When I first saw the Huawei Honor View 20 at CES, I couldn't take my eyes off of that mesmerizing finish.
It's actually hypnotic the way that the light shifts and reflects off the back to form this chevron pattern.
It feels very liquid in fact.
But there's more to this phone than just that.
It's the hardware matched with the Honor View 20's price that make it such a compelling better than min range phone.
Let's start with the screen, it's got a 6.4 inch LCD display with a 2310 by 1080 pixel resolution.
That's pretty high and it helps keep words and images looking sharp on the screen.
But notice how the screen stretches from one end to the other.
With only a narrow bezel around the rim.
There's no notch along the phone face and what's this?
No sensors either.
Instead the Honor view 20 uses the new punch hole design to place the camera within the screen.
Almost like it's peeking out through the display.
And the sensors have moved up to the phones top edge I'm happy to say that the punch hole design really works.
This is a 25 megapixel camera and I was able to take selfies smoothly.
The circular cutout never felt disruptive or covered anything crucial.
Sometimes it just melts into the background when you open up an app.
Other times, it sort of floats on top.
Now as far as photo quality goes, that was pretty good, too.
There's a beauty mode and dramatic lighting effects to spruce up photos.
Not all of those effects work, some of them cut off half my hair.
AR lens, which is why we always take on Apple's and emojis is kinda fun too.
Completing the tour of the casing, you've got a USBC charger port for that enormous 4,000 [UNKNOWN] battery, and you have a headphone jack up top.
There's no support for external storage, but you can go dual SIM.
On the back you have a 48 megapixel camera, with a 3D dub sensor lens next door.
You can use these to take portrait shots with all the trimmings.
And there's a wacky mode on here that let's you digitally make someone thinner.
But the far more interesting tool is the AI ultra clarity mode that combines multiple photos into one optimized mega picture that you can crop in on.
It's much smoother than the regular 48 megapixel image, but you lose some color and detail.
It also takes five seconds to shoot this way, and it works best for landscape shots with ample lighting.
To take photos faster with AI, you can tap the AI mode in the camera app.
It the phone recognizes a scene, it will automatically apply settings to optimize that photo.
It works especially well with photos of people, flowers, and food.
Battery life is impressive on this phone, running 16 hours in our continuous video loop test on airplane mood.
The 4,000 milliamp battery that I mention is the same capacity as on the Galaxy Note 9, a phone that costs about twice the Honor View 20's price.
Anecdotally it lasted a full day and well into the night.
You've got 128 gigabytes of onboard storage to play with or you could pay a little bit more for the 256 gigabyte version like the one I have.
The honor view 20 runs on Android 9 with the Magic UI 2 interface.
It sell in select markets around the world, but if you do get your hands on it, it's a strong value android phone that's guaranteed to turn heads.
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