Honor kicks off the launch of the new Honor 20 range with the £250 Honor 20 Lite

May is set to become a very busy month for Honor with the release of not just one, but three (and possibly even more) handsets as part of its new Honor 20 series.

Ahead of the launch of the two known flagship models on May 21st (the Honor 20 and Honor 20 Pro), Honor invited me to come and check out the entry-level Honor 20 Lite, and take away a review sample to test over the coming weeks.

Priced at £249.99 when it goes on sale May 15th, the Honor 20 Lite (available in midnight black or phantom blue) brings a triple camera setup to a new market, with a 24-megapixel standard camera, 8-megapixel wide-angle camera, and 2-megapixel depth sensing camera for hardware level bokeh effects.

Up front is a 6.21-inch dewdrop notch display with a resolution of 1080×2340 and narrow bezels (just 2.3mm at the top and 1.8mm left and right). This equates to a screen-to-body ratio of over 90%.

Within that dewdrop notch is a 32-megapixel selfie camera with HDR and enhanced light sensitivity.

On the back is a plastic finish that looks every bit as special as the more expensive glass adorned handsets, and might well prove to be more durable and rugged as a result. The 8-layer processing technique gives a graduated display and a shimmering effect that has been put to such good use on other Honor devices before it.

The Honor 20 Lite is powered by Huawei’s Kirin 710 chipset, with 4G of RAM and 128GB of expandable storage (using a hybrid dual-SIM tray for one SIM and memory card, or two SIMs and no memory card).

The phone also supports NFC, but it was quickly spotted that the Honor 20 Lite still uses micro USB over USB-C for charging and data connectivity. Honor still believes this benefits users who have built up a collection of chargers over the years, but at some point everyone will have to make the switch.

It also means there’s no proprietary fast charging support, although the phone comes with a fairly respectable 3,400mAh battery that should perform well with Honor’s decent power management tools that come as part of Emotion UI (EMUI) 9.0 on top of Android Pie.

My first impressions are that this is a very premium-looking phone that really will offer consumers on a budget something special with the addition of a wide-angle camera. This brings so many new opportunities for photography, and complements the traditional portrait and selfie modes that people now take for granted.

I’ll be working on a review in due course, but for now you can see the hands-on photos here. If you wish to purchase the phone, it will be available from Honor’s own store (see link below), plus Amazon, Carphone Warehouse, Very, AO, Argos and John Lewis.

Carphone Warehouse will have an exclusive on the midnight black colour for a period of six months.