Three years ago, I would probably have laughed at you if you told me that HiSilicon was going to be shipping mobile processors
that were competitive with the best CPUs from Qualcomm, Apple, and Samsung.
And yet, here we are.
Now to be clear, the Kirin 980, and by extension, the Huawei P30 Pro, is not industry-leading across the board,
falling well behind, well, everyone, when it comes to gaming, thanks to its Mali-G76 MP10 GPU.
But, the thing is, it's also not an also-ran, which means that I can no longer safely ignore Huawei's flagship phones as overpriced and underpowered.
So, the P30 Pro has spent the last three weeks in my pocket, and I definitely have some thoughts to share about it.
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If I had to describe its look, I'd say the P30 Pro is slick.
Both in terms of its clean, curvy industrial design, and its finish, which is one of the most slippery that I have ever held.
I've actually only encountered a handful of phones that I'm afraid to hold against my ear with my shoulder for fear that they will slip out.
But...
This is definitely one of them.
I actually even ended up switching to on-screen buttons rather than gesture control, so that I could hold it just a little bit higher and hold on to it better.
So, a grippy case or a textured dbrand skin is strongly recommended for this one.
Other than that, though, my main complaints are really audio-related.
The P30 Pro lacks a 3.5mm caveman jack, which I am still not over.
And, probably more importantly for most people, it's got a pretty crummy speaker setup.
Now, the earpiece speaker is handled similarly to LG's G8, with the top portion of the screen actually vibrating against your ear in order to produce sound.
Now, this has the benefit of making it easier to hear your phone in a crowd, and it takes some of the guesswork out of where you need to position it against your ear.
The issue is that it also comes with some drawbacks.
Now, LG decided to enable their screen speaker as a second speaker to boost output and create a stereo...
...listening effect, but we actually complained that it made the phone noticeably vibrate.
So, I'm pleased to say that Huawei left that feature out.
But, that means that the P30 Pro relies solely on its bottom-firing speaker for Netflix binging and other content consumption.
And, frankly, it's just not very good.
It's loud enough, but I found it harsh sounding and just not competitive with other flagships.
Back to positives, though.
The lock button is pretty good.
It is positioned such that I could reach both it and the in-screen fingerprint sensor comfortably without shifting my hand.
That was one of my major annoyances with the Galaxy S10+.
The volume rocker has no opposing buttons to accidentally mash.
The SIM tray can accept both a second SIM or Huawei's nano-memory card, and...
Is that an IR blaster?
It is!
AV and home automation fans rejoice!
Honestly, as positive as all that is, though, it wasn't until I started goofing around with the...
...camera that I really considered switching to the P30 Pro as my daily driver.
Now, there are gonna be other people that are gonna cover its merit as an artsy photography phone.
But, there are some killer features for normies like me as well, with the headline one being, of course, the hybrid...
...50x zoom that uses a combination of the 40 megapixel main shooter and the 8 megapixel 5x optical zoom lens...
...that uses a novel...
...periscope technique to bounce incoming light off of an angled mirror and then reflect it at the sensor that's 90 degrees offset.
Now, obviously, 50x zoom is hand-wavy, enhance nonsense.
I mean, you can't just enhance past the data that you've collected, but their software hybrid zoom technique...
...assisted by the optical image stabilization on both of those sensors actually worked far better than I expected.
Yielding usable images at anywhere from 25x to 35x zoom, as long as you've got a steady hand or something to rest the phone against, because that is truly a lot of zoom.
It's darn impressive, though.
The other big star of the show is the new RYYB yellow sub-pixel configuration of the main sensor that allows it to collect an advertised 40% more light,
helping the P30 capture some truly game-changing images under...
...very dark conditions.
So that's really, really cool stuff.
It's just that, unfortunately, it didn't work out quite as well for me as I hoped.
For one thing, you need to understand that phone camera lenses are not the same as real camera lenses.
You're not just changing out the glass on a modular mount like on a DSLR.
So, on the P30 Pro, each of those three lenses is actually a completely separate camera.
So, if you...
...like me, were imagining, then, that you could get amazing, stable video of your kid's poorly-lit performance from the back of the gymnasium,
think again.
The telephoto lens, aside from capturing at a lower 8-megapixel resolution,
has a conventional sensor behind it with a completely different image processing pipeline.
And that's never more clear than when you switch cameras in the middle of a recording and watch the colors go all wonky for a second.
With that said, that is a pretty cool thing.
That's a pretty cool feature, being able to switch like that.
On that note, though, that's about the only cool thing that I could find about video recording on the P30 Pro.
It's pretty disappointing overall, with very poor processing of its rolling shutter effect.
Watch the way my head stretches here.
And occasionally, really low audio levels that annoyed pretty much everyone who's viewed my YouTube stories over the last few weeks.
So, in summary, the camera's fine.
It's more than fine.
It's the best that I've ever used from a Chinese cell phone company.
And this comparison, in particular, makes the Note 9 look decidedly last-gen.
But, let's be realistic.
It's not godly.
And when you're running around snapping pics of your daily life,
even its fancy yellow pixels and multiple exposures are not going to be able to combat squirmy children,
and its occasional complete ball drop, like the yellow cast on this shot and this spectacular autofocus fail,
are going to come up now and again.
Fortunately, the P30 Pro, which is the most powerful camera in the world, is capable of doing that.
The P30 Pro is not a one-trick pony.
It's got a lot more going for it than just the cameras.
Now, two of my biggest complaints about the S10 Plus were its exit-wound-style display notch
and its slower, less-accurate, ultrasonic fingerprint scanner.
And Huawei, while falling well short of Samsung's outstanding brightness and color reproduction,
not to mention higher resolution, has done a better job, IMO, of the display's layout,
thanks to their minimalistic, symmetrical notch, and, of course, the high-resolution display.
Thanks to their minimalistic, symmetrical notch, and, of course, the high-resolution display.
And slightly wider side bezels that reduce accidental activations.
Now, I was also initially very pleased to see that they opted for an optical in-screen fingerprint sensor.
It's fast, and I had no issues with it during my time with the device.
But Samsung also issued a patch for their ultrasonic sensor,
I think about a week ago, as of filming this right now,
and it's way better behaved now, much faster, even when my fingers are really dry.
What Samsung still hasn't managed to address for me, though,
is their signature random battery drain.
And that is where Huawei blows away anything in their lineup.
The last time I had a phone that lasted me two full days this consistently,
I'm not even sure if it had a color screen.
Even with the fairly basic always-on-display enabled,
you could have convinced me that this phone had maybe a 6,000
rather than 4,200 milliamp-hour battery.
It's that impressive.
But this positive note also happens to be a perfect segue
into some of the negative things about the P30 Pro's software.
One of the ways that Huawei manages such excellent battery life
is EMUI's hyper-aggressive background app suppression.
And while I definitely appreciate the benefits,
I do find their approach a little bit over the top,
and I want more control.
So first things first,
there's this ridiculous card notification
that I can't swipe away.
Why is that there?
Then there's the constant,
constant reminders that like,
oh, I don't know, Sonos is running in the background.
That's fine, Huawei.
I use my speakers.
It's okay.
And then there's the fact
that it puts instant messaging apps,
instant, that's the key,
like Google Hangouts to sleep without my permission.
And before you ask,
yes, per Huawei's instructions,
I disabled that behavior,
but it kept doing it anyway.
So occasionally, I just won't get my notifications
until I open the app,
and that's just not acceptable.
And while we're at it,
neither are non-removable bloatware apps in the year 2019.
Also, since I'm on a roll here,
please let me pull down the notification shade
while the phone is locked
and add a double-press gesture
that works system-wide to quick launch the camera.
While the phone's off,
I can double-press volume down to launch it,
but while it's not,
that just goes down two volume clicks.
Like, okay.
To be clear,
the software is mostly fine.
At least putting my carrier SIM in didn't wipe the phone
like Samsung's craptastic implementation.
This SMS app has a cool copy text feature for 2FA.
That's nice.
It's just that,
overall, I found myself more annoyed by it than not,
which just isn't good enough
now that iOS, Samsung One,
and Google's stock experience are just so polished
and do such a great job of staying out of the way.
And making matters much worse on the software side,
actually, XDA has gone as far
as to include a disclaimer about this
in every article that mentions Huawei or Honor.
And so, I feel like I should probably raise my pitchfork
alongside them.
Due to a recent policy change,
it is no longer possible to unlock the bootloader
on Huawei devices,
which means, for better or for worse,
you are stuck with EMUI and the feature and security updates
that Huawei decides to provide.
There will be no extending the life of your phone
with lineage OS or something similar down the line,
and that's a real bummer,
and it's something that I'd like to see them fix.
It's already lame enough that Android fans have to accept
the, at best, two to three years of support
compared to Apple's four to five.
If you take away rooting,
you're basically saying,
yep, this thing's going in the landfill.
Deal with it.
And that's just not cool.
So, summary then.
I'm really impressed with this thing.
I'm gonna be continuing my policy
of not ignoring Huawei devices anymore,
but I'm also pretty jazzed to go back to my Note 9
because, quite frankly, display notches
and long live the headphone jack.
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