Huawei P20 Pro review

Assorted apps

Huawei is still persisting with its own multimedia apps and has both a custom Gallery and Music player. In addition to your camera roll, the Gallery offers sorting by albums, or smart sorting by subject, places, events, among others. It has its own image editor, if needed, and it also works with variable aperture shots for adjusting the bokeh effects post shot.

The EMUI gallery

The EMUI's Music app changes background dynamically to match the album art. Lyrics are available and downloaded automatically. We didn't find an equalizer, just a selector for the Dolby Atmos modes.

Music app • Now Playing • Lyrics • Dolby Atmos settings

There's a ton of useful pre-installed apps on the P20 Pro. Among the more notable ones is the Health app, which tracks steps and calculates calories, but can also count the number of floors you've climbed. The list of tools includes a proper file manager, IR remote control app, calendar , notes, weather, compass, sound recorder, and flashlight.

Health app • File manager • Remote control • Calendar

Synthetic benchmarks

The P20 Pro is powered by Huawei's own Kirin 970 chipset, one we're familiar with from the Mate 10 and 10 Pro. It's packing 4 Cortex-A73 cores clocked at up to 2.4GHz and another 4 Cortex-A53 cores capped at 1.8GHz. The GPU is a twelve-core Mali-G72 MP12. There's a generous 6GB of RAM on board too.

In benchmarks, the Pro consistently scores on par with the Mate 10 Pro - oh, surprise. Single-core performance in Geekbench is right there with the Snapdragon 835 bunch, but the latest Qualcomm chip is superior, not to mention the Exynos 9810 in the Galaxy S9+ and the iPhone X's Bionic. In fact, all of the above applies equally well to the P20 Pro's multi-core CPU performance.

GeekBench 4.1 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone X
  4256
• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  3771
• Sony Xperia XZ2
  2454
• Samsung Galaxy S9+ (Snapdragon)
  2199
• OnePlus 5T (Oreo)
  1974
• HTC U11+ (EU)
  1952
• Google Pixel 2 XL
  1915
• Huawei P20 Pro
  1907
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  1902
• LG V30
  1901
• Huawei Mate 10
  1882

GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone X
  10215
• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  8883
• Sony Xperia XZ2
  8466
• Samsung Galaxy S9+ (Snapdragon)
  8349
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  6783
• OnePlus 5T (Oreo)
  6759
• HTC U11+ (EU)
  6740
• Huawei P20 Pro
  6679
• Huawei Mate 10
  6625
• Google Pixel 2 XL
  6428
• LG V30
  6365

Raw graphics power is also a notch down from the best players. The Adreno 630 in the Snapdragon-powered Galaxy S9+ and the Xperia XZ2 is a proven beast, but the Mali-G72 in the other S9+ isn't too shabby either - it does have 6 more cores than Huawei's GPU.

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S9+ (Snapdragon)
  61
• Sony Xperia XZ2
  55
• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  47
• Apple iPhone X
  44
• Google Pixel 2 XL
  42
• LG V30
  41
• OnePlus 5T (Oreo)
  40
• Huawei P20 Pro
  40
• HTC U11+ (EU)
  39
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  38
• Huawei Mate 10
  38
• Huawei P10 Plus
  19

The Galaxies do have more pixels to render, having QHD+ displays and all, so the P20 Pro pulls ahead in the onscreen tests. The Xperia XZ2, on the other hand, is capable of iPhone X-like frame rates - that's what happens when you pair the most powerful GPU on an Android with a FullHD resolution display.

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone X
  51
• Sony Xperia XZ2
  51
• OnePlus 5T (Oreo)
  37
• Huawei P20 Pro
  37
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  35
• Samsung Galaxy S9+ (Snapdragon)
  34
• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  24
• Huawei Mate 10
  23
• Google Pixel 2 XL
  21
• HTC U11+ (EU)
  20
• LG V30
  19
• Huawei P10 Plus
  12

No benchmark score measuring contest will be complete without Antutu and in the test's seventh version the latest Huawei is posting last year's numbers. They're still some pretty big and impressive numbers, it's just that phones with both the Snapdragon 845 (Xperia XZ2 and Galaxy S9+) and the Exynos 9810 (well, just the Galaxy S9+) are outperforming it by a wide margin.

AnTuTu 7

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S9+ (Snapdragon)
  264044
• Sony Xperia XZ2
  259244
• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  246660
• Huawei Mate 10
  214037
• Huawei P20 Pro
  209884
• OnePlus 5T (Oreo)
  207072
• Google Pixel 2 XL
  203119
• LG V30
  182374

The P20 Pro may not really be up there with the best on the market when it comes to benchmark performance, but it isn't suffering from a shortage of processing power either. Slightly worrisome is the heat that builds up quickly once we start running the benchmarks - consecutive runs yield progressively worse results due to thermal throttling, and the back of the phone does get pretty hot.