Huawei P30 Pro This is the phone I've been using for weeks leading up to
all the galaxy fold stuff and might as well keep using after it this is the
phone that you've either never heard of or you've heard all about it and are
probably wondering if these cameras are worth the hype.
I gotta say the p30 Pro is the best phone not sold in the US that's just
facts and that's of course gonna hurt its popularity here but if you're gonna
get one which you still can you should know all about the rest of it too I mean
what people are really here for is the camera and we'll get to that but the
rest of the phones pretty damn good too. So the easiest way to think about this
phone is it's an upgraded design of the p20 Pro but with all the best features
of the mate 20 Pro.
So aesthetically you can tell Huawei definitely knows they struck gold
with this really unique triple color gradient look I'd bet money that was their
number one seller of the p20 Pro because now all of them have this look so
there's a red gradient one this pearly white gradient when I seen on videos and
then this one here is my personal favorite a sort of a green to blue to purple
aurora starburst kind of thing.
Actually of one of those classic windows wallpapers remember this one
with the fish just me. okay but yet no it stands out if you're about that psychedelic
look this is the one for you if not you can easily go full matt black everything
with a skin from our channel sponsored a brand. so huawei like i've mentioned
has sort of taken after samsung a little bit with their aesthetic but they've
also carved out some things that are their own some of them for the better some
of them not so much so the psychedelic a triple color thing sure that's all you
want on the top and bottom they own that the shape of the camera bump they sort
of own that too but it's pretty huge this thing legit wobbles on a table to the
point where it's actually note possible that could bother some people.
The speaker here below is compatible with other phones and it rings decently loud, but it doesn't sound great and it's actually really easy to accidentally block with one finger and to balance that button There is no earpiece speaker and then the position of the entire button is kind of interesting. So firstly the power and volume rocker are on the same kind of wish, while they don't, but I wish the volume rocker was on the other side, which is empty now and then on most phones do a double tap on the power button. You have a camera shortcut on the phone, which doesn't dope by tapping the power button that it just sleeps and wakes up really fast. It is actually pressing the double down volume button that you get in the camera until you are on the home screen, in which case double pressing volume reduces your volume so the camera is not a shortcut, then the power button Turning off not to stop will take you down to the Google Assistant, so that the accented power button is pressed for a long time, such as a voice assistant trigger and then the power and volume down is still a screen shot power and The volume up screen starts for recording and then turns on to turn the phone off completely. You don't have to tell the power button to Google Assistant and then wait 2 or 3 seconds to get the shutdown menu. Which will pop up over Google Assistant, so it's just a little taste of this phone's nuances nested but it's just the Huawei way.
Hardware-wise though if you like a phone that does check a lot of boxes
this one does it you got your premium build quality. There's ip68 water
resistance there's expandable storage your high-end specs it's all there. It
also has the earpiece speaker behind the glass so this whole top third of the phone
is the earpiece and it even tells you where to put up your ear to listen to it
and it doesn't buzz at all like LG's did so it sounds great. It doesn't double
as a second front facing speaker though I think some people would trade it for
a real speaker so that you didn't have such an easily mutable source of audio.
But hey that's the Huawei way but you know what else is behind the glass is
that fingerprint reader it's decent at best. I found it fine it's optical so
it's another one of those first-generation fingerprint readers that works about
as well as any other like the one in the oneplus 60.
I actually found it to be faster than the ultrasonic one in the Galaxy S10
but I think a lot of the optical ones
are what I do like is that it's smart about showing you where the reader is as
soon as you pick up the phone you can quickly unlock it while the screen is off
and it's pretty good about that but it still has to shine that annoyingly
bright light. So in screen fingerprint readers are still in the early stages of
actually getting good anyway the display is a good one too. It's very bright
and very high resolution looks great for videos and games it's not the
brightest but it is definitely viewable outdoors.
I might be starting to get over the sort of bleeding over the edge thing
that they've done with this phone and Samsung has done a little bit. I'm kind
of because they get a little extra glare on the sides but it still looks really
cool, but it definitely hasn't been anywhere near stopping me from using the
phone and liking it. I just think I actually wouldn't mind if it was flat the
screen is so nice anyway and then sadly no headphone jack in this phone.
Our IP headphone jack fans the p30 does have one that p30 pro does not
same thing as last year that's about the only box this phone doesn't check that
along with stereo speakers and the performance is all around excellent. So it's
super responsive and fast and thanks to the ki-rin 980 and eight gigs of ram,
I've had no slowdowns or any questionable lag or anything with the p30 Pro
which is awesome. It's one of my favorite things about this phone and it
actually goes hand-in-hand with the incredible battery life I didn't even mention
the battery life this 4200 milliamp hour cell is the new undisputed heavyweight
champ for battery and smartphones period I mean I'm ending days with 4045
percent left.
I'm getting seven plus hours of screen on time on heavy days I don't
even worry about when I charged anymore I just plug it in whenever I feel like
it. This is the champ this is what you want you want to never have to worry
about the battery when you're using your phone if you're a heavy user or
someone who travels a lot that's awesome for the peace of mind. And honestly if
you're a light user this is a 2-day phone comfortably for real two full days of
use a lot of people have mentioned.
Huawei phones are not only very aggressive with killing background apps
to extend battery which is pretty true but I feel like they can get away with
it in my case because it reopens apps so fast so I give a big thumbs up here to
performance and to battery life. So the big dark rose for me right now with
Huawei phones and it always has been is their software so this guy's running
there emu eye skin on top of android pi just some people like it some people
don't and I'm in that second camp. But there's a ton of great features, I love
the dark mode so if you go under battery settings there's toggle to darken
interface colors and it permeates throughout the whole OS so it's easy on the
eyes dark mode is basically everywhere.
I also like that in any app you can swipe across the navigation bar to
enter one handed mode and this is a gesture that you can do with one hand and
it makes it easier to type or just scroll or reach things in the corners. It's
kind of like apples rich ability but I think a better easier gesture but
there's also things I just don't like so the Settings app is still a clutter
it's hard to navigate and I wish they'd organize it a little bit better or
clean it up then there's all the Huawei bloat there's pre-installed apps when
I'm pinching to zoom it triggers Huawei's high-touch a service that I just
don't ever want to use so you got a disable things like that another thing if
you have multiple notifications in most other versions of Android I'm used to
you can expand the notification to open one instance of it or tap the whole
notification group to open that app, but on this phone you can't do that tap to
just open the app so it expands them every time requiring an extra tap for me
to open that annoyed me and on small details like zooming in with the camera
app strangely takes two hands because of where they put the zoom slider at the bottom
when pretty much every other phone is put careful attention into making sure.
I can zoom with one hand then there's just always been this constant
weird bug where sometimes I press the home button to go home and it just
doesn't go home it doesn't respond I think that's like a pretty basic thing it
should be able to do every time this happens every day multiple times per day
for me.
It's hard for me to get on board with that so this one is propped up and
held back by the software at the same time like it's definitely not that they
don't have enough features or customization there's plenty it's just that it
feels like the user experience isn't the main focus when designing all this
stuff like Samsung had the same problem they redesigned all their stuff one UI
is now pretty great so I'd say wow way is due for that same update so all that
brings us to the main head turning feature the reason you're all here the
reason you may have heard about this phone in the first place and that's these
cameras there are four sensors on the back, But in fact the three cameras are the main sensor ultra wide periscope zoom and then the fourth time of flight sensor which helps in depth measurement so two main features which are really eye catching about the P30 Pros cameras and zoom range in the right way And the low-light performance is why this kind of experience in the zoom range is the super borderline between the useful feature and the gimmick, so the periscope zoom which is actually an attractive anatomy as shown by tearing everything jig-rigged. 5x optical zoom will do and then you can keep going to 10x which
will sharpen and use AI and combining with the main sensor to try to be
lossless. But I found it's already starting to get softer and then you can keep
going 20 X 30 X 40 X all the way upto 50 times which is kind of ridiculous where
most smartphones will go maybe 8 X2 10 X zoom tops so like yes it does actually
work and it has generally pretty impressive results but most of the time do
people really actually zoom in that much like here's how far 50 times really is
it's absurd like how many photos do you really take like that are you a spy, is
this really super creep mode. It is strange that there was so much attention to it that I really liked myself knowing that I enjoy this feature much more often than when I zoomed into a photo. Although I have previously placed the telephoto camera in the smartphone, I think I topped out at about 10x zoom before it stopped being crisp and usable and looked soft and artificial, yet I definitely Found that the ultra wide way was more useful when you are close to large subjects or you want to change the perspective slightly or shot a larger landscape then it does a great job of minimizing and distorting
I use this more often than I actually ever went past 10x
zoom but then the night mode, the night mode is the real game-changer here
which was way more useful and impressive to me so go into any dark environment
first of all go out at night or in a dark room or a dimly lit and being a
restaurant anything like that, the view finder right off the bat is showing
more than most and then you snap the photo and let it process for a quick second
and boom it's showing the scene with way more light than real life. Usually
showing more than the actual human eye is seeing so I did a couple comparisons
myself with the iPhone 10S which doesn't have a night mode versus the pixel
threes night sight which has been pretty much class-leading by a longshot up
until this month and then versus the P30 Pro literally in auto mode and the results
were absolutely sick. So the image processing are clearly making a really big
difference here. Images from the p30 Pro in literally basically pitch-black
look like you're shining a light into your scene. It's wild and it's actually
kind of addicting and fun to play with the only downside is the fact that it
does this in auto mode all the time which means sometimes you're dimly lit bar shots
will actually look too bright. You know it's funny during huawei's presentation
of this phone they showed pretty much exclusively like nighttime and low-light
shots especially when comparing to the competition to the point where they
pretty much didn't even talk about daylight photography at all, not that
they're bad in daylight of course the May 20 Pro just won the blind smart phone
camera test but it's just kind of funny they're so dialed in with low light
that they almost don't even talk about daylight stuff but I think that's
actually a pretty good idea that's where most people take a lot of photos.
I will say daytime photos from the p30 Pro fell in line with what we saw
from the mate 20 Pro they're coming down from their hyper over-processed sharpened
land into a more toned-down realistic look for sure it still loves to
overexpose but that can be fixed and the 40 megapixel sensor down sampling to 10
megapixel photos still turns out plenty details. I feel like I can still identify
Huawei color science though onsite because especially with the Red sit's a
little bit behind the rest, compare it like this shot for example with the skin
tones on the pixel versus the p30 Pro it consistently has this sort of magenta
cast on skin that's actually hard to edit out, so with that in mind if we're
talking about overall image quality the p30 Pro still not quite the best and
we've had this conversation plenty of times.
Now this the new best smartphone
camera in a lot of ways it is but in some ways it isn't turns out the best
smartphone camera is a little more nuanced than that there is more than one
best smartphone camera and that's not a cop-out. That's just true if you just want
the absolute best image quality and nothing else then the best smartphone camera
that person is the pixel 3 it still is it has the best color science especially
and on there's dynamic range and detail and white balance but that's in an
ageing phone that's starting to get kind of slow and also not multiple cameras
so if you take a lot of low-light shots and you want the best fastest low-light
camera. The best smartphone camera for that person is the p30 Pro, if you want
the most versatile smartphone camera the best smartphone camera is the p30 Pro
but if you want the best video camera in any smartphone the best smartphone
camera is the iPhone 10s .
So you got to know what you want in a smartphone camera that'll
determine what's the best for you. P30 Pro is awesome, it's probably the best
right now for most people but if you happen to be someone who wants to take a
lot of video that's an area where this falls short date/time photography you're
gonna get better image quality out of the pixel camera so those things are
worth knowing about and that whole summary kind of works for the p30 pro. As a whole
phone - you got to know what you want if you want a phone that has an amazing
battery life and then checks pretty much all the boxes, you don't worry too
much about speaker quality this is an awesome phone if you want a great fast camera
you take a lot of low-light shots like a lot of people do this is gonna be
really impressive but yeah that's what you got in out this is a great phone. So
if you're cool with buying a huawei phone in 2019 with that huge asterisk and
you know about it then uh is a great step.
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