Honor 20i

Whether you should buy the Honor 20i or not? We will break our answer to this question in two parts, first how the phone actually is and in the second part, we will consider the US ban on Huawei.

Part 1: The Honor 20i packs big numbers in the camera department with 3 cameras in the back with a wide angle lens and though it captures good quality images, it doesn’t come close to the Redmi Note 7 Pro and also, the Samsung Galaxy M30 which also has triple rear cameras has better wide angle image quality. However, the Honor 20i also comes with a huge 32 MP front camera, which is pretty good and is one of the best for the price. It comes with Huawei’s own processor which is good & efficient for day to day usage & light gaming but is far behind the Qualcomm processors offered by the competitors. The phone’s display is good, it has the latest software and design-wise it looks good but has a plastic body. Overall, the Honor 20i does most of the things right but as a package, it is good at best while, the competition is a lot better and overshadows it in most departments.

Part 2: Coming to the US ban on Huawei, first let’s understand what it means for the Huawei and Honor phones globally and in India. Due to the ban, Google has to stop working with Huawei and stop providing Android’s pre-release builds and Play Services, including Google’s app store ‘Google Play’ to the company. The Honor 20i runs on the latest Android 9 Pie and also comes with Google Play store and it should keep running fine but there is a lot of uncertainty over the updates and neither Huawei nor Google has officially cleared whether the existing phones will get the updates or not. Meanwhile, Huawei is also developing its own operating system and is also expanding its own app store but, they are far from ready and there is no knowledge if Huawei will sort out the issue or stop seeding new updates or will update the existing users to open source Android without Google Play or some new platform. So, in this whole atmosphere of uncertainty, we recommend you to not buy Huawei phones until there is some clarity.