HTC U20 5G - 2020's Hidden Gem? The Full Review! By JEMZ Space

Hi everyone it's jams from namespace, I hope you're doing well, I'm back with another video and this time it's the long wait for review full review of the HTC u20. As you can see here, to review this phone, I'm just going to go over my experience with it from the last was about a month and a half two months now, and I'm going to break it down on a various few categories, such as design, display security battery performance, and then I'll summarize at the end, whether I think this is a worthwhile phone for you to purchase. So let's talk about design first and foremost. Now when I unbox this phone, I was amazed by it. I thought it looked absolutely incredible. It really struck me the premium quality that it has.

So it has this military green finish. You can get a white version as well, and it's accentuated by these bronze and silver and gold touches, so the power button there, which you can see also the camera ring as well- has a touch of gold. The HTC sign is chrome, silver and then there's this chrome metallic green finish on the fingerprint sensor. So with the military green finish, and these little touches and splashes of bronze and gold and silver everywhere just gives you a really premium luxury feel to it, and it's actually one of my favorite looking phones of 2020. Now, of course, if you know your phones you're going to know that this phone did take its design, cue from the Realme x50 pro, but in terms of basic design and aesthetic.

I do prefer this one a little more. It just feels more premium, there's a slight little jut out of the camera module, so it does mean that there's a little of a wobble if you put it on a flat surface, however, because cameras are becoming more and more advanced, and they need more space in the hardware um big camera modules that stick out is coming more commonplace now. So it's actually not that much of a problem because, quite frankly, most frames that are coming out these days has that same camera module and there's always going to be a little of a wobble. But in my time it's never been a problem. Okay.

So this is a really, really big phone, so 6.8 inches from corner to corner uh, because it's a more traditional aspect ratio. So it doesn't follow the same aspect ratio as say the note 20 ultra, which is a little thinner. What you got is a really tall phone, but a really wide phone and because of the 5000 William battery, it's quite thick, so this phone is heavy, but it's also a lot to hold um and if you've got small hands. I would probably avoid this because it is like I've got relatively big hands and I still struggle to firmly get my hand around it and reach everywhere. One-Handed mode on this is a complete nightmare like I can't reach up to the top, as you can see, but some people like their big phones.

You know for me this one's a little on the two big side, but you know lots of screen real estate, so you might enjoy that other thing to mention. It's got: 256 gigabytes of storage. There is room for expansion, memory expansion, so it's a dual sim and one of the sim trays can also take a SD card now for audio files, you'll see no headphone jack, I'm afraid. However, you do get some really nice USB type-c headphones free in the box, they're, really nice quality, good audio. I find that HTC's free headphones that they give with their phones are some of the best of any phones.

I only think really. Samsung um are probably above them with the AKG headphones that come with Samsung phones, but HTC is up here above all the other phone manufacturers in terms of the quality of the headphones that they provide for free, they're, really nice, and also just in general, the audio quality, the speaker um, and when you listen to your music, it's nice and loud and punchy and vibrant, so perfect audio on this as well. Of course, it comes with venom c, but there's no IP rating, which is a bit bizarre because the u12 plus, which was their previous flagship, had ip68. I believe the ip68 this one doesn't have any. I believe it's splash resistant, but it would have been nice if they carried on that heritage of their flagships being IP rated.

So all in all nice design looks good. It's a design that a lot of people in the business field, corporate types would probably love. It just has a really sort of like formal feel about it, and for me personally, I do believe this is one of the most striking looking phones for me personally of 2020. , okay, so we're going to talk display now so, as mentioned, it is a 6.8 inch display it's an IPS LCD panel, so no AMOLED you're not going to get those super deep, blacks, all those strikingly punchy, colors um, I would say, unfortunately, the display on this phone is one of the weak points. Okay.

So the main problem that I have with this display is just the muted feel of the colors, the colors don't really pop or punch, and they don't look natural. It looks kind of like artificially gray, if I can use that as a way to explain it, also because it's full HD, and it's not quad HD full HD, spread over such a massive screen. The PPI is 387 in this day and age, where PPI can far exceed 500 and there's some Sony phones that have gone over 600. That's pretty low. To be honest, it's not that you look at it and think wow, it's not sharp at all.

You won't be opening this phone. Turning the screen on and being blown away by it, you would have had phones in the past where the screen just completely outperforms that one other thing to mention. Can you see that chin there and the borders? So this has an 83 percent screen to body ratio, so that's quite low in this day and age. Again, phones are going over 90 um, the chin. On this one I mean it doesn't perfectly bother me, but for some the chin might be a problem: okay, security, biometrics.

So there's only one real method outside your traditional code pattern password uh to get in this phone, which is the fingerprint sensor which is here at the back now. I wish it would be where my finger was because, as mentioned, this phone is huge, so it is quite high and when you're naturally holding it in that position, which I find personally is the way that I hold the phone to reach up to the fingerprint sensors a bit of a ball lake. I just wish that they lowered it a little more, and it would have been perfect, so the fingerprint sensor is really responsive. So, let's give it a go I'll adjust my hand, so I'm going to press it now. Okay, we didn't go in that time.

That's not good! Let's try again, and we're in we're going to give it another go, and we're in one final time, and we're in again so 75 of the time we got in our four attempts. For the most part, that's uh! That's not the case most of the time I just get straight in so forget about that. First, one. It's quite responsive. It works well, but, interestingly enough it doesn't have face recognition.

Um. So, as mentioned, you've only got your traditional ways of getting in such as password and pattern and code. You've got your fingerprint sensor, but no facial unlock now, not a problem for me. Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of um face recognition. Um, it's just a bit of a longer way of getting into your phone, but at least there's an option for you to get into your phone quicker than putting a code in, and you know if your fingerprint sensor gets wet.

You have another solution of getting in uh. When your fingerprint sensor isn't being responsive with this phone. We don't get that um, a lot of phones, do it cheaper phones, I've reviewed phones for 100 pounds that have facial recognition. So it's a bit sad that they didn't put it in. It's not a dealbreaker in any way, but they could have just put it in a basic form of facial unlock.

Okay. So let's talk battery life, so battery on this is a 5 000 William battery. So it's pretty substantial. It comes with an 18 watt power brick, so I often find that this phone will charge fully in about an hour about an hour and 10 minutes and in terms of um how long the battery lasts the endurance of the battery. It will last me pretty much the whole day.

I've never had a day when this is run out of battery and I need to quickly charge it again somewhere halfway through the day. It's good the battery on. This is good by the time that I finish the day, and I'm ready to go to bed and put my phone on charge for the night. It still has about 20 battery left so perfect battery life. On this.

It's definitely one of his strong points. Okay, so let's talk camera, so you have four cameras on this phone on the rear. You have a 48 megapixel main sensor with 1.8 aperture. The ultra-wide lens is underneath, which is 8 megapixels at 2.2 aperture. Then you have two times: 2 megapixel cameras which deal with macro mode and portrait mode, so depth of macro camera for the front facing camera.

It's actually a pretty decent 32 megapixel camera, which has a 2.0 aperture okay. So if you want to see my camera review for this phone, it's up here, click the link somewhere um and in that camera review. I surmise that this is a pretty damn good camera phone um HTC have always been very good at cameras. This is why Google took a massive interest in HTC and brought out a lot of their research and development team, but still, regardless of the Google acquisition, HTC, still maintain a team which know what to do with cameras, and I'm going to run through some camera examples um. So you know you can judge for yourself um.

I would say that this camera, when the light conditions are perfect, can generate a really, really good crisp sharp photo um, and I've taken some really impressive photos. When the light is perfect, however, it's not all good. There are some problems. Um the color reproduction is a bit weird in some photos. It just looks like the colors are really muted and the greens look drab and the blues don't punch, so it'd be nice if they worked a little harder on their uh software processing.

Much like how Samsung and Google do with their phones to really make those colors punch. I'm also not a big fan of selfie mode on this, because the selfie pictures they have that traditional Chinese thing of beauty mode where to smoothen out your skin just makes you look like a doll, really unrealistic and also the front facing cam it over exposes the sky quite a bit as well. Another thing to mention is that there's a 48 megapixel mode on this for the super high detailed, sharp uh pictures. Normally it will bend the photos down into 12 megapixels, but the 48 megapixel mode doesn't have HDR enabled on it. So if you're, taking a picture with a lot of light sources or a clear blue sky facing the sun, you'll get that really over exposed.

Look um where the sky just looks washed out. So it's a bit weird that they kind of just put the HDR mode on the 48 megapixel mode as well. There are more positives as well. I mean the consistency in the color accuracy and just general quality of the picture between the ultra-wide and the main sensor is pretty good um. Obviously, the quality drops a little on the ultra-wide because of the um because of the not so quality lens.

But in terms of general look of the picture, it remains pretty accurate to what you would get on the main sensor, which is actually quite rare, because a lot of ultra-wide lenses take a photo which looked completely different um to the main lens that say, Samsung phones used to suffer from that problem. Quite a lot, I'm also pretty impressed with the portrait mode on this as well. Um stabilization on video on the main camera is very good, so you can get some good videos on it. Unfortunately, stabilization on the front-facing camera is non-existent. It's it just shakes like crazy, but on the main sensor it works very well.

All in all. This is a good to fairly good camera. In my opinion, the HTC u12 plus was one of my favorite camera phones of all time, and although this phone doesn't maintain that same level of excellence, I think a lot of HTC fans will still be happy with the camera on this phone, but so, let's talk performance, so it's powered by snapdragon 765 g, alongside of 8 gigabytes of ram. That would put this phone in the premium mid-tier range, and you will get a relatively good, strong, stable performance on this. This works absolutely fine with multiple apps open.

It runs smoothly in general, it's quite fast. If you're playing games on it, the rendering is good. The frame rate is high in general, it's quite a high performance phone. However, there are performance issues and I touched on the performance issues in the unboxing video. Let's talk about the version of android that they're using so HTC used to use their own skin with their own suite of apps, whether it be the contact, app email, app calculator, they had their own suite of apps, and all of that is now gone and HTC now use a stock version on android for the HTC u20.

So a lot of people, including me, will think that's great because, in my opinion, the HTC version of android, the skin of android, was pretty dated, and the apps were in desperate need of updating. They hadn't updated the apps in a long time, so they just looked incredibly old. On the other hand, it takes away some features that a lot of HTC fans would have cherished. Now. One subscriber did mention something to me in my previous unboxing video.

He uses the HTC phones for its ability to be able to bring up all the details of a contact, whilst the actual contact is on the phone to you. So if someone calls your phone, and you might have thousands of contacts- I mean this is something perfect for sales. Whilst the call is ongoing, you can bring up a menu which brings that person's details up on screen, including all the notes, because you can add notes to them. Um, and you know, for example, in sales you might put about the previous nature of the call. What their interest was, what they were inquiring about, their need for your business, blah blah blah.

You can access all of that immediately, whilst they're on the court, whereas on stock android, that's a lot more problematic because then you will have to go through all of your contacts find that contact than open it up, and that can be a big problem if you have thousands of contacts which a lot of people do, especially in businesses. So, even though I do believe that moving over to stock android was a good thing for HTC, just purely because of how dated their software was, it would have been nice if they just kept a few of these things that made HTC stand out, especially some of these productivity tools. So let's talk more about the performance issues. So in the original video I mentioned something about YouTube glitch and that it's actually nothing to do with HTC. So I apologize that was a YouTube problem which I managed to figure out the fix.

Then there was the major problem which was really making me not enjoy this phone at all and HTC, who are not renowned for their software updates. Did a software update within about three weeks of me having this phone which eradicated that problem and that problem was the accidental palm touch? So you know when on waterfall displays or curved displays, your palm might trigger the screen, and it might force you out of the app, or it might just do something or close something or open something or delete something this, even though it's not a waterfall display or curved display. This had the worst case of accidental palm touch on any phone I've ever used, but HTC updated the software, and it's gone, and that problem doesn't exist anymore, and I'm like praise the lord, because then I could really enjoy the phone. So thank you HTC for that um. Hopefully, that is them listening to the complaints and rectifying it, but it's not perfect.

There's still other issues that need software updates to sort out big problem. The Wi-Fi drops out more than any phone that I've ever had before. So I don't know if it's just a hardware fault of this particular handset, or it's just something in general, but the Wi-Fi is always dropping out, but the absolute worst problem for me now that the accidental palm touch problem has been sorted. Is that, for whatever reason calls do not come up as their contacts they just come up as unknown, doesn't matter if it is an unknown call a withheld number, your mother who's in your phone book, your sister in your phone book, your girlfriend in your phone book, whoever it may be, the phone will only show unknown across the screen. So you don't know who's calling and that's not good, because I don't like picking up the phone to unknown callers.

Okay, because it could be someone trying to sell something to me. It could be a prank called, could be a spam call and that's a big problem because I like to know who's calling my phone, oh and final mention of a problem. That is bad for me. It might not be bad for you because you might not use it, but for me personally Sonos it will not enable me to play my own files. I upload on Sonos, for whatever reason it's the only phone that does it.

So that's a big problem for me, because I play a lot of music. I make music, I upload my music onto it. I want to play it on my Sonos system around my flat, but I can't so. Furthermore, I have to use another phone. So that's a problem for me.

If you don't use Sonos, then it's not going to be a problem for you. So let me summarize the performance on this phone so other than some key glitches and problems and bugs that I've talked about in general. It's quite a good performing phone games run smoothly. Media runs nice and when you've got a lot of open, it runs. Okay.

The performance of the processor is good and combined with the eight gigabytes of ram, you can have a lot going on at once. It's just a shame that there are these bugs and glitches um that really dampen the experience of the performance. So what is my summary in school for this phone? So the original price of this phone was 700 pounds and at 700 pounds. I find it really hard to recommend this phone, but then you can now get it for about 400 pounds which makes it much more attractive proposition with the good camera performance and a fantastic look of the phone in general and if you're a HTC fan, I would probably say that this is a really, really good option for you um. It definitely is one of the top five phones in that price bracket of around 400 pounds and when you think about it, you have a perfect camera.

You have great audio, you have a whopping 6.8 inch display and a huge 5000 William battery, which comfortably lasts a whole day. So on paper those things make it look like a really attractive proposition. But when you combine it with those software problems, for me, this phone should be a lot better than it is, but because of those software problems it makes it really hard for me just to enjoy it. I can't enjoy my music because it doesn't work with Sonos, probably properly. I don't know who's calling my phone, I might be watching something on YouTube and the Wi-Fi will drop out, and I'll have to reboot it.

It doesn't have the old software that HTC used to have, which was so great for productivity for work. So it's just a massive shame that it has these software issues, which can be sorted hopefully with a software update. But for that reason I'm going to give this phone a 6.5 out of 10. At full potential. I would give this phone a 7.5 out of 10. So hopefully, if HTC do a software update I'll, do a follow-up video on this and give it a more positive score.

But right now, in its current form, I can only give it a 6.5 out of 10. Saying that I do believe. HTC fans will like this phone and I do recommend it to HTC fans, but for the general people who are looking for a phone around the 400 pound mark, I can't recommend this phone over something such as the Google Pixel 4a, which in general for me, is a much better phone and that's it for me. I hope you enjoyed this video. Please subscribe, make a comment like tune in for the next one.

This is jams from namespace over and out.

Source : JEMZ Space