Huawei P20 and P20 Pro released: 40MP Camera on a Smartphone

Huawei unveiled their two new flagships at an event in Paris – the Huawei P20 and the P20 Pro. And you guessed it, they both have a notch! But more on that later. These are a new breed of phones in a way and these are our first impressions.Both the devices have multiple cameras on the back. While the P20 sports a dual camera setup, the Pro sports a triple camera setup. This is a first on a smartphone or almost any device for that matter. Is it overkill to have 3 cameras in a smartphone that is not specifically meant for AR? On the front, the P20 has a 5.8 inch notched RGBW screen while the Pro has a slightly bigger 6.1 inch OLED panel.Both devices have the same resolution at 2,240 x 1,080 pixels. The Huawei P20 series comes with a full vision display with 18:9 aspect ratio.

Huawei like most OEMs now are implementing AI capabilities in their devices. The SoC that powers the devices is a Kirin 970 that is AI centric and features a NPU for all AI based features. The smartphones run on EMUI 8.1 which is based on Android 8.1. The P20 comes with 4GB RAM and 128GB and it lacks a microSD card slot. The Pro, on the other hand, comes with 6GB RAM and 128GB. Huawei P20 series also loses the headphone jack as well.  While the P20 Pro has a 4000 mAh battery, the smaller P20 has a 3400 mAh battery on board. Both devices will also support Google’s ARCore for advanced AR capabilities.

The camera is the real star of the show and we have a detailed article coming up on the camera set ups of the devices soon.  The camera configuration of the P20 Pro includes a 40MP RGB sensor, a 20MP monochrome sensor and an 8MP sensor with telephoto lens and it’s a Leica 3x optical zoom lens. This sounds crazy but it’s true and the samples so far look great too. The regular Huawei P20 also has a Leica dual camera featuring a 12MP lens with 1.55 μm pixel size and a 20MP monochrome lens. For the selfie camera, both smartphones have a 24MP selfie camera with AI beautification and 3D portrait lighting.

Have a look at these glorious pictures of the Huawei P20 here.