P for Photography – A Huawei P30 Pro review
It is amazing that a company that began in 1987 focused on creating budget and mid-tier mobile phones in their local markets has now evolved into making a flagship phone that not just takes the smartphone veterans to the ring but comes out swinging and victorious in multiple key areas.
The P series was introduced as their flagship series focused primarily on the camera and design aspects of the phone as it’s DNA and the P30 pro is no exception to the rule but is an evolution of it.
The P30 pro comes with a glass body (front and back) that is cradled by an aluminum frame. The company provides 5 official color variants for the phone, some of which are entertainingly named: Amber Sunrise, Breathtaking Crystal, Pearl White, Aurora and Black. Though the names may seem to be bring to one’s face on its adolescence, it quickly dawns that the names are perfect to the visual design they have incorporated to the back of this device. Except for the black, which true to its name is just a black shade of black - all the other variants have a breathtaking (yes, just like the name) gradient design of transforming colors. The ‘Breathtaking crystal’ and the ‘Aurora’ are the standout color variants that will instantly turn heads wherever you go. The transition of color shades is seamless and the fact that it is integrated to a glass panel makes it more reason for it to be eye-candy.
The phone feels solid in the hand and unlike other phones of its size, it is surprisingly comfortable for one-hand use. The power button is specially designed with a slight bump in its texture along with red accents to differentiate itself from the rest of the physical buttons. Its placement is perfect to be accessed with a single hand where the thumb rests, as opposed to the power button placement in the similarly designed Samsung S10 Plus where the thumb needs to be able to do unconventional acrobatics to press it when holding with one hand. The phone also sports an IP68 dust and water resistance rating which means that the phone will be alright as tested and certified if dunked up to a depth of 2M for a maximum of up to 30 minutes underwater.
The front of the phone is what is considered acceptable for the day’s trend, with extremely slim bezels on the side and a small chin at the bottom. The P30 pro sports it’s front camera with a water drop notch that is not too intrusive and fits well with the overall design aesthetic of the phone. The display of the phone is a curved-screen OLED with a size of 6.47 inches and a native resolution of 1080 x 2340 (aspect ratio 19:5:9) with a rating of HDR10. The screen is ultra-responsive and the color reproduction seems natural though it can be changed to suit the user’s personal preferences.
The screen to body ratio is over 85% and seamlessly integrated to the curved edges of the display. It is hard not to compare the display design of this phone to the edge displays of the Samsung S10 series – both have similar curvatures on the sides of the screen, but the P30 pro has found a curvature that feels nice in the hand and doesn’t translate to warped content on the edges when looking at this screen and this is definitely a design plus over the Samsung.
In a lot of ways, the design and physical ‘feel’ of this phone is very similar to that of a Tissot Watch – it is large and opulent with multiple features, but in a practical and usable way that becomes comfortable to use and handle quickly.
The P30 pro is claimed by its makers to have photography as a major part of it’s DNA. The phone sports a Quad camera setup featuring technology and lenses provided by the lens-meisters of Leica. The cameras are featured in an in-line format with the following lenses in top to bottom order: A 27 mm lens with a 40 MP sensor, a 16 mm ultrawide lens with a 20 MP native sensor and a 125 mm periscope telephoto lens for 5x optical zoom. The fourth camera is a Time of Flight 3D camera on the side that is only used as a support camera as it exclusively provides depth information to the sensors for photography. The front of the phone houses a wide-lens 32 MP camera.
The camera hardware integrated to the phone module is mind-blowing and the pictures taken with these cameras help the phone earn its name and stay in the game with the other heavy hitters offered by the likes of Apple and Samsung. The HDR and native photography offered by the 40 MP sensor is crisp and detailed and provides a slightly enhanced color conversion. The AI detection works seamlessly in the native camera app and can even detect animals such as cats and dogs and enhance the sharpness as required quite impressively. The wide-angle lens is starting to become common place in smartphones in 2019 and this is unexceptionally added and works as expected.
The ‘special sauce’ of this phone is the telephoto lens that exceeds all expectations at how much of a difference a 5x optical zoom makes when we have had to make do with pinching in for digital zoom all these years. Take a subject that is 10 feet from you and change to the telephoto lens and the subject is teleported to your phone screen. The phone’s camera software allows you to zoom all the way up to 50x zoom – but it is to be noted that from 10x onwards, the zoom is digitally powered and will lead to quality loss – although it is surprising how the quality loss is compensated with the AI algorithms and sensor information from multiple cameras to put together an impressive an usable picture even at 50x zoom. Users can have a lot of fun zooming into objects like the moon or distant billboards and being impressed with the results – it is a conversation starter unlike any other.
Another significant quality of the cameras of the P30 Pro is the intelligent night mode that works more like a magical night vision device than a technological feature. Go into a pitch-dark room, turn off the lights and select the night mode feature on the phone and suddenly your phone gives you the superpower to sufficiently see and identify objects in the dark. Huawei has done a fantastic job in integrating multiple information facets from its many cameras and stitching together a clear and crisp image even in pitch darkness. This is a game changer that will have to become staple and done well in offerings by its competitors to stay relevant in the smartphone game.
Another interesting feature offered by the P30 pro’s cameras is the AIS Long Exposure Shot that will enable users to take those mesmerizing shots of hazy water or night streaks of traffic on the street. The 40 MP sensor is an absolute beast when it comes to capturing details of miniscule objects/ subjects in macro photography – we are talking absolute detail – like distinguishing cell striations on the exoskeleton of insects - level detail.
Video recording on this phone is fire-and-forget with its Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) where users can take 4K videos while moving and have a smooth and seamless video. It also features night mode in video recording to produce surprising results. The innovative feature that will leave one’s jaw wide open is the Dual-video mode where you can record a video from the perspective of 2 separate cameras, so you get a video from 2 distinct perspectives that turned out to be more useful and relevant than initially expected. All these features are in addition to the standard camera features in smartphones such as panorama, slow motion, manual mode, etc.
The front camera does what it does best and takes selfies that are surprisingly sharp. What is impressive is that the selfie camera is not pre-programmed with any beauty modes to soften features or blow up the colors – the native camera strives to capture as much detail as possible in the clearest way possible and you can add beauty features if required by choice.
The cameras of this phone are industry leading and forces the long-time flagship champions to raise their games to even be given a chance of standing on par with the overall features and performance provided by the P30 Pro’s camera.
The P30 Pro features the world’s first 7nm mobile process chipset – the Kirin 980; but what does this mean, though? The Kirin chipsets are a series of SoCs (System on a chip – CPU and GPU on a single IC) made by Huawei. Normal smartphone chipsets so far are of a 10nm configuration, a 7nm chipset means that they have managed to pack more processing power into lesser space which translates to increased single core performance and less battery consumption which results in longer battery life.
The Kirin 980 packed along with the Mali-G76 GPU (Graphical Processing Unit – used for gaming and other intensive multi-level processing) packs a formidable punch when it comes to performance. Gaming in this phone is a breeze and it can play any Android game from the play store in its Ultra/ High setting. The Kirin 980 processor fairs better than the Exynos offerings from Samsung and is on par with the latest Snapdragon and Apple’s Bionic chips in terms of AI based processing.
The power of this chipset is evident when using the P30 pro. The transitions and load times of applications are ridiculously fast and there is no lag even when operating with multiple applications including games and productivity applications that are supposed to be heavy-weight. Games like PUBG work like a charm and added to the fact that the Kirin 980 allows up to 1.4 GBps of download speed, online games are next to impossible to throttle as long as the user has a good internet connection.
The P30 Pro comes in 2 main variants with the 6GB RAM coupled with 128 GB storage or 8GB RAM with options of 128/ 256/ 512 GB of storage variants. It houses a nano-memory slot that can be used to expand up to 256 GB storage, though it would mean giving up a secondary SIM slot.
Even though the processor is highly capable and powerful, it pales in comparison on how this phone manages its battery. The P30 pro features a 4200 mAh battery which is class leading and this shows on its day to day usage over other flagship offerings by its competitors. On doing a comprehensive battery drain test alongside premium phones such as the Samsung S10 Pro and the iPhone XS Max involving running more than 10 applications and games continuously (same on all phones) – the P30 Pro came out as the battery champ outlasting the iPhone by almost 2 hours and the S10 by almost an hour.
Users can get almost 2 whole days of average to high phone usage with the battery capacity coupled to the Kirin chipset. Add this to the fact that the P30 pro enables wireless charging and wireless charge sharing technology, this phone gives you and others around you, the power to keep going all day.
The P30 pro comes with Android 9.0 (Pie) and Huawei’s own EMUI 9.1 off the box. Previously, EMUI seemed to be a bit dated and overtaken with the standard vanilla version of Android. The new iteration of EMIU brings it home with a simple and clean look as close to the stock android version as possible along with a lot of user-friendly features and AI options that the user can control.
A doubt in the question of all prospective smartphone buyers today will be about what US President Trump’s ban on Huawei OS from Google would mean for the future of Huawei smartphones; the future remains unknown and the alternate Huawei OS claimed to be 40 % faster than stock android remains to be seen next year. But the users who are purchasing the P30 Pro need not worry as the company has guaranteed updates and subsequent patches of the next Android Q OS for its flagship devices. This would guarantee that the P30 pro is relevant and in play as a flagship with its competitors for at least the next 2 years or so.
The new Kirin 980 chipset directly plays into the improved connectivity of the phone as it enables signal processing and information downloads at a much faster and higher rate. The P30 Pro uses Bluetooth 5.0 giving you an effective indoor range of 40m connectivity. The phone also comes with NFC and a less-commonly found Infra-red port.
Summary
The P30 pro is an interesting addition to an already complex pool of selections offered by the longtime smartphone flag shippers like Apple and Samsung. The market for phones has undergone a paradigm shift where consumers can buy phones with class leading processors and specifications in as little as 200 USD. So, what defines a smartphone to be extraordinary and to be worthy of that coveted 1000 USD price tag of the flagships made by multiple brands? A flagship today has to do way more than it ever did to justify its status of being on the leaderboard and the top price bracket of its company. It must look beautiful, be exceptionally fast and run any application on offer without compromise, take amazing photos and last at least over a day before plugging it in for charge – the expectations for flagship phones are unreasonable and yet, Huawei has managed to meet them and go beyond with the P30 Pro. With its innovative new processor and unbeatable camera array, the P30 pro has managed to carve its own niche and settle as a worthy offering in the flagship class that is doing more than expected for its price than its contender’s offerings.
The Huawei P30 Pro was made and is provided as an answer to two of the most iterative questions in the smartphone market – which is the smart phone with the best camera and which overall smartphone has the best battery life? Look no further, the P30 Pro is here.
The P series was introduced as their flagship series focused primarily on the camera and design aspects of the phone as it’s DNA and the P30 pro is no exception to the rule but is an evolution of it.
*Huawei P30 Pro - Design and Display:
The P30 pro comes with a glass body (front and back) that is cradled by an aluminum frame. The company provides 5 official color variants for the phone, some of which are entertainingly named: Amber Sunrise, Breathtaking Crystal, Pearl White, Aurora and Black. Though the names may seem to be bring to one’s face on its adolescence, it quickly dawns that the names are perfect to the visual design they have incorporated to the back of this device. Except for the black, which true to its name is just a black shade of black - all the other variants have a breathtaking (yes, just like the name) gradient design of transforming colors. The ‘Breathtaking crystal’ and the ‘Aurora’ are the standout color variants that will instantly turn heads wherever you go. The transition of color shades is seamless and the fact that it is integrated to a glass panel makes it more reason for it to be eye-candy.
The phone feels solid in the hand and unlike other phones of its size, it is surprisingly comfortable for one-hand use. The power button is specially designed with a slight bump in its texture along with red accents to differentiate itself from the rest of the physical buttons. Its placement is perfect to be accessed with a single hand where the thumb rests, as opposed to the power button placement in the similarly designed Samsung S10 Plus where the thumb needs to be able to do unconventional acrobatics to press it when holding with one hand. The phone also sports an IP68 dust and water resistance rating which means that the phone will be alright as tested and certified if dunked up to a depth of 2M for a maximum of up to 30 minutes underwater.
The front of the phone is what is considered acceptable for the day’s trend, with extremely slim bezels on the side and a small chin at the bottom. The P30 pro sports it’s front camera with a water drop notch that is not too intrusive and fits well with the overall design aesthetic of the phone. The display of the phone is a curved-screen OLED with a size of 6.47 inches and a native resolution of 1080 x 2340 (aspect ratio 19:5:9) with a rating of HDR10. The screen is ultra-responsive and the color reproduction seems natural though it can be changed to suit the user’s personal preferences.
The screen to body ratio is over 85% and seamlessly integrated to the curved edges of the display. It is hard not to compare the display design of this phone to the edge displays of the Samsung S10 series – both have similar curvatures on the sides of the screen, but the P30 pro has found a curvature that feels nice in the hand and doesn’t translate to warped content on the edges when looking at this screen and this is definitely a design plus over the Samsung.
In a lot of ways, the design and physical ‘feel’ of this phone is very similar to that of a Tissot Watch – it is large and opulent with multiple features, but in a practical and usable way that becomes comfortable to use and handle quickly.
P30 Pro Camera:
The P30 pro is claimed by its makers to have photography as a major part of it’s DNA. The phone sports a Quad camera setup featuring technology and lenses provided by the lens-meisters of Leica. The cameras are featured in an in-line format with the following lenses in top to bottom order: A 27 mm lens with a 40 MP sensor, a 16 mm ultrawide lens with a 20 MP native sensor and a 125 mm periscope telephoto lens for 5x optical zoom. The fourth camera is a Time of Flight 3D camera on the side that is only used as a support camera as it exclusively provides depth information to the sensors for photography. The front of the phone houses a wide-lens 32 MP camera.
The camera hardware integrated to the phone module is mind-blowing and the pictures taken with these cameras help the phone earn its name and stay in the game with the other heavy hitters offered by the likes of Apple and Samsung. The HDR and native photography offered by the 40 MP sensor is crisp and detailed and provides a slightly enhanced color conversion. The AI detection works seamlessly in the native camera app and can even detect animals such as cats and dogs and enhance the sharpness as required quite impressively. The wide-angle lens is starting to become common place in smartphones in 2019 and this is unexceptionally added and works as expected.
The ‘special sauce’ of this phone is the telephoto lens that exceeds all expectations at how much of a difference a 5x optical zoom makes when we have had to make do with pinching in for digital zoom all these years. Take a subject that is 10 feet from you and change to the telephoto lens and the subject is teleported to your phone screen. The phone’s camera software allows you to zoom all the way up to 50x zoom – but it is to be noted that from 10x onwards, the zoom is digitally powered and will lead to quality loss – although it is surprising how the quality loss is compensated with the AI algorithms and sensor information from multiple cameras to put together an impressive an usable picture even at 50x zoom. Users can have a lot of fun zooming into objects like the moon or distant billboards and being impressed with the results – it is a conversation starter unlike any other.
Another significant quality of the cameras of the P30 Pro is the intelligent night mode that works more like a magical night vision device than a technological feature. Go into a pitch-dark room, turn off the lights and select the night mode feature on the phone and suddenly your phone gives you the superpower to sufficiently see and identify objects in the dark. Huawei has done a fantastic job in integrating multiple information facets from its many cameras and stitching together a clear and crisp image even in pitch darkness. This is a game changer that will have to become staple and done well in offerings by its competitors to stay relevant in the smartphone game.
Another interesting feature offered by the P30 pro’s cameras is the AIS Long Exposure Shot that will enable users to take those mesmerizing shots of hazy water or night streaks of traffic on the street. The 40 MP sensor is an absolute beast when it comes to capturing details of miniscule objects/ subjects in macro photography – we are talking absolute detail – like distinguishing cell striations on the exoskeleton of insects - level detail.
Video recording on this phone is fire-and-forget with its Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) where users can take 4K videos while moving and have a smooth and seamless video. It also features night mode in video recording to produce surprising results. The innovative feature that will leave one’s jaw wide open is the Dual-video mode where you can record a video from the perspective of 2 separate cameras, so you get a video from 2 distinct perspectives that turned out to be more useful and relevant than initially expected. All these features are in addition to the standard camera features in smartphones such as panorama, slow motion, manual mode, etc.
The front camera does what it does best and takes selfies that are surprisingly sharp. What is impressive is that the selfie camera is not pre-programmed with any beauty modes to soften features or blow up the colors – the native camera strives to capture as much detail as possible in the clearest way possible and you can add beauty features if required by choice.
The cameras of this phone are industry leading and forces the long-time flagship champions to raise their games to even be given a chance of standing on par with the overall features and performance provided by the P30 Pro’s camera.
Performance and Battery:
The P30 Pro features the world’s first 7nm mobile process chipset – the Kirin 980; but what does this mean, though? The Kirin chipsets are a series of SoCs (System on a chip – CPU and GPU on a single IC) made by Huawei. Normal smartphone chipsets so far are of a 10nm configuration, a 7nm chipset means that they have managed to pack more processing power into lesser space which translates to increased single core performance and less battery consumption which results in longer battery life.
The Kirin 980 packed along with the Mali-G76 GPU (Graphical Processing Unit – used for gaming and other intensive multi-level processing) packs a formidable punch when it comes to performance. Gaming in this phone is a breeze and it can play any Android game from the play store in its Ultra/ High setting. The Kirin 980 processor fairs better than the Exynos offerings from Samsung and is on par with the latest Snapdragon and Apple’s Bionic chips in terms of AI based processing.
The power of this chipset is evident when using the P30 pro. The transitions and load times of applications are ridiculously fast and there is no lag even when operating with multiple applications including games and productivity applications that are supposed to be heavy-weight. Games like PUBG work like a charm and added to the fact that the Kirin 980 allows up to 1.4 GBps of download speed, online games are next to impossible to throttle as long as the user has a good internet connection.
The P30 Pro comes in 2 main variants with the 6GB RAM coupled with 128 GB storage or 8GB RAM with options of 128/ 256/ 512 GB of storage variants. It houses a nano-memory slot that can be used to expand up to 256 GB storage, though it would mean giving up a secondary SIM slot.
Even though the processor is highly capable and powerful, it pales in comparison on how this phone manages its battery. The P30 pro features a 4200 mAh battery which is class leading and this shows on its day to day usage over other flagship offerings by its competitors. On doing a comprehensive battery drain test alongside premium phones such as the Samsung S10 Pro and the iPhone XS Max involving running more than 10 applications and games continuously (same on all phones) – the P30 Pro came out as the battery champ outlasting the iPhone by almost 2 hours and the S10 by almost an hour.
Users can get almost 2 whole days of average to high phone usage with the battery capacity coupled to the Kirin chipset. Add this to the fact that the P30 pro enables wireless charging and wireless charge sharing technology, this phone gives you and others around you, the power to keep going all day.
Software and connectivity:
The P30 pro comes with Android 9.0 (Pie) and Huawei’s own EMUI 9.1 off the box. Previously, EMUI seemed to be a bit dated and overtaken with the standard vanilla version of Android. The new iteration of EMIU brings it home with a simple and clean look as close to the stock android version as possible along with a lot of user-friendly features and AI options that the user can control.
A doubt in the question of all prospective smartphone buyers today will be about what US President Trump’s ban on Huawei OS from Google would mean for the future of Huawei smartphones; the future remains unknown and the alternate Huawei OS claimed to be 40 % faster than stock android remains to be seen next year. But the users who are purchasing the P30 Pro need not worry as the company has guaranteed updates and subsequent patches of the next Android Q OS for its flagship devices. This would guarantee that the P30 pro is relevant and in play as a flagship with its competitors for at least the next 2 years or so.
The new Kirin 980 chipset directly plays into the improved connectivity of the phone as it enables signal processing and information downloads at a much faster and higher rate. The P30 Pro uses Bluetooth 5.0 giving you an effective indoor range of 40m connectivity. The phone also comes with NFC and a less-commonly found Infra-red port.
Summary
The P30 pro is an interesting addition to an already complex pool of selections offered by the longtime smartphone flag shippers like Apple and Samsung. The market for phones has undergone a paradigm shift where consumers can buy phones with class leading processors and specifications in as little as 200 USD. So, what defines a smartphone to be extraordinary and to be worthy of that coveted 1000 USD price tag of the flagships made by multiple brands? A flagship today has to do way more than it ever did to justify its status of being on the leaderboard and the top price bracket of its company. It must look beautiful, be exceptionally fast and run any application on offer without compromise, take amazing photos and last at least over a day before plugging it in for charge – the expectations for flagship phones are unreasonable and yet, Huawei has managed to meet them and go beyond with the P30 Pro. With its innovative new processor and unbeatable camera array, the P30 pro has managed to carve its own niche and settle as a worthy offering in the flagship class that is doing more than expected for its price than its contender’s offerings.
The Huawei P30 Pro was made and is provided as an answer to two of the most iterative questions in the smartphone market – which is the smart phone with the best camera and which overall smartphone has the best battery life? Look no further, the P30 Pro is here.
user rating :
4.75 stars (4 votes)
Sakshi considers herself a speck of creation trying to make sense of this galaxy. Meditation Practitioner, Life enthusiast & Traveller, she firmly believes in the power of change and goodwill. She is working as a content creator and a branding consultant