Galaxy S20 vs Huawei P40 - Can you forget about Google - Android

The 2020 flagship season is in full swing, from $1,400 top-tier behemoths to more reasonably sized flagships such as the Samsung Galaxy S20 and Huawei P40. These are two phones living in the shadow of their more feature-rich and expensive siblings, but definitely still worthy of your attention.

The Galaxy S20 and the Huawei P40 feature industry-leading flagship hardware, showcasing some of the best technology available at slightly more affordable entry points than the Plus and Pro variants. These two models are likely to ship the largest volumes out of their respective ranges. They both cost less than $1,000 or €1,000, but which should you buy? Let’s find out in the definitive Samsung Galaxy S20 vs Huawei P40 showdown.

First, let’s tackle the obvious

We’ll get the elephant in the room out the way first. The Huawei P40 is forbidden from using Google Mobile Services, which provides data, location, and other services for apps. Instead, Huawei relies on its HMS alternative and AppGallery store, which offers a much smaller app library. As a result, the Samsung Galaxy S20 is the better option for the vast majority of Android users who are familiar with Google’s ecosystem.

Attempting to use the Huawei P40 without Google’s ecosystem isn’t easy. It’s not just the loss of the Play Store or Assistant, other apps that use Google services lose their functionality too. For instance, you can’t back up and restore conversations from WhatsApp, as it relies on Drive.

However, the loss of GMS doesn’t render the Huawei P40 unusable. The revamped AppGallery features a number of popular apps, including Snapchat, Telegram, NordVPN, and a few others. But you can’t find everything and that’s going to be frustrating for consumer who aren’t aware of the GMS situation.

Attempting to use the Huawei P40 without Google’s ecosystem isn’t easy.

Fortunately, you can transfer your apps directly from your old device, and many continue to work, including Google Maps. But without the Play Store, these apps will gradually miss out on vital updates and could eventually stop working. Manually downloading APKs is also viable, but this risks compromising the security of your device if you’re not careful about sources.

All of the above makes it virtually impossible to recommend the Huawei P40 over other flagships. Unless you’re already used to a life without Google. Regardless, let’s dive into the rest of our Galaxy S20 vs Huawei P40 showdown.

Two very 2020 designs

The Samsung Galaxy S20 and Huawei 40 look uncannily similar, especially from the back. Both adopt black rectangular camera housings, flat displays, and light pastel colors. The two even have punch-hole displays, although Samsung opts for a more inconspicuous center circle. The Huawei P40’s display is reminiscent of the Galaxy S10‘s offset cutout.

There are subtle differences to each look and design, such as the the speaker grille and metal design around the buttons. But the two are the quintessential modern smartphone. There’s nothing particularly exciting or unique about either of them. That said, both are nice to behold.

Despite the similarities, there are key differences between the two. The Galaxy S20 is slimmer and lighter and you can definitely tell in the hand. The slightly curved display and back edges also make the handset nicer to hold. The Huawei P40 isn’t unwieldy, but it feels stocky and isn’t as slick as previous generations. On balance, I prefer the design of the Galaxy S20.

Galaxy S20 vs Huawei P40: specs & performance

Both the Galaxy S20 and Huawei P40 offer flagship-tier performance, through a combination of cutting-edge processors and tons of memory. The Galaxy S20’s 12GB RAM is pure overkill for 99% of use cases. However, the inclusion of a microSD card slot is likely to be more useful than Huawei’s more expensive Nano Memory card. Given that the P40 ships with 128GB of internal storage, this is an important difference.

The Galaxy S20 features either a Snapdragon 865 or Exynos 990 chipset, depending on the region. The Huawei P40 sports the company’s own Kirin 990 5G SoC. All options have you well covered for day-to-day app use, but there are some differences in more demanding use cases. We’ve run several benchmarks to showcases these differences.

As expected, the Huawei P40’s Kirin 990 offers slightly lower single-core CPU performance. This is due to its slightly older Cortex-A76 big CPUs, compared to the Cortex-A77 in the Snapdragon 865 and custom Mongoose-M5 in the Exynos 990. This puts the Kirin 990 closer to last year’s handsets, although multi-core performance is much more competitive.

On the GPU side, Huawei sits more notably behind its rival chips, again in part due to its older Mali-G76 MP16 GPU. By comparison, the Exynos 990 uses a newer Mali-G77 MP11 configuration. However, it’s Qualcomm’s proprietary Adreno 650 solution that offers the superior gaming performance. The Huawei P40 remains a solid all-round chip though, making up the gap in system-wide benchmarks owing to its strong memory configuration.

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