How do you completely state something subjective, such as the quality of a photo, or song, or piece of art, is the best? Our culture has been attempting to do it for a considerable length of time, rewarding and granting the most well known or acclaimed fundamental of each classification, as fact. Since people like assurance, and they increasingly depend on experts to tell them what to watch, read, listen to — and buy.
In the smartphone world, the iPhone has profited most from that marriage of approval and popular culture acknowledgment; it’s a great phone, indeed, but it’s also the default phone in a significant part of the West. Hollywood celebrities use the iPhone, even they are paid or not with humiliating consequences.
But in the remainder of the world, the iPhone is a footnote. An optimistic product that, truly, has an outsized effect on item and software design, but a footnote nonetheless. In the remainder of the world, people purchase Android phones, and the company they progressively patronize is Huawei.
With the P30 Pro, Huawei has released by far its best phone yet, and it’s not a particularly difficult leap to make that it’s going to be incredibly successful outside of the U.S.
Huawei P30 Pro
The most adaptable camera phone you can buy
Huawei’s P30 Pro is big, indeed, however, it contains one of the best and most charming camera experiences to date. That it’s also a great phone is an added bonus.
The good
- An incredibly versatile camera system
- Delightful, space-optimizing design
- Unmatched battery life and charging options
- EMUI is finally free of huge usability issues
The bad
- Lower resolution display than most flagships
- Loses a speaker over the P20 Pro
- Not officially available Stateside
Huawei P30 Pro The Hardware
Huawei makes hardware of generally excellent quality and, progressively, of excellent design. It resembles its predecessor in numerous ways, but it lops off the physical fingerprint sensor for extra vertical screen space, and shrinks the indent to a dewdrop, exploiting 2019’s most consumer-friendly trends: such as in-display fingerprint sensors, and display-as-earpiece speaker. The phone is taller than its predecessor, too, which makes it feel somewhat cumbersome, especially when used with one hand, but the general design is a big improvement.
If Samsung had decided to do without its right-oriented opening punch pattern in favor of a more traditional notch, the Galaxy S10 may have looked liked the P30 Pro. The phone emulates Samsung’s now-iconic curved glass sides and symmetrical metal casing, yet Huawei’s smoothed the phone’s top and base, giving it an unmistakable and not unwelcome contrast. Huawei also utilizes a different catch scheme to Samsung, preferring to put the power and volume catches on the right side of the phone — which anyone has grown to prefer, especially given Samsung’s most recent pattern of setting the power button too high up on the phone.
| Screen | 6.47-inch Curved OLED 19.5:9, FHD+ 2340×1080 pixels |
| Chipset | Kirin 980 with Dual NPU |
| Memory | 8GB RAM 128GB |
| Battery | 4200mAh |
| Rear Camera 1 | 40MP SuperSpectrum Wide angle, f/1.6, OIS |
| Rear Camera 2 | 20MP ultra wide angle, f/2.2 |
| Rear Camera 3 | 8MP Periscope 5X Optical zoom, f/3.4, OIS |
| Rear Camera 4 | Time-of-flight camera |
| Front camera | 32MP, f/2.0 |
| Water and dust resistance | IP68 |
| Connectivity | Cat 21, up to 1.4Gbps Wi-Fi 802.11a/.b/g/n/ac BT 5.0, NFC |
| Dimensions | 158 x 73.4 x 8.41 mm 192 g |
Huawei P30 Pro The Cameras
If I were to describe the P30 Pro’s camera contribution in a word, it’d be flexible. This thing can get practically any purpose you need, from ultra-wide edge to super zoom and everything in the center. There’s been a huge amount of publicity about the quality of the camera, especially in low light, and that’s generally true, but I’d say the best-preferred advantage to having a P30 Pro in your pocket is the variety of shooting learning it affords.
There are five camera sensors altogether, on this phone — four on the back, and one on the front — however one of them, the rear time-of-flight sensor, doesn’t really capture light, just depth data. The main sensor is very huge for a phone, so the way that it has 40 megapixels — almost nearly four times the typical number on a phone — shouldn’t concern you.
A few other camera features:
- I’m happy that Huawei included a reachable switch for its Master AI mode in the camera app, however, I’m satisfied to say I generally keep it on. The company’s toned down the impacts of this mode extensively over the P20 Pro and Mate 20 Pro, including only hints of extra color or contrast to generally scenes. I don’t love that it empowers portrait whenever point it sees a person’s face — I don’t always want counterfeit bokeh when snapping a photo of a person — but that’s a minor complaint.
- Video quality has improved significantly over the Mate 20 Pro, which had a variety of judder and casing rate issues. Adjustment is incredible, however, for some reason, Huawei doesn’t offer a choice to catch 4k at 60fps like the Galaxy S10 or iPhone XS.
- The front-facing camera has plenty of goals, at 32MP, yet unlike the Galaxy S10’s FFC it’s fixed-center, and I had great trouble catching a sharp selfie, even with the included guides and in great light. Not certain what’s going on here.
- Huawei’s so-called AI HDR+ uses computational photography to ensure that foreground subjects are legitimately lit even in intensively backlit situations. That’s all well and good, yet it regularly resulted in photos with way too much immersion and contrast, making everything seems as I imported the photo to Instagram and ramped up Lux to 100. I hope Huawei tones this down a bit.
- Finally, while I believe Huawei’s taken incredible steps to improve the usability of its camera app, that you need to use a second finger to start zoom instead of making the controls available to the thumb on the hand holding the phone is a confusing oversight and one I trust the company addresses.
Huawei P30 Pro Bottom Line
It’s clear that Huawei makes cameras with phone parts and it’s been doing that for some time now and the P30 Pro just reinforces that technique. Thankfully all the phone parts are worth using, and the cameras are exceptional. At just under 1000 Euros, £900, and more than $1200 CAD, this isn’t a shabby phone, but at the same time with the Galaxy S10+ in each market — and incredibly competitive with Samsung’s best.
Also Read: Samsung Patent Reveals its Next Foldable Smartphone will be a Huawei Mate X Copycat
I am presently using the P30 Pro as my everyday driver and I have no intention of giving it up at any point in the near future. The phone’s accessibility in Canada, the UK, and most European countries at this moment, and if you’re in the U.S. you can easily import it and it’ll work on T-Mobile and AT&T but not Verizon or Sprint.
I’m going to put it all on the line and say that this will be Huawei’s best-selling phone ever once the beans are tailed at the end of the year, and based on my experience up until now, it’ll not be difficult to see why.
Huawei P30 Pro
The most versatile camera phone you can buy
Huawei’s P30 Pro enormous, truly, yet it contains one of the best and most enjoyable camera experiences to date. That it’s also a great phone is an added bonus.