Honor View 20 release date, price, and specs

As if Honor didn’t have enough phones on the market already, the firm has a new one bringing with it a trio of new technology. Here’s what you need to know about the Honor View 20 including release date, price and specs.

Although it’s hard to keep up with all of the Honor smartphones, the View 20 (aka the V20) is notable for having one of the first in-screen cameras. Instead of the infamous notch, it uses what’s being referred to as a ‘punch-hole-screen’.

The View 20 is out now in the UK and Europe, following a 22 January launch – though it came out in China a bit earlier, in later December. The company first showed it off in the west at CES 2019 – where it picked up one of our best of CES awards, and did pretty darn well in our review.

How much is the Honor View 20?

The View 20 is available in a few colours and versions, starting from £499 for the base model. That comes with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage, and you can get it in either Sapphire Blue or Midnight Black.

You can buy the phone outright from the likes Amazon, Very, or Honor itself, while if you’d prefer to grab it on contract it’s available from Carphone Warehouse or O2. Buy the phone before 6 February from a participating retailer and they’ll even throw in a free Honor Watch Magic – the company’s new smartwatch, worth £179 in its own right.

Our photos show the Phantom Blue version of the phone, which comes with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage and costs £579. In some countries that version is also available in Phantom Red, but unfortunately the UK isn’t getting the red edition of the phone. In the UK the Phantom Blue version of the phone is a Carphone Warehouse exclusive until 9 April.

The Honor View 10, its predecessor, launched at £449 so this is a slight increase – but really not much more than we’d expect a year on.

What are the Honor View 20 specs?

As mentioned earlier, one of the headline things about the View 20 is that it’s one of the first smartphones to come with an in-screen camera. This means the camera is completely surrounded by the screen rather than being placed in a notch. The ‘punch-hole’ style is likely to be just as controversial. 

Honor says this is achieved “by an extremely complex 18-layer technology stack that carefully embeds the front camera in the display area of the screen, extends the display area to almost 100 percent.”

It’s thought the camera hole is around 4.5mm, which is smaller than the 6mm expected on the upcoming Galaxy S10. But did Samsung actually beat Honor to the punch, quite literally, with the Galaxy A8s, announced just a day before the View 20 – though releasing in Europe later.

Sticking with cameras, the View 20 is the first with a whopping 48Mp rear camera. It’s a Sony IMX586 CMOS with a large 1/2-inch sensor (0.8 µm/pixel). Working with the Kirin 980 processor it will offer multi-frame image processing.

It has an ‘AI Ultra Clarity’ mode to help “create an AI-enabled high-definition 48Mp image.” In the dark it will merge four 0.8um pixels into one to create larger 1.6um. This will result in 12Mp images.

Here’s a sample image from the View 20’s camera provided by Honor: