The Huawei P30, P30 Pro and P30 lite are Android smartphones manufactured by Huawei. Unveiled on 26 March 2019, they succeed the Huawei P20 in the company's P series line.
Specifications
Hardware
Their designs are similar to those of the P20. The P30 Pro has a curved screen, and replaces the traditional earpiece speaker with an "electromagnetic levitation" speaker that vibrates the top of the phone's screen, enabling a narrower bezel. The P30 has IP53 water and dustproofing, while the P30 Pro has IP68, but does not include a headphone jack. Both models utilise the Kirin 980 system-on-chip. The devices feature an in-screen optical fingerprint reader, stated to have improved performance over that of the Mate 20 Pro. In September 2019, Huawei unveiled new "Mystic Blue" and "Misty Lavender" color finishes for the P30 Pro, which carry a two-tone appearance using matte and glossy finishes. In May 2020, Huawei announced new 256 GB "New Edition" P30 Pro models for Germany, including a new silver color scheme.
Camera
The P30 Pro features three rear-facing camera lenses with Leica optics, including a 40-megapixel lens, 20-megapixel ultra-wide angle lens, an 8-megapixel "periscope" lens with 5x optical zoom. The optical zoom can be combined with software-assisted digital zoom of up to 50x. The P30 Pro also includes a time-of-flight sensor. The base P30 model excludes the periscope lens, reduces the ultra-wide angle lens to 16-megapixels, and does not include optical image stabilization.The 40-megapixel lens on both models use a new "SuperSpectrum" image sensor, whose color filter array uses yellow sub-pixels instead of green. Huawei stated that this would allow more light to be captured, and enhanced absorption of red and green colors. This sensor is leveraged by improvements to the camera software's night mode, as well as new "Super HDR" and "Super Low Light" capture modes.
Software
The P30 line ships with Android 9.0 "Pie", with Huawei's EMUI 9.1 software suite. Huawei unveiled an Android 10-based EMUI 10 in August 2019, with the P30 among the first to receive it in a beta program. The Mystic Blue and Misty Lavender P30 models come pre-loaded with Android 10. Although released after trade sanctions were introduced against Huawei by the United States, these "new" models continue to still include Google-licensed Android.
Reception
Vlad Savov of The Verge felt that the P30 Pro was comparable to the Samsung Galaxy S10 in terms of hardware specifications, but that Huawei was an "unrivaled champ" in camera quality. Its cameras were shown to have better low-light performance at its default settings than the Pixel 3's "Night Sight" mode, and that even with a slight reduction in sharpness past 10x, there was very little degradation in the quality of zoomed images with its periscope lens, producing a usable image even at 32x zoom. However, although not as aggressive as the P20 Pro, he still felt that Huawei's automatic processing was "too aggressive with its mix of grain-suppressing blur and additive sharpening", and that the Pixel 3 had more accurate white balance. Savov felt that the P30 Pro had good Bluetooth and Wi-Fi performance, "heroically long" battery life, and that the "magnetic levitation" earpiece worked "shockingly well". However, its display was considered to be inferior in quality to the S10, the in-display fingerprint reader was not as fast as the P20, and that Huawei's default user interface was "more frustrating and nagging than helpful". In a review of the standard P30, Pocket-lint noted that its overall size was more in line with the previous year's P20 Pro, and that it still included a headphone jack and most of the P30 Pro's new hardware. However, the camera was considered to have downgraded quality over the P30 Pro, and its battery life was not as good due to its smaller capacity. It was allegedly discovered that a new mode intended to enhance photos of the Moon on the P30, merely composes existing imagery of the Moon into the photo to enhance its appearance.
