A look at the Huawei P30 and P30 Pro

Its surprising how quickly Huawei has made its rise to power in the smartphone market even going as far as to surpass Apple as the second most successful company in 2018.

If you’ve used some of their premium phones (not the Y7 and its group) you’ll understand why this is so. The Mate 20 released last year was a beast in a phone and was satisfying to use. This year, Huawei has unveiled its successor to rival the Samsung Galaxy S10 and its the P30 Pro.

Huawei has always had some form of biannual releases which are the Mate series and the P series besides the other budget phones. This means they have a competitor to deal with the release of the Samsung Galaxy series and the another to compete when Google’s Pixel and Apple’s iPhone are released.

It’s a good strategy because the can work on the faults of the P series and also better technology would be available as the year is rounding up. This made last year’s Mate 20 Pro a real contender to deal with and considering the fact that they sold 10 million handsets of them in 5 months, it is pretty safe to call it a success.

Unveiled on the 26th of March, The Huawei P30 and P30 Pro are the latest to directly compete with the widely successful Galaxy S10. If you look at the spec sheet, you would realize they are in line too. They basically check all the boxes the Galaxy S10 checks but in terms of design, the Galaxy S10 goes for a hole punch whiles the P30’s go for the traditional teardrop notch. The only other difference might be the higher storage offered on the S10 and the camera setup.

However, the two premium phones are as similar as they are different. The P30 and P30 Pro are very similar looking with the majority of the features being the same. Both devices have the same Kirin 980 Processor (Huawei’s own Processor) and have the same design with the P30 Pro having a curved display while the P30 is flat. Both have an optical in-display fingerprint sensor and the same 32-megapixel camera. In terms of software, they both run the same EMUI experience.

The difference between them is what sets them $200 apart and that can be summed into wireless charging, headphone jack and cameras.

As for the headphone jack, its a matter of self-preference and with the emergence of wireless earpieces such as the airpods and the Galaxy buds, it’s getting tough to justify its use. Wireless charging is becoming an integral part of our lives(well maybe not Ghana) and its convenient to use.

Again this comes to personal use, if you’ve spent over 50 dollars in a 3rd party wireless charger it’ll be hard to justify the switching to a phone that doesn’t support wireless charging. The time of flight sensor is the difference between the two in the camera department. The time of flight sensor is a depth sensor that enhances portrait mode.

Talking about cameras, the night mode of the P30 is simply mind-blowing.

Despite having to hold the phone for 6 seconds before the shot is taken, the results are stunning even in pitch darkness. Last year’s P20 had a great night mode but this feature has been taken to another level. The P30 also has a periscope built in which offers 5x lossless zoom( the image wouldn’t lose detail between the 1x and 5x) and up to 50x digital zoom.

It also has an ultra-wide camera for the nature shots and a normal camera sensor but there are some differences with these as well. The P30’s triple camera system is made up of a 40-megapixel main sensor with an f/1.8 aperture, a 16-megapixel ultra-wide sensor with an f/2.2 aperture and an 8-megapixel zoom sensor with an f/2.4 aperture.

The P30 Pro has a 40-megapixel main sensor with an f/1.6 aperture, a 20-megapixel ultra-wide sensor with an f/2.2 aperture and an 8-megapixel zoom sensor with an f/2.4 aperture. A pixel overload for this phone it seems.

The new phone signify Huawei’s ambition to dominate the smartphone market in the coming years. The P30 starts at £699 (GHS 4055) for the 6GB/128GB version whiles the P30 Pro starts at P30: From From £899 (GHS 5216) for the 8GB/128Gb version.