Honor Pad 20 Review – Value-Packed Tablet For Students and Mobile Workers on A Budget

The ongoing memory shortage has resulted in sky high prices for an array of tech ranging from laptops to phones which has left those on a budget out in the cold. The Honor Pad 20 aims to address this somewhat with a blend of features, performance and value to meet the needs of those who need a productivity platform for paperwork, assignments and the like that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. 

Honor has graciously loaned a sample for field testing and after putting it through its paces, here’s our Honor Pad 20 review where we share if it’s worth what you pay for.

Honor Pad 20 Review – Build and Design

Out of the box, Honor has given a generous array of extra kit that include a fast charger, a USB-C cable as well as a stylus and wireless keyboard case. The charger features a UK-style folding plug and is able to offer 45W wired charging while the wireless keyboard case itself is a fairly standard design seen in earlier models like the Honor Pad 10.

The case protects the tablet and also features a compact wireless keyboard that pairs up with the tablet and that needs to be charged separately via a USB-C port on the side. The tablet snaps into a set of prongs that keep it secure within the case itself with the base featuring a groove that lets you prop the tablet up at about a 60-degree angle.

@hitechcentury(opens in new tab) Unboxing and first look for the all new HONOR Pad 20 tablet that will be coming soon to Malaysia! @HONOR Malaysia #honorpad20(opens in new tab) #hitechcentury(opens in new tab) #unboxing(opens in new tab) ♬ original sound – Hitech Century(opens in new tab)

There’s no other way to adjust the angle of the tablet. The angle itself is optimised for usage on a static, flat surface like a table. Much like earlier designs, the tablet is at too steep an angle which precludes its use on your lap it you’re looking to get some work done on the commute. 

Out of the box, our Honor Pad 20 review sample features a flat front and back with equally flat sides and rounded corners. The backplate has a two-toned design with a shiny metallic strip across one edge with the rest of the backplate finished in a matte grey. Rounding things off, literally so, is a single 13MP camera set into a rounded housing able to capture stills and up to 4K@30fps video.

Intended to be used primarily in landscape mode, the Honor Pad 20 has a volume rocker, a power button and a SIM card tray on its top edge. Its sides feature grilles for the speakers, with each side featuring three drivers though the right side has a single USB-C port for charging. The base is otherwise unremarkable.

Up front, our Honor Pad 20 review sample comes with a 12.1-inch LCD Honor Eye Comfort Screen that has 3K (3,000 x 1,872 pixels) resolution, up to a 120Hz refresh rate and about 700 nits peak screen brightness along with support, for DCI-P3 colour gamut. The display itself is fairly standard, with large side, top and bottom bezels with the top edge featuring a punch hole for the single 8MP camera for selfies.

Overall build quality is solid and the tablet is sufficiently light enough and slim enough for one-handed use though it is intended to primarily be paired up with and housed within its keyboard case. 

Combined with the keyboard case, the Honor Pad 20 is sufficiently light enough for all-day carry in a backpack or handbag and is lighter than the vast majority of laptops in the market. However, it lacks any dust or water resistance so some care is required when taking it outdoors.

Honor Pad 20 Review – Performance and Specifications

For Malaysia, the Honor Pad 20 is available in two configurations that differ slightly in terms of RAM, the rear camera and in terms of weight and thickness with one variant featuring WiFi-only capability and the other which features 5G-connectivity that costs slightly more. Both variants otherwise utilise the same display, same battery, front camera and processor.

In terms of hardware, our Honor Pad 20 review sample is the 5G-capable version with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 processor paired with 8GB RAM augmented by an additional 8GB of virtual RAM Turbo virtual memory assigned off the onboard 256GB of storage. 

Running under the hood of the Honor Pad 20 is Android 16 with MagicOS 10.0 that has a host of practical AI functions optimised for productivity related tasks which we’ll get into later.

One quibble here is that Honor only offers one OS update to Android 17 and 2 years of security updates which reduces its longevity somewhat but for its intended budget conscious demographic, it’s not an immediate concern. Here’s how our Honor Pad 20 review sample stacks up on paper:

Price	RM2,299 [5G variant], RM1,999 [WiFi]
Display	12.1-inch IPS LCD Honor Eye Comfort Screen, 3,000 x 1,872 pixels, 1,500:1 contrast ratio, 700 nits peak brightness, 292 ppi, 120Hz refresh rate
Processor	Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3
OS	Android 16 w/ MagicOS 10
Memory	8GB RAM w/ 256GB storage [5G variant], 6GB RAM / 256GB [WiFi variant]
Cameras	13MP [5G variant, 5G variant], 8MP camera [rear, WiFi variant] / 8MP [front]
Battery	10,100mAh Lithium Ion w/ 45W wired charging
Size/Weight	277.07 x 179.28 x 6.39mm [5g variant] 6.29mm [WiFi variant]/ 548g [5g variant] 525g [WiFi variant]

When subjected to synthetic benchmarks, our Honor Pad 20 review sample scored the following benchmarks:

3D Mark Steel Nomad Light	500
3D Mark Steel Nomad Light Unlimited	498
3D Mark Wild Life Extreme	1,446
3D Mark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited	1,446
3D Mark Wild Life	5,205
3D Mark Wild Life Unlimited	5,401
Geekbench 7 Single Core	933
Geekbench 7 Multi Core	2,916
Geekbench 7 OpenCL	2,274
Geekbench 7 Vulkan	1,425
Geekbench  AI CPU (Quantised)	1,301
Geekbench AI GPU (Quantised)	913
PC Mark Work 3.0	14,153
PC Mark Battery Life	16 hours 30 mins

Seeing as it runs the same chipset as its predecessor, there aren’t any significant differences in test results though the newer Geekbench 7 benchmark does result in slightly lower single and multicore scores due to newer workloads. 

In more practical terms, our Honor Pad 20 review unit was able to competently handle most productivity related tasks including writing articles on Google Docs, web browsing and video editing on CapCut. Gaming was also possible and it ran Call of Duty Mobile and Genshin Impact without issue.

What gives it the edge is its inclusion of the PC-Level WPS Office suite for free which confers you access to Word, Excel and Powerpoint analogues with shortcuts and functionality typically conferred onto a laptop or PC. This comes in especially handy as it is able to work completely offline.

Other notable features that will endear it to paperwork crunchers is the inclusion of the AI Memo that uses the microphone to record notes from lectures or meetings not only in English and Chinese but in Bahasa Malaysia too. When tested, it was able to efficiently organise a conversation with three individuals though it did occasionally get confused with some words here and there.

Of greater value is that MagicOS 10.0 allows for resizable apps as well as a file management system akin to a Windows desktop complete with the usual shortcuts to Copy and Paste like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.

When tested over the course of a week, our Honor Pad 20 review sample proved to be greater than the sum of its parts with its various apps giving it a unique edge for productivity.

The Honor Memo app was able to transcribe meetings while PC-Like WPS Office allowed for offline writing in lieu of tethering to a hotspot or having to go to a coffee shop. Combined with the keyboard and stylus, the Honor Pad 20 makes for a compact, effective productivity platform. 

The 12.1-inch 3K Eye-Comfort display offered up vibrant and punchy visuals for movies with crisp detail along with fair clarity under sunlight conditions.

Beyond the hardware and software, what makes the display novel is Honor’s additional enhancements including what they refer to as chip-level AI defocus protection that mitigates transient myopia by an average of 13%, the integration of DC Dimming and Flicker-Free tech to make it easier on the eyes as well as hardware-level low-blue light protection for extended viewing.

The six side-firing speakers flanking the display were able to deliver excellent volume and a good amount of detail for a tablet and were more than sufficient for watching content, a live stream or a lecture.

When tested in PCMark’s battery life test, it got slightly less endurance than its predecessor at 16 hours and 30 minutes though this is on account of its sharper display which is well worth the trade-off. 

In terms of practical endurance, the Honor Pad 20 offers more than sufficient battery life thanks to its 10,100mAh cell to last through a typically full day of work or classes with enough to get through to the end of the average work day.

Should you buy the Honor Pad 20?

The Honor Pad 20 is a budget workhorse tablet with features that will endear it to price conscious users like students and mobile workers who need to get paperwork and classwork done on the go, all shoehorned in a light and compact package that can fit into a backpack or handbag.

Its crisp display, bundled keyboard case and stylus, along with a preinstalled copy of PC-level WPS Office, give it plenty of productivity potential and exceptional bang for the buck. 

While those who already own last year’s Honor Pad 10 may not find it a compelling upgrade, those looking for an affordable productivity platform will find plenty to like, particularly at a time when rising component costs are pushing up the price of competing devices.

At RM1,999 for the WiFi model and RM2,299 for 5G, it remains considerably cheaper than a full-fledged laptop while offering much of the functionality needed for everyday work and study.

Honor Pad 20 review sample courtesy of Honor Malaysia. For more details please visit https://www.honor.com/my/tablets/honor-pad-20/spec/