Huawei P30 Review: A Complete Power House Phone

Huawei P30 Review: A Complete Power House Phone

OUR VERDICT

The Huawei P30 has during a one in every of one among the simplest cameras we have seen in a phone, with features like incredible optical zoom and night mode that other handsets could only dream of, but aside from that it feels more sort of a decent mid-range handset than a flagship.

FOR

• Fantastic camera
• Vibrant design
• Powerful processor

AGAINST

• No wireless charging
• Huawei's UI to not everyone's taste
• Not nearly as good because the P30 Pro

UPDATE: The Huawei P30 sees some serious camera competition from the OnePlus 7 Pro, so to make a decision which is that the best for taking pictures once and for all, we took them both out for a camera comparison.

We took ultra-wide, night sight, zoom, and lots of more sorts of pictures (including pigeon pics), to figure out the strengths and weakness of every device. But which is better? Is one actually better, or are they both rather similar?

Huawei’s P series of phones became known for being fantastic devices for photography – that’s what the P stands for, in any case – and with the Huawei P30 the corporate has clearly began to make another handset that towers above the competition when it involves its camera setup.

Released on March 26 at a launch event in Paris alongside the Huawei P30 Pro, and an entire collection of other gadgets, Huawei wants the phone to ‘revolutionize’ the way people take pictures with their handset – but can the P30 deliver on this lofty promise?

And albeit the P30 had the simplest photographic capabilities within the world, there’s tons more to a phone than its camera – so does it deliver in terms of the opposite key features we expect from a flagship device, and overall performance?

There is a caveat to purchasing the P30 though. After Google suspended Huawei's future access to Android Play Store and security updates, there are serious question marks over the longer term of Huawei and Honor phones.

While Google and Huawei have promised to support phones currently on the market, it isn't clear how long they'll receive Android updates or access to the Google Play Store, which might severely curtail their usefulness compared to the competition.

PRICE AND AVAILABILITY

Huawei made the P30, also because the P30 Pro, available immediately in Europe after launch on March 26 2019 – but it’s not available everywhere (see below for a note on US availability), and you’ll need to wait until April 16 to select it up in Australia.

Huawei smartphones are currently not available through US carriers or major retailers, though it's still possible to shop for them. This usually means a better cost or counting on an unverified online retailers, and software might not be optimized for US networks. Huawei is functioning to get clearance to plug its phones within the US, so we could see this handset officially launched there within the future.

The Huawei P30 will set you back £699 / AU$1,099 (roughly $910), which within the UK especially is sort of a hike over the Huawei P20’s launch price of £599 / AU$999 (roughly $780) but an honest deal but the Huawei P30 Pro’s entry-level 128GB variant, which costs £899 (roughly $1,170 or AU$1,660, although this version of the P30 Pro isn’t coming to Australia).

There’s just one model of the Huawei P30 beginning, with 6GB RAM and 128GB internal storage, but there are enough color variations to offer you a degree of choice at the checkout.

BEST CAMERA PHONE EVER?

If you’re watching the Huawei P30 it’s probably because you would like a phone for photography, and its triple-camera loadout is enough to rival the simplest of Samsung and Apple.

The main camera may be a 40MP wide-angle beast – Huawei calls it an excellent Spectrum shooter, and it ‘sees’ RYYB (red, yellow, yellow, blue) light rather than the standard RGB (red, green, blue), enabling it to capture a wider range of colours for richly detailed images and, Huawei claims, making it particularly great in low-light conditions.

In addition the phone packs a 16MP ultra-wide camera and an 8MP telephoto camera, the latter of which lends itself to snappier autofocus also as 30x optical zoom, enabling you to urge up close and private even to distant subjects.

All that sounds great on paper, and with the addition of a 32MP front-facing snapper for unnecessarily high-quality selfies, it looks like the Huawei P30 has the simplest camera setup on the market (other than the P30 Pro, which offers a 50x zoom and a further ‘time-of-flight’ depth-sensing camera for better bokeh shots) – you’ll got to head to the Camera section of this review to see out how well it fared in practice.

DESIGN AND DISPLAY

In terms of size, the Huawei P30 is that the very definition of a mid-sized phone – at 149.1 x 71.4 x 7.6mm, and with a weight of 165g, it’s almost precisely the same size because the Samsung Galaxy S10, although the P30 may be a little heavier.

The back and front of the phone are covered in Corning Gorilla Glass, which alongside the rounded edges and sleek design give the P30 a premium feel; however, the highest and bottom of the handset are flat where the edges are rounded, and alongside the fairly prominent camera bump on the rear it arguably makes for a rather sub-premium look – although we’ve seen phones just like the Xiaomi Mi 9 on which this array was even more ‘bumpy’.

The bottom of the device houses the USB-C and three .5mm headphone ports, and on the proper side is that the volume rocker and power button.

This presence of the headphone jack may be a little surprising given the Huawei P20 didn’t have one, and personally we’re glad to ascertain it return – although the P30 did launch alongside the Huawei FreeLace wireless headphones, which hook up with the device through the USB-C port for charging and setup, therefore the company was under no particular obligation to bring back the jack.

The Huawei P30 stands out from other phones for its colorful body, because it comes during a range of gradient designs: Amber Sunrise (basically orange), Breathing Crystal (pale blue), Aurora (a more vivid blue), also as standard black and white models.

We used the Aurora model for our review, and other people often acknowledged how good it looked – it definitely appears distinct from other phones.

The 6.1-inch OLED display takes up a powerful amount of the phone’s frontage, broken only by a ‘teardrop’ notch at the highest housing the front-facing camera. The screen features a 2340 x 1080 resolution and supports Full HD+, allowing a greater brightness range and more vivid colors.

This display’s max brightness is noticeably brighter than the screens on other handsets we compared it to, but colors did seem a small bit paler – we only noticed this in side-by-side comparisons though, therefore the difference isn’t significant.

BATTERY LIFE

The Huawei P30 features a sizeable 3,650mAh battery pack, which was enough to urge through each day of moderate to heavy use with a healthy amount left in reserve.

We could stream content, play games, or hear music or podcasts for extended periods of your time, and therefore the battery wouldn’t drop too low, and Huawei’s Optimizer function tells you if idle apps are draining battery, so we never had to stress about curtailing our usage to save lots of juice.

As with any phone, photography drained power a touch more quickly, and since that’s one among the most draws of the P30 we found ourselves using the camera a lot; however, even prolonged photo shoots didn’t have enough of an impression on the battery to be a cause for concern.

When we put the phone through the TechRadar battery test, which involves playing a 90-minute video with full brightness while accounts are syncing over Wi-Fi, the charge only dropped a miniscule 7% – that’s one among the simplest results we’ve ever seen, beaten only by the LG G Flex from 2013, which lost 6%.

Most phones tend to drop by the region of 12%-15%, therefore the P30’s result's impressive – we even ran the test twice, because we didn’t believe the result the primary time.

The P30 supports Huawei’s SuperCharge fast-charging tech up to 100W, which Huawei claims will charge the phone to full in 17 minutes; however, the specified charger isn’t available yet, and Huawei hasn’t announced when we’ll see it.

Instead, included within the box may be a standard charger, which we found powered the handset from empty to full in an hour – that’s quick enough for the battery size, and means you'll comfortably get two days’ use with just a few of brief trips to the charger.

The P30 doesn’t, however, have wireless charging capability, which the P30 Pro does – and that’s an enormous feature to miss out on for a flagship phone lately.

CAMERA

The big point of the Huawei P30 is that the camera – that’s likely why you’re considering buying the phone, and it’s what Huawei talked about the foremost at the launch.

The three-camera setup the P30 boasts is impressive enough, but the range of photographic effects and tools on offer here are what cement the phone’s dominance.

The headline attraction may be a 40MP f/1.8 wide-angle camera, protected by 16MP f/2.2 ultra-wide and 8MP f/2.4 telephoto snapper, and together they’re capable of taking some amazing pictures.

The 40MP sensor uses Huawei’s Super Spectrum technology, which suggests it gathers RYYB light rather than the RGB that the majority sensors do; which consistent with Huawei enables the P30 to capture images with more natural-looking and vivid colors, and to require greatly improved low-light shots.

When we took pictures in the dark, or in dark indoor settings, we frequently found the camera took pictures that picked out the topic far better than other phone camera would, both for close-up and wide shots.

This is the work of the camera’s Night mode, which needs longer exposure to require better pictures – so you’ll got to confirm to stay the camera steady – although we also got some great shots using the quality shooting mode.

The other advantage of the Super Spectrum sensor is that it captures more color detail, with the Vivid or Smooth color modes enhancing naturally bright colors, just like the yellow append the pair of keys pictured below, without artificially boosting more muted colors, meaning objects retained a natural look.

However we found the Night and enhanced color modes didn’t work together alright, with colors boosted a touch overzealously in low-light conditions.

Another impressive feature of the Huawei P30’s camera setup – and positively the foremost fun to play with – is that the zoom facility.

As well as capturing ultra-wide shots, you'll concentrate up to 30x in pictures or 10x in videos – almost the 50x photo zoom on the P30 Pro, but impressive nonetheless.

Using 30x zoom we could see details that were imperceptible in 1x zoom, and although the image quality suffered, and slightly shakey hands could easily ruin an attempt, we were still impressed by what proportion detail was retained.

Of course you’re not always getting to be taking pictures in the dark or from huge distances, and therefore the standard picture mode is perfectly dependable – almost every picture we took looked great, from high-quality wide shots to close-ups with the right level of background blur.

It was a touch fiddly taking close-ups because the camera could take a short time to focus, but altogether fairness we tested it on some demanding shots, including ‘busy’ compositions featuring multiple subjects.

The P30 supports a variety of video resolutions and frame rates, from 720p HD to 4K Ultra HD at 30fps, although if you would like to shoot at 60fps your only option is 1080p Full HD, and video effects aren’t available at higher resolutions.

The front-facing camera boast a whopping 32MP sensor, and took selfies that might still be full of detail even when blown up to poster sizes. Pictures crazy this camera looked amazing, and much more natural in terms of both colors and background blur than shot from rival phones.

There’s also a set of effects that you simply can use for selfies, including a ‘stage lighting’ effect which turns the background back and highlights your face, creating professional-looking headshots.

We were really impressed by the standard of images crazy the P30 – if it wasn’t for the existence of the P30 Pro, this phone would definitely be a contender for best smartphone camera.

As it stands, the Huawei P30's camera was so good we carried on using it way after our review was finished, and you'll read our further thoughts on the camera to seek out out why. We also put it through some tests side-by-side with the OnePlus 7 Pro, to ascertain which of the smartphone snappers works better in several circumstances.