Honor View 20 hands-on review

Design and handling

The Honor View 20's design is unique and it's an eye-catcher for sure. The side frame is aluminum while the front and back are glass. Yes, it's another glass sandwich phone, but two things make it stand out.

Right off the bat, the hole in the upper left corner of the screen draws attention. Honor says it has worked a lot toward reducing the size of the hole and the circle is as small as 4.5mm in diameter. Five different patents and a significant amount of R&D have gone into refining the manufacturing process.

And since the hole eliminates the need of a notch, you get more screen real estate. The bezels around the screen are also fairly thin with the bottom one being the thickest of them all. And don't worry about the notifications around the screen hole - they adapt depending on the scenario and apps. Honor claims that it won't get in the way as most notches do.

The back is where it gets interesting. During the launch event in China, we got our hands on the Magic Night Black version and it's mesmerizing.

The V-shaped strip shifts its color when the angle changes while the Phantom Blue variant we saw in Las Vegas has a more pronounced V-shape.

Other than that, the back houses the fingerprint reader, the main 48MP camera sensor (which looks huge) and the 3D ToF sensor along with the LED flash next to it.

Going around the sides, we find the 3.5mm audio jack (yay!) as well as an IR blaster. The loudspeaker is bottom-firing and it sits right next to the USB-C connector.

As you would expect, the Honor View 20 is hard to balance in one hand - after all, that's a 6.4-inch device right there. And it sure is slippery like every other glass phone.

All in all, the device looks stunning and we are eager to get our hands on more color options - for now we've only seen the Magic Night Black and the Phantom Blue. And only further testing will help us decide whether the punch-hole display design is the way to go or it's going to be the next most hated thing after the introduction of the notch.