4646 AUGUST 2019|COMPUTER SHOPPER|ISSUE 378
ITWASN’TTOOlong ago that you’d have
been laughed out of the shops if you asked
foraphone with multiple cameras, but now
dual- and triple-lens arrangements are the
new normal. Instrumental in this sea change
was the Huawei P20 Pro (Shopper366),
which introduced triple-lens cameras to the
masses, and now the P30 Pro aims to take
smartphone photography even further with
asnapper containing not three but four
different sensors.
If it seems as though Huawei has only just
released aflagship,you’re not faroff, as the
Mate20Pro (Shopper373) launched just six
months ago.The P30 Pro complements the
Mateseries with ahandful of extras, much as
the Samsung Galaxy Noterange expands on
the Galaxy Sformula, but there’s at least one
keysimilarity: the processor.
The Mate20Pro and P30 Pro are both
powered by Huawei’s own Kirin 980 mobile
processor,which is a7nm CPU clocked at
up to 2.6GHz. In the P30 Pro,this is
complemented by 8GB of RAM and achoice
of 128GB or 512GB of expandable storage.
In addition, you’re looking at aslightly
bigger 6.5in OLED screen, with aresolution of
2,340x1,080, and a4,200mAh battery.It’s also
running the latest version of Android, 9.0.
There’s the new camera setup as well, but
we’ll get to that in more detail later.
OLD FRIEND
Outside of the cameras, the Huawei P30 Pro is
acontinuation of what made the Mate20Pro
so great. It’s achingly attractive,sandwiched
between layers of softly curvaceous glass on
the front and rear,and comes in some
enticing, jewellery-shop colours. The most
eye-catching is the iridescent ‘Breathing
Crystal’ colour,which fades from deep purple
to alight blue across the rear panel, depending
on how the phone catches the light.
As you’d expect of amodern flagship,the
Huawei P30 Pro is nice and thin, packing its
large screen intoacomparatively compact
chassis. Better still, the P30 Pro’s display
delivers aslightly taller aspect ratio of 19.5:9.
HUAWEI P30Pro
★★★★★
£899•From http://www.amazon.co.uk
VERDICT
Afour-sensorcameraarrayisjustoneofthis
gorgeoussmartphone’smanytriumphs
ANDROID 9.0 SMARTPHONE
Along with the
arrival of this
elongated aspect
ratio comes the
return of the notch.
However,this time
around it isn’t an
iPhone-like affair;
instead, the
32-megapixel selfie
camera is embedded
in acomparatively
unobtrusive circular
teardrop notch.
GOODVIBES
From the pictures,
you might be wondering where the front-
mounted earpiece speaker went to.Unusually,
you won’t find such athing on the P30 Pro.
Instead, it has been replaced with anew
feature Huawei calls ‘electro-magnetic
levitation’. This is afancy wayofsaying the
phone’s screen vibrates to createsound when
pressed against your ear.We’re not sure
where the levitation comes intoit, or even if
it’s necessary,but it works well enough and
cleans up the aesthetics abit.
Odd features aside,the Huawei P30 Pro is
the Huawei’s most attractive,well-designed
smartphone to date. It covers most of the
functionality bases, too. There’s alarge
4,200mAh capacity battery keeping things
ticking along, and it supports both fast 40W
charging and reverse wireless charging, in
effectturningitintoapowerbank.TheP30Pro
isalsoIP68-ratedfordustandwaterresistance.
On an unhappier note, 3.5mm headphone
connectivity seems lost forever,but slightly
more worrisome is the lack of microSD
expansion. Instead, the P30 Pro,like the
Mate20series, only supports Huawei’s
nano memory cards. These are physically
smaller but more expensive than their
micro-sized equivalents, and so make
almost no sense whatsoever.Still, with at
least 128GB of internal storage,you
probably won’t need one anyway.
Measuring 6.5in across the diagonal, the
P30 Pro’s screen is slightly larger than the
6.1in displayofthe cheaper P30 (Shopper377).
Its specifications remain the same,asthe
P30 Pro uses an AMOLED panel yet again
and the resolution is 2,340x1,080. This would
appear to be adowngrade on the 1440p
displayoffered by the Mate20Pro,but this
lower-resolution screen has the added benefit
of prolonged battery life.
Displayquality is pretty good, too. In the
Normal displayprofile,the P30 Pro’s screen is
reasonably colour-accurateand able to
reproduce 95.7% of the sRGB colour gamut
with atotal volume of 109%. An average
delta-E of 2.53 isn’t perfect, however,and
there are acouple of issues, particularly with
oversaturated red and dark blue colour tones.
Still, the P30 Pro’s screen is capable of
reaching apeak luminance of 854cd/m2 in
auto-brightness mode and, with this being an
OLED panel, contrast is effectively perfect.
GO LONG
We’ve already seen the Kirin 980 tear through
our performance benchmarks in the P30 and
the Mate20Pro,and the P30 Pro is no
different. In the Geekbench 4single-core and
multicore tests, the P30 Pro produced scores
of 3,302 and 9,720 respectively.Gaming
performance is just as good, with the P30 Pro
reaching apractically perfect average frame
rateof59fps in the GFXBench GL Manhattan
3.0 onscreen GPU benchmark.
Likely due to the move to amore efficient
7nm processor,overall battery lifehas seen a
significant improvement from the P20 Pro.
Our video rundown test shows that the P30
Pro’s stamina is roughly 39% better than its
predecessor,reaching astaggering total of 21h
