Huawei P20 Lite review

Android 8 with EMUI 8

The Huawei P20 Lite ships with Android Oreo and Huawei's EMUI 8.0 skin over it. Emotion UI is constantly getting better, with behind-the-scenes improvements, like better RAM management, sophisticated battery management, improved miss-touch detection and higher touch accuracy, to name a few. And we appreciate the constantly shrinking amount of bloat, bundled in the ROM, the sheer number and the added convenience of the baked-in features.

Out of the box, there is no app drawer on the EMUI 8 - it's a single tier interface like on the iPhone. However, if you miss it, you can enable it back in the Display settings. There is also a handy search feature, which can be accessed by flicking down on any empty area of any home screen.

Home screen 1 • Home screen 2 • Home options • Search • Enable drawer

EMUI has something called Magazine lock screen, which rotates through a bunch of wallpapers, so you see a different one every time you fire up the display.

The lockscreen

EMUI offers plenty of customization and features like face unlock, smart rotation, and lift to wake. Themes are supported, too, and there is a lot to choose from. There are a few themes to choose from with the option to change the icons, the skin, and wallpaper.

From the Phone Manager app, you can access shortcuts to storage cleanup, battery settings, blocked numbers, Virus scan powered by Avast, and mobile data usage.

Theme chooser • Theme • Theme • Theme • Phone Manager

The notification shade is pretty much a standard affair. There's a brightness bar with an Auto toggle - pull down again for more toggles.

Multitasking is pretty standard as well. Tap-holding the Recents key will let you activate split screen.

Notification area • Notifications • Toggles • Recent apps • Split screen

Huawei's own Music app is here and offers a way to listen to stored MP3s. An FM radio app is present, and the Gallery is here to stay.

Huawei's Health app is also pre-installed. It offers Google Fit syncing and step counting. There's a file manager app and a note-taking app. There is an abundance of replacements for these in the Play Store, however.

Music Player • Gallery • Huawei Health • Files • FM radio

Performance

The Huawei P20 Lite employs the same Kirin 659 chipset as the P10 Lite and Mate 10 Lite, as well as the Honor 7X. Those already offered some benchmark numbers and painted a clear picture of what can be expected from the chipset. The P20 Lite fell in line with those expectations. Its scores are pretty much the same (within margin of error).

The Kirin 659 has a total of eight Cortex-A53 cores. Four of those take the heavy lifting and work at 2.36GHz, while the other four take care of less power-intensive tasks while ticking at 1.7GHz. The CPU is up to the task of handling everything, though it seriously trails behind the A73 cores inside the Oppo F7 (Helio P60), for instance.

GeekBench 4.1 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Oppo F7
  1531
• Huawei P Smart
  939
• Huawei P20 Lite
  938
• Huawei Mate 10 Lite
  913
• Motorola Moto G6 Plus
  882
• Nokia 6 (2018)
  882
• Xiaomi Mi A1
  877
• Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus
  874
• Sony Xperia XA2
  865
• Huawei P10 lite
  834

GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Oppo F7
  5901
• Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus
  4309
• Xiaomi Mi A1
  4292
• Nokia 6 (2018)
  4225
• Sony Xperia XA2
  4215
• Motorola Moto G6 Plus
  4160
• Huawei P20 Lite
  3756
• Huawei P Smart
  3736
• Huawei Mate 10 Lite
  3603
• Huawei P10 lite
  3344

There are only two Mali-T830 GPU cores inside the P20 Lite, as on the rest of the budget Huawei phones, and those really struggle with modern graphics loads. But just to be on the safe side, those are still enough to run a huge chunk of the games on the Play Store, but hiccups, low-quality textures, or low fps are to be expected in the more demanding ones.

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Oppo F7
  11
• Sony Xperia XA2
  10
• Nokia 6 (2018)
  10
• Motorola Moto G6 Plus
  9.3
• Xiaomi Mi A1
  6.3
• Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus
  6.2
• Huawei P10 lite
  5
• Huawei P Smart
  5
• Huawei P20 Lite
  4.9
• Huawei Mate 10 Lite
  4.6

Basemark X

Higher is better

• Nokia 6 (2018)
  14365
• Motorola Moto G6 Plus
  14357
• Sony Xperia XA2
  14312
• Oppo F7
  11873
• Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus
  10484
• Xiaomi Mi A1
  10472
• Huawei P20 Lite
  9090
• Huawei P Smart
  8834
• Huawei Mate 10 Lite
  8721
• Huawei P10 lite
  7588

While the GPU scores might be dismal, the compound benchmarks show the Huawei P20 Lite and its Kirin 659 to be as capable as the best of mid-rangers - read Nokia 6 and Moto G6 Plus with their Snapdragon 630 silicon. So, yes, the Kirin 659 is still a balanced and capable chip even now, 2 years into active service.

AnTuTu 7

Higher is better

• Oppo F7
  139414
• Nokia 6 (2018)
  90918
• Motorola Moto G6 Plus
  90263
• Huawei P20 Lite
  87431
• Huawei P Smart
  87156

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

• Oppo F7
  1953
• Sony Xperia XA2
  1545
• Motorola Moto G6 Plus
  1525
• Nokia 6 (2018)
  1517
• Huawei P Smart
  1486
• Huawei P20 Lite
  1455
• Huawei Mate 10 Lite
  1408
• Huawei P10 lite
  1284
• Xiaomi Mi A1
  1262
• Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus
  1226

The P20 Lite runs cool even at full throttle, so don't expect any heat issues no matter how you use it. It isn't a chart-topper, sure, not even next to fellow mid-ranges, but the Lite offers some nicely calculated balanced performance.

The thing is balanced scores won't do it for long. The Kirin 659 has been around for two years already and while offering enough punch, it's hardly future-proof. It's about time Huawei comes up with something new, because its mid-rangers are seriously behind the competition in terms of theoretical performance and it will become an issue sooner rather than later.