Huawei Mate 30 Pro Flagship Hands-On: Incredible Phone Without Android

Huawei Mate 30 Pro is the latest high-end flagship of Huawei. Due to the U.S ban, this flagship does not support Google services and apps. So could it still win customers? Let's take a quick look at Huawei Mate 30 Pro to see whether it's worth purchasing

Waterfall-Screen Design

Huawei has greatly upgraded its Huawei Mate 30 Pro in design compared to its predecessor Huawei Mate 20 Pro. Accordingly, there is no square camera module anymore, but a circular camera setup surrounded by a special layer of glass that looks quite fancy.

The back of the Huawei Mate 30 Pro is quite sleek but roughened to limit the grip of sweat and fingerprints. Huawei has reduced the gradient effect compared to what it used on the Mate 20 Pro.

The Huawei Mate 30 Pro comes in Space Silver, Cosmic Purple, Black, and Emerald Green colors. In addition, there is also a special version with the leather back. All of these versions support IP68 water resistance.

Overall, the Mate 30 Pro offers similar grip feeing as the previous Huawei flagships. But users still can distinguish this device from the previous generation thanks to some changes in design like the waterfall screen.

Basically, the waterfall screen on Huawei Mate 30 Pro has two sides that are beautifully curved. The curvature is similar to Samsung's flagship but even more impressive.

The top of the device has an infrared port, a recording mic, and two antenna bands.

When putting the smartphone face down, we can still see the curved edge on the Huawei Mate 30 Pro.

Because of using the waterfall screen, when you want to turn the volume up or down, you will need to slide your finger up and down the side of the phone to adjust, and just double-click on the two sides, the volume adjustment bar will display. It is sometime quite inconvenient as you have to click on the correct location for this volume control bar to appear.

The Mate 30 Pro still has a fair big notch as it houses an infrared sensor for face locking feature, but it's still more compact than the one on the Mate 20 Pro.

The device still has an in-display fingerprint sensor and Huawei says it has the highest security standard on the market today.

Strong performance

This is the first smartphone to be equipped with a new Kirin 990 chipset coupled with a 5G modem.

When compared to the Kirin 980, Huawei said that the Kirin 990 has a 23% increase in CPU performance, a 39% increase in GPU and an increase of 460% in AI, but is more energy efficient.

The support for the 5G network will create an interesting competition between Samsung and Huawei, while Apple has not integrated 5G connectivity on the iPhone 11 series.

The device responds very quickly and smoothly. Huawei uses a 4,500 mAh battery on the Mate 30 Pro, which is higher than the 4,200 mAh battery on the Mate 20 Pro and P30 Pro.

Although fast charging technology has not been upgraded compared to its predecessor, the 45W fast charging is still impressive (users can charge from 0% -70% within 30 minutes).

Camera setup does not have periscope lens

The Mate 30 Pro does not support periscope lens like the Huawei P30 Pro. In addition, instead of 5x optical zoom, the phone comes with 3X optical zoom and 30X hybrid zoom. They are more than enough for the needs of most people.

The Mate 30 Pro is also using the large RYYB sensor to capture more light than the traditional RGB sensor. This device has all 4 cameras including a 40Mp f/1.6 sensor with OIS, a 40MP f/1.8 ultra wide angel sensor, an 8MP sensor with an aperture of f/2.4 with OIS and a 3D depth sensor.

The greatest strength of this camera setup is probably the flexibility, the ability to capture images in low light environment and professional bokeh effect. And the most notable feature on the Mate 30 Pro is the ability to record videos at super slow motion of only 7,680fps.

In addition, this device can also record 4k60fps with extremely high ISO of 51,200.

The front camera module has the ability to respond quickly, tracking the user's face movement, such as automatically turning off the screen auto-rotate feature when detecting users lying down.

No support for Google apps and services

Huawei Mate 30 Pro was the first device to debut after a US ban issued by President Donald Trump. Huawei had to release a smartphone that does not come with Google pre-installed apps like Gmail, Google Maps, Youtube and the Play Store.

The lack of Google's apps makes the Mate 30 Pro's EMUI interface look rather empty.