Honor 20S goes official: a more affordable Kirin 810-powered version of the Honor 20

The Honor 20S has been fully unveiled. It’s essentially the same phone as the Honor 20, except with a different chipset and one camera fewer - and a noticeably lower price tag.

The 20S is powered by a Kirin 810 chipset instead of the Kirin 980 (both are 7nm chips). The major change is the GPU – a Mali-G52 MP6, down from a Mali-G76 MP10. The downgrade in CPU performance is smaller, as you get two Cortex-A76 cores (instead of four) and six A55 cores. Anyway, the phone comes with 128GB of storage and 6GB or 8GB of RAM. There’s no microSD card slot.

Honor 20S

The triple camera on the back keeps the 48MP main sensor (f/1.8 aperture). However, the chipset tops out at 1080p/30 video recording, which means that camera loses 4K video capture.

An 8MP ultra wide-angle camera and a 2MP dedicated macro camera round off the triple camera on the back (note that the Honor 20 has a 16MP ultra wide cam). The 2MP depth sensor is gone, but we’re not sure how many will miss it. The NPU hardware of the Kirin chipset is used to power the AI-based Super Night Scene mode.

The Honor 20S boasts a 32MP selfie camera placed inside a punch hole in the screen. Both the selfie camera and the 48MP rear cam have 0.8µm pixels and support pixel binning.

Back to the screen, it’s an IPS LCD panel that measures 6.26”. It has 1080p+ resolution and it covers 96% of the NTSC color gamut. The fingerprint reader is mounted on the side of the phone.

The battery has 3,750mAh capacity and supports 20W fast charging (a minor downgrade from the 22.5W charge speed of the Honor 20).

The Honor 20S is currently in a short pre-order window, sales should begin in earnest tomorrow. If you register now, you get a small bonus – Huawei AM115 wired headphones that you can plug into the 3.5mm jack.

The price starts at CNY 1,900 (equivalent to $265/€240) for the 6/128GB model, the one with 8GB RAM is CNY 2,200. For comparison, the Honor 20 costs CNY 2,700 (the base model is 8/128GB) and the Honor 20 Pro is CNY 3,200. You can find the 20S on VMall, TMall and JD among others.