Huawei P30 Pro Review

Setting a new benchmark for mobile photography, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei recently launched P30 Pro smartphone that builds on the success of the Huawei’s P Series DNA in design and performance and is currently proclaimed as the company’s most advanced smartphone. The Huawei P30 Pro comes with SuperSpectrum Sensor, an optical SuperZoom Lens, a Time of Flight (ToF) camera with improved optical and AI image stabilisation technology. While the Huawei P30 Pro certainly feels like a photography machine, but is it enough to beat the Google Pixel 3XL and the Samsung Galaxy S10. Lets’ take a closer look at the Huawei P30 Review.

Design and display

The Huawei P30 Pro is a neatly designed device and the moment you take a first look, it will surely catch the eye. I believe, the P30 Pro is best premium smartphone Huawei has made till date. Both the front and back is covered in glass that slopes slightly at the edges before meeting in a durable rigid metal frame.

While the use of glass has its benefits – looks elegant, allows for wireless charging, however, makes the smartphone slippery. The curved sides help you to easily hold the device in hand, but there is always a fear of it slipping out from hands. For this, Huawei has included a plastic case within the box.

According to Huawei, the P30 Pro is designed with a nine-layer nano optical colour finish, inspired by the unique colour palette and pristine look of salt flats. The Huawei P30 Pro comes in breathing crystal, amber sunrise, aurora, pearl white and black colours. The 6.47-inch flows from edge-to-edge with the selfie camera housed in a tiny notch that the company calls ‘Dewdrop’ display. The near bezel-less front glass panel also houses in-display fingerprint sensor. The smartphone also comes with ‘Acoustic Display Technology’ allowing it to deliver audio through a sound emitting display.

Performance

At the core, the Huawei P30 Pro is powered by the Kirin 980 processor, the same processor also seen in last year’s Mate 20 Pro. The processor is clubbed with 8GB of RAM and offers 128GB of storage. Combining all together, the Huawei P30 Pro is incredibly fast with apps opening in an instant. The multi-tasking is a breeze on this phone. Be it high-end gaming, working with editing apps, etc. the Huawei P30 Pro delivers some of the best performances I have encountered on an Android smartphone.

While Huawei smartphones are making constant improvement in terms of hardware, the phone continues to lack in terms of software. The EMUI skin is still heavy and not that great. The EMUI looks like a copycatted version of iOS and is messy, with poorly implemented gesture controls. However, one thing that has improved is the use of AI and machine-learning in its EMUI software. The P30 Pro learns which apps you use most frequently and tries to open them faster the next time – and it does works.

The P30 Pro’s display is bright, sharp and supports HDR content also in apps such as Netflix. And while the display is great for most of the multimedia usage, it does not match the same intensity provided by Samsung’s AMOLED display.

The P30 Pro’s fingerprint scanner has improved over the Mate 20 Pro -- it’s faster, more accurate and fails rarely. The in-display fingerprint technology is in early stages and will take some time to be mainstream. The P30 Pro is also IP68 certified meaning it can handle accidental splashes of water.

Camera

Now let’s address the elephant in the room – the Huawei P30 Pro’s camera. The smartphone comes with Leica quad-camera system consisting of a 40MP main camera with SuperSpectrum sensor, a 20MP ultra-wide angle camera, an 8MP telephoto camera, along with a 32MP front camera. Combining all together, the Huawei P30 Pro offers never seen before zoom capabilities, at times rivals Pixel’s dynamic range and puts the low-light photos of iPhone Xs to shame.

Incorporating a new periscope style design, the SuperZoom Lens supports high fidelity magnification of 5x optical zoom, 10 times hybrid zoom and 50 times digital zoom. A prism element in the telephoto camera bends light at a 90-degree angle to maximise focal length while minimising camera height, without disrupting device design.

The smartphone combines data from the both the telephoto camera and the primary 40MP sensor, and produces what the company calls ‘hybrid.’ In bright day light, you will be able to capture near lossless shots even if you had zoomed in to 32x. Huawei has also gone for RYYB (red, yellow, yellow, blue) setup. According to Huawei, the RYYB set-up absorbs both red and green light and helps the sensor collect 40 per cent more light.

Another big improvement comes in the form of night photography. While Google was titled as the best smartphone for low-light photography when the company introduced Night Feature, but Huawei has gone a step higher with the P30 Pro. Huawei P30 Pro can click a night shot within a second as compared to three or four seconds that Google takes. The P30 Pro’s camera produces far better images in a second than Google Pixel 3.

Conclusion

The Huawei P30 Pro redefines the rules of photography with its periscope style lens setup. The smartphone has also performance and versatility to be best contender among 2019 flagships.