Huawei Mate 30 Pro review | No Google Services But It’s A Wonderful piece of Tech.

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Huawei Mate 30 Pro

Huawei Mate 30 Pro review: Mate 30 Pro is one of the biggest flagships of the year, but the feeling is a kind of bittersweet if Google services aren’t available on; though, it still packs a lot of features that may water the mouth of so many Tech-mads. So let’s take a deep look at this phone.

Like many other phones these days, the Huawei mate 30 Pro is made of glass. Its look it’s pretty unmistakable; though, with the unique tall wraparound screen, and round camera setup. We’ve seen our share of curved displays, but this is the most extreme one yet.

With this waterfall design, it extends almost around the entire edge of the phone. There’s just a sliver of shiny aluminum supporting it at the bottom, and this means there are basically no visible side bezels. Although, it brings into question how sturdy this build really is.

If you happen to bump the edge of the phone that’s a glass, you’ll be hitting Gorilla Glass but still another issue this brings up is where to fit the hardware buttons, Hauwei solves the problem by getting rid of the volume buttons entirely to adjust the sound level. you’ll have to double-tap on the screen where there is still a power key; though the third concern is with accidental hand activations which you’d think would happen more often, but actually I didn’t have too much of a problem with them.

Our Mate 30 pro is in space silver and the gradient finish goes from blue to purple it all looks quite a mirror-like surrounding. The camera setup is around accent sort of like a shiny donut, and since the setup is in the center, the phone is balanced and you can use it on a desk without wobbling.

Another nice aspect of the build is that you won’t have to worry about water getting in, thanks to the phone’s ip68 rated water and dust resistance. let’s take a closer look at what Holly calls his horizon display it’s a 6.5 inch curved OLED with a tall aspect ratio and a 1080 plus resolution. Up at the top, there is a notch cut out for the selfie cam it’s too bad that Huawei couldn’t have made the top and bottom as bezel as the sides.

The notch won’t get in the way of contents, but YouTube doesn’t work well so we ended up with black bars on the screen sides. The screen itself looks great; though, there’s nice contrast in deep black’s sharpness is good too. Colors look nice they’re not the most accurate, but you can tweak them as you like in settings.

Their support for HDR content to maximum brightness is around 460 nits with a slider pretty high, but not the brightest we’ve seen among flagships these days. You should have no problems in the Sun; though, with auto mode on these situations we’ll bring out as much as 680 nets.

There is an always-on display that you can enable to show you the time and any notifications that may come up. I really like the convenience of this sort of feature, and wish it was on even more devices just like the P30 Pro. The Mate 30 pro uses the display as an earpiece, and it vibrates to conduct the sound and delivers great clarity in your calls and sound leakage isn’t an issue.

Under the display is an optical fingerprint scanner for you to wake up and unlock the phone with, it’s super-fast and accurate one of the best I’ve tried this year. You can also use face unlock it’s quite fast too, and actually pretty secure thanks to 3D mapping from the tof camera.

Unlike many premium phones these days, the Mate 30 Pro doesn’t have a stereo speaker setup. There’s just the one loudspeaker at the bottom; however, it does do a great job. We measured excellent loudness, and the lows mids and highs are all well done. Just as before you can’t plug in normal headphones without an adapter, as there’s no 3.5 millimeter jack you do get USB-C earbuds in the box.

Huawei Mate 30 Pro review STORAGE: Though, you get 128 or 256 gigs of storage on the Mate 30 Pro, which should last you a while. And if you need more it is expandable, sadly you will need to use one of those who always proprietary Nano memory cards to do it. And it’s a phone that still features the IR blaster technology which you don’t find so often these days, and with it, you can use the phone to control certain appliances around the house.

Huawei Mate 30 Pro review

Now, let’s get into the biggest controversy with this phone:

Huawei Mate 30 Pro review THE SOFTWARE: As you may have heard the USA’s beef with Huawei means that American companies like Google can’t work with this company. And that means new Huawei devices like this one don’t have support for Google services or security of these. You still get an Android OS actually the latest Android 10 with the EMUI 10 on top, but you’re missing the Play Store in, and basically every app with Google’s name on it.

Our test is entirely based on the Chinese version of the phone, and is unclear of a future global version would do things differently or even if there would be a global version at all. For now, since there’s no Play Store, you’ll need to get your apps from something like Huawei zap gallery which doesn’t have a whole lot or side-load them from a PC and sadly many apps just won’t run properly without Google services.

But besides the Google issue, the user interface is quite smooth and navigation is done with gestures by default and we’ve seen this layout before. The visual updates from EMUI 10 are most noticeable in the notification shade in the quick toggles because of the screen’s extreme curve. The UI of certain apps may end up on the edge of the device, so you have the option to tweak apps to only display on the flat part which does leave you with black bars.

Huawei Mate 30 Pro review CHIPSETS: Under the hood is one of Huawei’s top-tier chipsets, the new Kirin 990 along with 8 gigs of RAM in CPU benchmarks. The Mate 30 Pro posts better scores than rivals running on a snapdragon 855, but it’s still no match for the iPhones. Here turning on performance mode makes a difference. In GPU tests the Mate 30 Pro rivals the ROG phone 2 and even the iPhone 11 pro. In addition, it does a pretty good job with its thermals regardless of performance mode, it doesn’t get as hot as many competitors and delivers decent sustain performance.

BATTERY: At 4500mAh the Mate 30 Pro’s battery is a bit larger than last year’s model the phone did a great job in our proprietary screen on tests entered an excellent endurance rating of a hundred and three hours charging is incredibly fast as well. The bundled 40W Huawei supercharger was able to charge the phone from zero to 72% in half an hour.

A full charge took just over an hour, and there is support for 27W wireless charging if you buy the proprietary charging pad. And you can use reverse wireless charging to top-up another device, but we found that quite finicky.

CAMERA: The Mate 30 Pros cameras along with the 40MP main camera, the quad bear filter that we saw in the p30 Pro, there’s now a new 40 megapixel ultra-wide camera with a large sensor and bright lens, the third camera is an 8MP 3X telephoto, and finally there’s a tof sensor for portrait mode.

The camera interface is similar to what we’ve seen before, and the camera modes are among the best in the business. But in landscape orientation controlling, the zoom is quite a stretch for the thumb and I kind of miss using the volume keys as a shutter button and daylight photos taken with the main camera look quite nice with great detail and foliage rendition.

Awesome, dynamic range and hardly any noise colors are conservative; though, yellow is especially seem a bit weak if you switch to the telephoto cam. You do have more vivid colors, and 3x lossless zoom and the shots look great with better fine detail than the competition.

The ultra-wide-angle camera is unlike any other on the market with its large sensor and autofocus, these shots have excellent detail basically no noise and great dynamic range plus the colors are nicer than on the main camera. We should note that the field of view isn’t as wide as on other phones; though, like other quad bear cameras we’ve used you can choose to shoot with the main and ultra-wide cameras in the full 40 megapixels. And just as before you don’t necessarily get much more detail this way, and the files will be a lot larger portraits can be taken with either the main cam or the 3x telephoto and there are plenty of effects you can add to the shot too.

The results are pretty nice with a very good subject separation, and the D focus background is well done in low-light. The Mate 30 Pros main camera does an excellent job, thanks to its large sensor photos look sharp and clean with the wide dynamic range, especially with light sources.

We did notice a redshift in the colors; though, if you turn on night mode, you get a bit more detail from the shadows and the overall result looks livelier and more colorful. The reddish tint is still noticeable at night the ultra-wide cam will also give you great results.

something you can’t say about many phones these are pretty much the best in the business: there are great detail and wide dynamic range, there’s night mode for the ultra-wide-angle cam, but it comes with pros and cons. the colors are more accurate and the redness is gone, but for some reason these come outcropped and upscaled resulting in softer photos with a narrower field of view.

Sadly if you try to zoom at night, you won’t get great results. In most cases, the phone will crop digitally from the main camera occasionally, and you will get an actual output from the telephoto. The zoom works with night mode too, but is tricky to get a good handheld shot; because, of the long focal length. Unless you’re using a tripod, don’t expect a lot here.

Moving on to selfies: the main 30 pros 32-megapixel fixed-focus selfie cam is the same as the one on the p30 pro. there’s also a Tof sensor on the front for portraits selfies come out with great detail spot-on colors and wide dynamic range overall really nice selfie portraits are pretty impressive as well. Videos can be recorded with the main cam and the ultra-wide at up to 4k at 60fps, while the telephoto can record 4k at 30fps.

Video stabilization is available in all modes and is always on 4k videos from the main camp have good detail and sharpness and dynamic range is wide colors are accurate – except for a slight reddish tint 4k videos from the ultra-wide cam also look quite nice.

There is a noticeable difference in colors between the 30fps and the 60fps modes videos from the telephoto cam, and 4k at 30fps look good; though, the level of detail leaves a bit more to be desired. And finally here’s a neat trick the Mate 30 pro can shoot 720p super slow-mo video at 1920 fps, and thanks to AI this is extrapolated to 7680 FPS so you get 256 times slowdown. Needless to say, you should have a lot of light here.

So that’s the Huawei Mate 30 Pro review feature-wise, this phone has all the bells and whistles there’s a breathtaking curved OLED screen, excellent battery life, super-fast charging, killer performance, and some of the best cameras in the business especially the ultra-wide.

Sadly the lack of Google support means that one of the best flagships on the market is actually a pretty tough sell in the West. How can you run an Android phone though Google services not very easily? we’re not sure if the phone will even be released outside of China, so there it is I find it hard to recommend buying a gray import you’d have to forget about your Google account and take the time to sideload all of your apps. Let’s hope for a change in Google’s policy weather at least have a global version if there ever is one.

simon Assela
Simon is a technology writer and researcher. He's also an avid sports fan, especially when it comes to the FCB. When not working, you can usually find him tweaking his Android devices or reading political news.

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