Samsung’s hardly the only company working on smartphones with hole-punch displays. Huawei sub-brand Honor has just unveiled its first phone with a tiny hole in the screen for front-facing camera.

But it’s the rear camera on the Honor View 20 which may be more interesting — it’s a 48MP camera with a Sony IMX586 image sensor.

That’s the highest-resolution camera for any smartphone to date, as far as I’m aware… although others have come close. The Huawei Mate 20 Pro has a 40MP camera, and Nokia was making phones with 41MP cameras 6 years ago.

Photography isn’t just about megapixels these days, but the Honor View 20 is also said to support a new artificial intelligence-enhanced HDR mode thanks to dual neural processing units in the phone’s Kirin 980 processor.

There’s also support for shooting high-quality 12MP photos in low-light settings, or you can shoot full-res images and crop them instead of using digital zoom. So it’s not surprising that, like Google’s Pixel phones, the Honor View 20 has a single high-quality rear camera rather than multiple camera lenses.

The Honor brand also tends to be a little more affordable than Huawei’s flagship phones sold under its own name, so maybe the single-camera solution was a way to keep costs down.

Huawei/Honor is also unveiling a new technology called “Link Turbo” that the company says will enable the phone to use WiFi and 4G LTE connections simultaneously.

More details should be available later this month, when the phone will officially be unveiled in China ahead of a global launch scheduled for January.

Update 12/26/18: full specs for the View 20 have been revealed. Its hole-punch, 1080p display will measure 6.4 inches with a stretched-out 19.25:9 aspect ratio. Processing will be handled by a 7nm Kirin 980 chip.

Three models have been announced, starting at CNY2,999 ($435) with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. The mid-range View 20 comes with 8GB RAM and 128GB for CNY3,499 ($510). At the top end is the Moschino edition with 8GB RAM and 256GB for CNY3,999 ($580).

via GSM Arena

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One reply on “Honor View 20 smartphone features a 48MP camera (and a hole-punch display)”

  1. Awesome! We finally get a phone with a turbo! Now it can suck up ALL the bits from the internet and pack them into that display. Next thing you know Samsung will announce a phone with a super charger. That air(bit?) scoop will be a bit of a bother but think about how fast you will be able to download!
    Will the nonsense ever stop? Hopefully this phone will have a screen with a 47:1 screen ratio and make light saber noises when you move it around.
    I love spiked eggnog.

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