Huawei is hell-bent on revolutionizing smartphone photography, making it simpler for the average consumer to capture DSLR-like images. The Pixel 3 was the best camera device to date for this purpose, however, Huawei’s latest flagship smartphone – the Huawei P30 Pro has debuted with some impressive camera hardware and capabilities that would blow your socks off.
Before we talk about my initial impressions of the Huawei P30 Pro, here’s a quick look at the key specifications of the device:
Huawei P30 Pro: Design and Build
The Huawei P30 Pro is a visually stunning device and you’ll notice that the moment you take it out from the box and remove the plastic wrap that secures it. This smartphone is building on the excellent design of Huawei’s previous flagship, the Mate 20 Pro, and I’m loving what I see.
As for the ports and buttons, the latter are quite tactile and I love the red indent in the power button. They are also located at an appropriate position, whereas the former is a lone wolf. There’s only a USB Type-C port at the bottom and no 3.5mm headphone jack. There’s a speaker grill and SIM tray at the bottom as well, with the IR blaster and noise cancellation mic sitting up-top.
Turning our attention to the front, the Huawei P30 Pro includes a gorgeous display with smaller bezels (more on this below) and improved in-screen fingerprint scanner in comparison to the Mate 20 Pro. The fingerprint scanner on P30 Pro is an optical one (not the ultrasonic sensor we’ve seen on the Galaxy S10 Plus) and it’s placed lower this time around.
The massive 6.47-inch curved OLED panel is one of my favorite characteristics of the Huawei P30 Pro. The company has done away with its Apple iPhone X-style notch with all the necessary hardware to enable 360-degree face unlocking feature on the P30 Pro. It’s adopted the trendy dewdrop notch for an unobtrusive experience and I really like how it makes the front of the device look – taller and beautiful.
Stepping up from its previous flagships, Huawei P30 Pro carries a Leica-branded quad-camera module which has a primary 40MP (f/1.6) SuperSpectrum sensor (with an RYYB Bayer filter), a 20MP (f/2.2) ultra-wide angle camera (with more than 120-degrees FOV), an 8MP (f/3.4) telephoto camera (with the 10x SuperZoom capability) and finally a Time-of-Flight (TOF) camera. The TOF camera is currently used to better low-light photos and portraits, but will later come in handy for AR applications as well.
The biggest highlight of the P30 Pro camera, however, will have to be its insane zooming capabilities. You have 5x optical zoom, 10x hybrid “almost lossless” zoom, and even 50x digital zoom available on this smartphone. I’ve been playing with this feature since I got my hands on the P30 Pro and my initial impression is my jaw hitting the floor. Here are a couple of samples:
If you want to check out some more awesome 50x camera samples, here’s our YouTube video straight from Paris:
So the cameras here look promising, but obviously, I’ll be testing them out thoroughly and comparing them against other flagship smartphones. Keep an eye out for our full review to get a more detailed look at the camera performance on the P30 Pro.
Though you may already know, still let’s recap once again. Huawei P30 Pro is powered by the company’s in-house 7nm Hi-Silicon Kirin 980 chipset, coupled with up to 8GB of RAM and up to 256GB of internal storage. This is Huawei’s most powerful and capable chip to date and I’ve encountered no hiccup in the performance in the past 24 hours for which I have had the device.
The Huawei P30 Pro carries a massive 4,200mAh battery pack but still manages to keep the thickness at around 8mm, which is pretty impressive. The smartphone doesn’t even feel heavy and is comfortable to use too. You should be able to extract up to a complete day of usage from this battery pack on a single charge, without having to push the limit.
And even if you completely drain the battery by playing a ton of PUBG Mobile or viewing BTS videos (something that I’ve been doing, of recent), the 40W SuperCharger bundled with the P30 Pro will allow you to fill close to 75% of your battery in just 30 minutes. It’s the same as the Mate 20 Pro and the charging power also hasn’t been bumped to 50W or higher.
Huawei P30 Pro offers you endless possibilities and I stand by this statement, right from this hands-on impression. I say that because of the jaw-dropping and mind-boggling (oh yeah, one adjective felt lacking) camera prowess of the smartphone. It seems to throw a challenge to its competitors in this department, while packing all necessary features and many over-the-top ones too.
