Last year, Huawei made clear its loyalty to mobile photography when it launched the P20 Pro and, a few months later, the Mate 20 Pro, both with triple cameras co-developed with Leica that have been praised numerous times. This year, Huawei has reaffirmed its loyalty to photography with the Huawei P30 Pro, whose main improvements concern the P20 Pro and Mate 20 Pro. We must look for them precisely on the camera, as we will see later.
Don’t miss reading the Apple iPhone 11 Pro Review.
Table of Contents
Huawei P30 Pro Review
The Huawei P30 Pro maintains a design similar to that of its predecessor, with a large 6.5 ″ screen curved to the sides and occupying almost the entire front.
The screen is surrounded by a frame that, being quite narrow, increases in width at the bottom, giving rise to a more pronounced chin than other high-end smartphones.
According to Huawei, it is a design decision to favor grip and gestures although I would have preferred an even narrower frame.
The glass back covers, also curved on the sides, are available in three finishes with striking gradient colors – Nacre, Aurora, and Amber – in addition to a serious and traditional Black color. The model tasted looks pretty attractive, although fingerprints tend to be marked.
Huawei has decided to dispense with the 3D facial recognition present in the Mate 20 Pro, which has allowed it to reduce the size of the notch considerably, which now has the shape of a water drop. Instead, Huawei has opted for an integrated fingerprint reader on the screen, following this year’s trend, although it also offers simple facial recognition.
The fingerprint reader works well, although the unlocking process is somewhat slower than a conventional reader. The area where you must place your finger is reduced and, even with the Always-On screen active, it is not marked until you place your finger, which makes it difficult to hit the first one.
Another of the design innovations of the Huawei P30 Pro is that it lacks an earpiece on the top. Huawei has equipped the P30 Pro with a screen that, when vibrating, brings the sound to your ear when you have your ear resting on the front and, in practice, it works well.
Huawei has incorporated an OLED panel with Full HD + resolution, so you might wonder if it looks as sharp as Quad HD + panels. In my opinion, a density of 398 dpi is more than enough even for an OLED panel with a Pentile matrix. Other smartphones with higher resolution panels normally work in Full HD + to consume less energy.
The P30 Pro screen is capable of displaying a wide range of colors, since it not only covers sRGB color space but also the wider P3 Display space, commonly used in the film industry, and is also compatible with HDR content.
In normal color mode, the screen offers spectacular color accuracy and pure white color, without any color tone. If we opt for the vivid color mode, the color accuracy worsens because, as the name itself indicates, the colors are oversaturated (although many people prefer unreal colors …).
The maximum brightness of the screen is around 592 nits (measured with the screen fully lit in white), which means a high level of brightness, although slightly below some other high-end smartphones. Since it has an OLED panel, the black color is pure and the contrast is very high (theoretically infinite).
The screen offers Always On Display mode that permanently displays the time and other data of interest such as battery level and notification icons. It is possible to wake up the screen with a double-tap on it, as well as make it turn on monetarily when a notification arrives.
Processor
The Huawei P30 Pro has a Kirin 980 processor manufactured in a 7 nm process, which means that it consumes less energy and is more powerful than other processors of previous generations.
This processor has eight cores: two powerful Cortex-A76 high performance 2.6 GHz cores, two high efficiencies Cortex-A76 cores at 1.9 GHz, and four Cortex-A55 cores with extreme efficiency at 1.8 GHz. Also, it has an NPU dual, which accelerates operations related to artificial intelligence.
The Huawei P30 Pro is accompanied by 8GB of RAM, an amount more than enough to have no problems when doing multi-task. In my experience, apps remain in memory and unexpected closures are not suffered.
In CPU benchmarks, the Huawei P30 Pro has obtained high scores, along with other high-end smartphones from last year, but below what the Snapdragon 855 or the Exynos 9820 offers today.
The 3D graphics performance is good but it falls below other high-end smartphones in the benchmarks.
However, three demanding 3D games have been tried such as Asphalt 9, Dead Effect 2 and PUBG, and in all of them, very high average refresh rates have been measured, close to 30 or 60 FPS, depending on the limitations of the title.
Therefore, today, if you are fond of games, you will have no problem enjoying the most demanding 3D titles.
The Huawei P30 Pro is available with 128, 256, or 512 GB of storage, so there is a model that suits your needs. Huawei has added the possibility of expanding storage but, instead of using a micro-SD card, it has opted for a proprietary format called NM Card that offers an expansion of up to 256 GB.
In the connectivity aspect, the Huawei P30 Pro is very well served with WiFi 802.11 b / g / n / ac (wave2), Bluetooth 5 (compatible with aptX, aptX HD, LDAC, and HWA), 4.5G / LTE, a transmitter of infrared and NFC.
Battery
The Huawei P30 Pro has a large 4,200 mAh battery that has obtained good autonomy compared to other high-end smartphones.
Also, it has the SuperCharge 40W fast charge that allows you to fully recharge your phone in less than 1 hour, as well as with wireless charging at 15W. As an interest, the Huawei P30 Pro is also capable of charging other smartphones wirelessly, although it makes it quite slow.
In the multimedia aspect, it should be noted that Huawei has incorporated Dolby Atmos compatible sound when using headphones but the smartphone lacks a 3.5 mm jack. and therefore does not offer FM radio either. We did not find stereo speakers but the only speaker present is the one next to the USB-C connector.
Focusing on the phone software, Huawei incorporates its customization layer, EMUI 9.1 on Android 9 Pie, which benefits from the cleaning that Huawei did compare to previous versions.
EMUI adds a large number of features that complement Android as a carousel of wallpapers, additional energy-saving modes, additional application permissions, one-handed operation, twin application, private space, application lock, file safe, projection in desktop mode wirelessly or backup.
In my opinion, the aspect where EMUI fails is in its aesthetics, which looks somewhat dated compared to other layers of customization. However, the company is making progress and some icons have been redesigned for the better.
Camera
Focusing on the star section – photography – Huawei has incorporated a quad rear camera developed together with Leica.
The quad-camera is made up of a 40 MP main camera ( f / 1.6) with optical stabilization and a new SuperSpectrum sensor capable of capturing more light, an ultra-wide 20MP camera ( f / 2.2), and an 8 MP telephoto camera with 5X optical zoom ( f / 3.4) and optical stabilization. Also, Huawei has added a fourth ToF camera to measure distances.
Starting with the main chamber, its performance in conditions of sufficient light is good, although on certain occasions the processing plays a trick and the photographs result in unnatural colors (usually orange) or an unnatural appearance. However, these occasions are the least.
When light is scarce, the new sensor demonstrates what it is capable of as the photographs have a lower level of noise compared to other rivals and maintain a wide dynamic range. The Night mode has also been improved and is capable of taking long-exposure photographs without a tripod surpassing other high-end smartphones again.
The presence of an ultra-wide-angle camera brings great versatility, especially when it comes to capturing monuments and buildings, or taking group photographs without having to get too far away. In travel, it becomes a perfect ally.
Another star camera is the zoom camera with a periscopic lens that offers 5X optical zoom, 10X hybrid zoom, and 50X digital zoom. Thanks to this camera, we can approach details that, until now, we could not imagine that we could capture with a mobile.
The only drawback of such a high optical zoom is that any zoom level lower than 5X is achieved by expanding the image captured by the main camera by software, so if you only have to zoom in to a 2X or 3X zoom, the quality is lower.
The last camera is the ToF depth camera that will help achieve a more natural blur effect on portraits when activated via an OTA update. In tests, the portraits look quite natural and, although certain areas of the hair remain a challenge, the result is very satisfactory even without the ToF camera running.
When recording video, the Huawei P30 Pro offers 4K recording at 30 fps and 1080p at 30/60 fps but, for the moment, there is no trace of 4K recording at 60fps. The recording has a good quality and the stabilization is excellent.
Huawei has included some curious modes that squeeze the AI capabilities to the fullest, such as the Color AI mode that leaves the entire scene black and white but keeps people in color and the Blurred Background mode that applies the bokeh effect to the recording Of video.
The front camera has a resolution of 32MP and captures selfies with good quality as long as we are in good light conditions. It allows you to take selfies in Portrait mode as well as, of course, apply a beauty effect.
Price
The Huawei P30 Pro is on sale for an official price of $685.00 (128GB), $733.99 (256GB), and $947.99 (512GB) and can be purchased online.
Here, you can find my Huawei P30 Pro in-depth Review, Price and Opinion. Don’t hesitate to read it.
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