 20%.

3.Androbench test
AndroBench is a benchmarking application that measures the 4K storage performance of Android devices, including internal or external storage.
From left to right, the storage performance test results of the Honor V20, one plus 6T, and Xiaomi MIX3. 

Although they are all UFS2.1 flash memory, it can be seen that the MIX3, which claims to be a high-performance flagship, especially the one plus 6T is obviously not as good as the Honor V20. In terms of sequential reading, the Honor V20 858.4MB/s is much faster than them.

It is worth noting that in terms of the performance of the flash core - 4K random read and write performance, there is a huge difference between MIX3，one plus 6T and the Honor V20,as MIX3 and one plus 6T only have 19MB / s to 21MB / s, but the Honor V20 has reached 162MB / s.

4. GPU Turbo 2.0
Honor upgraded GPU Turbo to the new version 2.0, and improve the gaming experience by developing the performance of the GPU through coordinating the underlying hardware and software. It can best balance the power, temperature, and voltage, so that the actual acceleration frequency of the GPU can be close to the theoretical value, far higher than the standard base frequency.

The official statement is that Kirin 980 uses the latest GPU Turbo2.0 technology to improve graphics processing efficiency by 60%. Next we use the earliest adapted game - the famous "negative optimization" mobile game "stimulus battlefield" to experience.

After our actual test, the frames of the Honor V20 is in line with expectations. In the case of more complicated scenes, the Kirin 980's large core will instantaneously approach full frequency and then quickly adjust the frequency according to demand. The scheduling is flexible and active, and the average frame number fluctuation is only about 1.03 frames.

48 million pixel IMX586 / AI tends to mature

The Honor V20 is the flagship mobile phone equipped with the IMX586. The resolution of the module is 8000x6000.Its sensor reaches 1/2 inch, 0.8μm per pixel, which is the world's first. It also has F1.8 apertures.

In addition to the powerful IMX586, the Honor V20 also comes with the Kirin 980's dual-channel ISP. The pixel throughput rate is 46% higher than the previous generation. It can adjust the image color and grayscale in different regions. It is also based on the powerful image processing capability of the Kirin 980 dual NPU. The Honor V20 has achieved a special bonus to AI HDR dynamic range adjustment and color reproduction, allowing the details of the photo to be more vividly performed.


Daytime photos
As can be seen from the above macro photo, the AI training of the Honor V20 rear camera has been much slower than the previous generation. The yellowness of the leaves and the vicissitudes of the trees are all manifested in detail under the macroscopic view, and the blurring of the outside is also a natural transition.


Photographing should be a record of the reality of light and shadow art, the Honor V20 for the large aperture IMX586 light volume scheduling is very restrained, as much as possible to restore the luster and brightness of the objects seen, without excessive intervention and post-processing.

Night photos

Night scene mode off


Night scene mode on

The Honor V20 supports the AIS handheld night scene.

Handheld Super Night Scene Through AIS, it automatically calculates and synthesizes dozens of images in a short time, improving the brightness and sharpness of the image, and correcting image blur and color. In the past, when we went out to take pictures, we had to carry a tripod with us to take good night scene photos at night, and now the software algorithm with the super night scene can optimize the breakthrough of the hardware ceiling to achieve better night shooting performance.

4000mAh battery can be chased a day / 22.5W fast charge / 90 minutes back to full blood
The Honor V20 maintains the long tradition of the V series and has a large battery of 4000mAh. So what is the performance of its actual endurance test? Here I use the online video and games to test its battery life.

1.Online Video Test
I use the bilibili APP to play online video, starting from 85% of the battery with 20% volume and 50% brightness. After 60 minutes, the remaining power is 76%. Only 9% of the power consumption which means the Honor V20 with full power can continuously play online video more than 11 hours, this is very good for those who love watching TV.

2.Game Test
The author uses the mobile game "Stimulus Battlefield" to test the battery life of the Honor V20, High-effects enable high-definition picture quality with high frame rate mode, starting from 95% power and playing games for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, the remaining electricity is 89%. Only 6% of the power consumption, which means the Honor V20 can play the game for 7 to 8 hours.

From above endurance testing, we can see that the Honor V20 perfectly inherits the traditional strength of large battery and long battery life of the V series, and the full capacity of 4000mAh battery can guarantee the normal usage from day to night.

3.Charging
Like its own big brother Huawei Mate 20, the Honor V20 supports a super-fast charge of up to 5V4.5A, and comes with Huawei "SuperCharge".
Starting from 1% to charge the screen, it takes 90 minutes to charge 97%. Facing a large battery with a capacity of 4000mAh, such fast charging speed has exceeded much of the standard and can be called the ultimate speed.

Experience

1.THE NINE liquid cooling
Speaking of this liquid cooling, we can trace back to the Honor Note10 stuffed into PC-grade liquid cooling tube. At that time, Honor was devoted to the construction of mobile phone cooling structure. The "NINE" refers to the 9-layer three-dimensional heat dissipation, which quickly and evenly distribute the heat generated by the chip to other parts of the body and quickly dissipate it to create the ultimate heat dissipation effect.

The Honor V20 heat dissipation structure diagram

Different from the Honor Note10, the Honor V20's heat pipe design has made a delicate innovation. It changed the heat pipe to a hyperbolic S shape, taking away various heat sources such as camera modules, SOC, charging modules and so on, and at the same time not increasing the thickness of the body.

Therefore, the author selected a test environment with a room temperature constant at 20 degrees, and in the standby state measured the temperature of the body back at 22.5 degrees. Then play "Stimulus Battlefield" with the full effect and full frame for 30 minutes.

Thanks to the THE NINE liquid cooling, on the other hand, it is also related to the cold weather in winter. The body temperature basically does not change after rises to 26.8 degrees slowly. From the view point of human touch, this temperature change is almost imperceptible.

2. "Magic Eye"
A lot of friends are more concerned about adaptation problem of the various applications for the "magic eye" full screen, we also did a simple test.

For most adaptation applications, the Honor V20 will hide the “magic eye” with the top black edge, and we can hardly see the presence of the front camera during the video playback. But during the game, the Honor V20 APP does not hide the "magic eye", but directly displays the front lens part. After the actual experience, it is found that the front camera does not affect the operation of the game because the area controlled by the main finger is mainly in the center area, and it is difficult to have access to the corners of the screen where the "magic eye" is located.

3, LINK TURBO
With unlimited traffic plans, the users are no longer worried about traffic charges. In addition, in the daily Internet process, we often face the upper limit of bandwidth under the same network standard, so the Honor V20 is equipped with LINK TURBO technology, which allows the mobile phone application to use both WIFI and LTE at the same time, which ensures efficient transmission and stability.

That is to say, when using the Honor V20, different applications can be located in different communication networks, and the application will be intelligently assigned to the most suitable network to establish links according to real-time requirements, such as using WLAN for background downloading, video chat for 4G network.

Summary
After the daily use experience and evaluation in these days, we believe that the Honor V20 is the hybrid of all the "scare technology" in 2018.

For the ultimate performance experience, the Honor V20 is equipped with full-blooded Kirin 980 mobile platform, while reproduces the NINE liquid cooling structure. This structure has been successful in the Honor Note10 and won many accolades.

In addition to the inheritance of the original hard power, the Honor V20 has made many innovations - the 48-million-pixel large aperture camera IMX586, and there is almost perfect magic eye comprehensive screen, and more LINK TURBO allows WiFi and traffic to work at the same time.

Top performance, innovative design, high-quality materials, ultra-high configuration but competitive price make it become the most cost-effective Kirin 980 platform mobile phone. All in all, the finale launch of the Honor V20 brings glory to the Honor at the last moment in 2018.