Huawei Mate 30 Pro

Recently, in September 2019, Huawei launched yet another one of its flagship smartphones – the Huawei Mate 30 Pro. The phone boasts of an impressive design, top-notch cameras, robust processor, and fantastic battery life. Unfortunately, it is the victim of a sad situation – Huawei’s trade blacklisting by the USA, that prevents it from getting any access to Google Play Services. Huawei Mate 30 Pro sports a 6.53-inch OLED display with a resolution of 1176×2400 pixels. It boasts of beautiful glass and metal design, an immersive display, excellent Leica camera hardware, and super-fast charging with reverse charging feature. 

Huawei Mate 30 Pro Price in India

In India, the Huawei Mate 30 Pro was launched around over a lakh rupees but it is currently available to purchase via Amazon India for just Rs.63,000. It comes in six colour variants – Black, Space Silver, Emerald Green, Cosmic Purple, Vegan Forest Green, and Vegan Orange colours.

When it comes to the design, the Huawei Mate 30 Pro has two striking features. First is the large waterfall display, that Huawei terms as ‘Horizon Display.’ The display is curved from two sides, leaving no scope for side bezels. However, there is a wide notch at the top of the screen that houses the selfie cam along with a few other sensors. Second is the circular camera disk on the rear panel. The circular disk houses four cameras encompassed beautifully by a matte chrome-like casing. As for the flash, it has been shifted to the left side of the back panel, just beside the camera module. 

The Mate 30 Pro has Gorilla Glass 6 coating for both the front and the rear panels, which imparts a super glossy look to it. Needless to say, it is a fingerprint magnet (despite Huawei’s claims of having a fingerprint resistance). However, the good thing is that the phone does have an IP68 rating for water and dust resistance. This is true even of the leather versions. The phone doesn’t exactly have a lot of buttons. The only button you’ll see is the power button located on the right side of the frame. There’s no volume rocker (yes, that’s right!). So, if you wish to adjust the volume, you will have to double-tap on the top left or right edge of the display, and then slide the bar up or down. As usual, this makes it quite troublesome to control the volume when the screen is off.

At the bottom, you’ll find a USB Type-C port, a speaker grille, and the dual-SIM tray. There’s no headphone jack anywhere! This makes us wonder what was Huawei thinking about doing away with the volume rocker and headphone jack. 

Overall, the phone is on the heavier side. It weighs about 198g, which is quite bulky, but then again, you have to remember that it is all glass and metal. So, it is bound to be heavy.

The 6.53-inch OLED curved screen has an excellent resolution and the perfect balance of sharpness and colour. It has a 94.1% screen-to-body ratio and an 18.5:9 aspect ratio. While the resolution of 1176×2400 isn’t anywhere near to that of flagships phones like the Samsung Galaxy S10 and OnePlus 7 Pro, it is pretty decent. The colours pop beautifully, and the texts, images, and icons look sharp and vivid. Another noteworthy aspect of the Mate 30 Pro is its always-on display.

As for the notch on top and the curved edges, both can be hidden with slim black bars that are next to invisible, all thanks to the fantastic deep inky feature of the OLED screen. The phone offers decent viewing angles. However, the curved edges create somewhat of a vignette effect, which is kinda cool.

Performance is where the Huawei Mate 30 Pro wins. The combination of Kirin 990 7nm chipset with 8GB RAM ensures that the phone delivers a stellar performance, particularly when it comes to gaming. Huawei’s upgraded EMUI offers an assortment of in-game options to create the perfect gaming experience. It even converts the corners of the screen into L and R buttons that appear in the top left and right of the curved display (in landscape orientation). They are highly responsive and are also remappable. The curved edge-to-edge display makes the overall viewing and gaming experience one-of-a-kind. 

The ample 8GB/256GB of storage is enough for the phone to handle routine tasks and multitasking with ease. You will never experience any glitch whatsoever. The phone runs on EMUI 10, and it is an utter disappointment that Google Play Services is missing here. This brings the users at a huge disadvantage – it feels like you cannot use the phone to its optimal best.

While the UI core feels similar to the P30 Pro, Huawei has made certain welcome additions and tweaks to make the UI cleaner than before. As for the phone’s biometrics, everything works smoothly. Both the under-display fingerprint scanner and 3D face-unlocking are highly secure and reliable.

The Mate 30 Pro’s camera arrangement comprises of a 40MP wide camera with an aperture of f/1.6, equipped with optical image stabilization (OIS), a secondary 40MP ultra-wide camera with an aperture of f/1.6, an 8MP telephoto camera with 3x zoom and an f/2.4 aperture, and a 3D depth sensor. The telephoto camera, too, has OIS. As for the front cam, you get a 32MP camera.

Images captured in auto mode across cameras are packed with details. The colour reproduction is fantastic, the dynamic range is on point, and the focus is accurate. Although sometimes the contrast and saturation may seem to be a bit boosted, you can balance it out by turning off AI scene-detection. The ultra-wide-angle camera can capture tons of detail at a praiseworthy dynamic range. What’s more, the ultra-wide camera has autofocus. So, it is capable of locking-on for macro shots as well. When accurately focused, the images come out looking stunning with an adequate amount of background blur.

The front camera does a wonderful job of capturing vivid selfies with an ample amount of detail. The photos look great in well-lit conditions. However, it does lack autofocus and 4K capture. It can record videos at 1080p 30fps.

The camera can shoot 4K videos at up to 60fps. The great thing about video recording is that the OIS across the wide and telephoto lenses is balanced beautifully. Although ‘cine-camera’ doesn’t match with the likes of the Mate 20 Pro or Galaxy Note 10, it does a decent job and handles noise pretty well too. Overall, the video quality is highly impressive for most lighting conditions. 

For those who love to make slo-mo videos, there’s also a 7680fps slow-motion capture at 720p. Once you get the hang of this, it can be an excellent trick to shoot some cool slo-mo shots.

The Huawei Mate 30 Pro comes with a 4,500mAh battery, and it just might be one of the best smartphones today from the viewpoint of battery mileage. It has tons of power-saving features like the Power Saving Mode, Ultra Power Saving Mode, and App Launch, to name a few. On a single charge, the phone can last you over a day for light usage. As for hardcore gaming, you have the option to toggle on and off the Performance Mode for times when you have some battery capacity to spare and want maximum gaming performance. 

Then, there’s super-fast wireless charging up to 27W, which is much higher than Apple’s iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro (both max out at 18W). The 40W SuperCharge tech can power up the phone in under 15 mins! Plus, there’s a reverse charging feature, as well.

Huawei Mate 30 Pro is jam-packed with some powerful features. It has top-notch looks, excellent cameras, massive battery life and mileage, and a powerful processor at its core. However, for the likes of us who cannot do without the perks of Google Play Services, the phone is a huge letdown. It is almost like the forbidden fruit – you want to have it, but purchasing it makes no sense to buyers outside of China.