Huawei P30 Pro Review: Optical Excellence! By Marques Brownlee

Hey, what is up guys, I'm Kim BHD here, okay, pausing on all the Galaxy fold hype for just a second. This is the Huawei P 30 Pro. This is the phone I've been using for weeks, leading up to all the galaxy fold stuff and might as well keep using after it. This is the phone that you've either never heard of or you've heard all about it and are probably wondering if these cameras are worth the hype. I have to say the P30 Pro is the best phone not sold in the US. That's just facts and that's of course, going to hurt its popularity here, but if you're going to get one which you still can, you should know all about the rest of it too I mean what people are really here for? Is the camera, and we'll get to that, but the rest of the phones, pretty damn good too.

So the easiest way to think about this phone is its an upgraded design of the p20 Pro, but with all the best features of the mate 20 Pro, so aesthetically you can tell Huawei definitely knows they struck gold with this unique, triple color gradient, look I'd bet money that was their number one seller of the p20 Pro, because now all of them have this look. So there's a red gradient one. This pearly white gradient when I have seen on videos- and then this one here is my personal favorite, a sort of green to blue to purple aurora, starburst kind of thing Ryan's me actually of one of those classic windows. Wallpapers. Remember this one with the fish! Just me: okay, but yet no, it stands out.

If you're about that psychedelic look! This is the one for you. If not, you can easily go full Matt black everything with a skin from our channel sponsored a brand. So if you'd like to keep it low-key, like that I'll drop, a link to those below so Huawei, like I've mentioned, has sort of taken after Samsung a little with their aesthetic, but they've. Also carved out some things that are their own, some of them for the better, some of them not so much so the psychedelic a triple color thing, sure! That's all you want on the top and bottom they own that the shape of the camera bump they sort of own that too. But it's pretty huge.

This thing, legit wobbles, on a table to the point where it's actually note possible. That could bother some people, the speaker down here at the bottom. It's consistent with other phones, and it's decently loud, but doesn't sound great, and it's disappointingly really easy to accidentally block with a single finger and there's no earpiece speaker to balance that out and then the whole button situation is kind of interesting. So, first the power and volume rocker are on the same side kind of wish they weren't. While what keeps doing this, but I wish the volume rocker was on the other side, which is just blank and then on most phones, a Doubleday of the power button.

Is your camera shortcut on this phone dope tapping the power button doesn't do that it just sleeps and wakes really fast. It's actually double pressing the volume down button which gets you into the camera unless you're on the home screen, in which case double pressing volume down just lowers your volume. So there's no camera shortcut, then holding down the power button isn't for shutting down that'll, get you to Google assistant so that accented power button has a long press. It sort of doubles as a voice assistant trigger and then power and volume down is still a screenshot, power and volume upstarts to screen, recording and then to turn the phone off entirely. You have to hold down the power button, don't say anything to Google assistant and then keep waiting for another 2 or 3 seconds to get the shutdown menu that pops up over Google Assistant.

So it's just a little of a taste of the finicky nests of this phone, but that's just the Huawei way. It's the well the Huawei way. Hardware-Wise, though, if you like a phone that does check a lot of boxes, this one does it. You got your premium, build quality, there's ip68 water resistance, there's expandable storage, your high-end specs, it's all there. It also has the earpiece speaker behind the glass.

So this whole top third of the phone is the earpiece, and it even tells you where to put up your ear to listen to it, and it doesn't buzz at all like LG's did so. It sounds great. It doesn't double as a second front facing speaker, though I think some people would trade it for a real speaker so that you didn't have such an easily mutable source of audio. But hey, that's the Huawei way, but you know what else is behind the glass. Is that fingerprint reader it's decent at best, I found it fine, it's optical.

So it's another one of those first-generation fingerprint readers that works about as well as any other like the one in the OnePlus 60 I actually found it to be faster than the ultrasonic one in the Galaxy S ten, but I. Think a lot of the optical ones are what I do like is that it's smart about showing you where the reader is as soon as you pick up the phone? You can quickly unlock it while the screen is off- and it's pretty good about that, but it still has to shine that annoyingly bright light. So in screen, fingerprint readers are still in the early stages of actually getting good anyway. The display is a good one too. It's very bright and very high resolution looks great for videos and games.

It's not the brightest, but it is definitely viewable. Outdoors I might be starting to get over the sort of bleeding over the edge thing that they've done with this phone and Samsung has done a little I'm kind of torn on it because they get a little extra glare on the sides, but it still looks really cool, but it definitely hasn't been anywhere near stopping me from using the phone and liking it I. Just think I actually wouldn't mind if it was flat. The screen is so nice anyway and then sadly, no headphone jack in this phone, our IP, sorry headphone jack fans. The p30 does have one that P30 Pro does not same thing as last year.

That's about the only box. This phone doesn't check that, along with stereo speakers, and the performance is all around excellent, so it's super responsive and fast, and thanks to the Karin 980 and eight gigs of ram I've had no slowdowns or any questionable lag or anything with the P30 Pro, which is awesome. It's one of my favorite things about this phone, and it actually goes hand-in-hand with the incredible battery life. I didn't even mention the battery life. This 4200 William hour cell is the new undisputed heavyweight champ for battery and smartphones period.

I mean I'm ending days with 4045 percent left I'm, getting seven plus hours of screen on time on heavy days. I, don't even worry about when I charged any more I just plug it in whenever I feel like it. This is the champ. This is what you want. You want to never have to worry about the battery when you're using your phone.

If you're a heavy user or someone who travels a lot, that's awesome for the peace of mind and honestly, if you're a light user. This is a 2-day phone comfortably for real two full days of use. A lot of people have mentioned. Huawei's phones are notoriously very aggressive, with killing background apps to extend battery, which is pretty true, but I feel like they can get away with it in my case, because it reopens apps so fast, so I give a big thumbs up here to performance and to battery life. So the big dark rose for me right now with Huawei phones, and it always has been, is their software.

So this guy's running there emu eye skin on top of android pi, just some people, like it, some people don't, and I'm in that second camp, but there's a ton of great features: I love the dark mode. So if you go under battery settings, there's toggle to darken interface colors, and it permeates throughout the whole OS. So it's easy on the eyes. Dark mode is basically everywhere. I also like that in any app you can swipe across the navigation bar to enter one handed mode, and this is a gesture that you can do with one hand, and it makes it easier to type or just scroll or reach things in the corners.

It's kind of like apples, reach ability, but I think a better, easier gesture, but there's also things I, just don't like so the Settings app is still a clutter. It's hard to navigate, and I wish they'd organize it a little better or clean it up. Then there's all the Huawei bloat, there's pre-installed apps, when I'm pinching to zoom it triggers Huawei's high-touch a service that I just don't ever want to use. So you got a disabled things like that. Another thing, if you have multiple notifications in most other versions of Android I'm used to you, can expand the notification to open one instance of it or tap the whole notification group to open that app.

But on this phone you can't do that tap to just open the app. So it expands them every time requiring an extra tap for me to open that annoyed me and on small details like zooming in with the camera. App strangely takes two hands because of where they put the zoom slider at the bottom, when pretty much, every other phone is put careful attention into making sure I can zoom with one hand, then there's just always been this constant, weird bug where sometimes I press the home button to go home, and it just doesn't go home. It doesn't respond. I think that's like a pretty basic thing.

It should be able to do every time. This happens every day, multiple times per day. For me, it's hard for me to get on board with that. So this one is propped up and held back by the software at the same time as it's, definitely not that they don't have enough features or customization, there's plenty, it's just that it feels like the user experience, isn't the main focus when designing all this stuff, like Samsung, had the same problem. They redesigned all their stuff.

One UI is now pretty great, so I'd say wow way is due for that same update. So all that brings us to the main head turning feature. The reason you're all here. The reason you may have heard about this phone in the first place and that's these cameras. There are four sensors on the back, but really three cameras, the main sensor, the ultra-wide, the periscope zoom and then there's a fourth time of flight sensor that helps with depth measurement.

So the two main features that are really catching eyes about the p30 pros cameras and rightfully so, are the zoom range and the low-light performance. So the zoom range, I kind of feel is super borderline between useful feature and gimmick. So the periscope zoom, which actually has a fascinating physical structure, as shown by the jury-rigged everything teardown. It will do a 5x optical zoom, and then you can keep going to 10x, which will sharpen and use AI and combining with the main sensor to try to be lossless. But I found it's already starting to get softer, and then you can keep going 20, X, 30, X, 40, X.

All the way up to 50 times, which is kind of ridiculous, where most smartphones will go, maybe 8 X, 2, 10, X zoom tops so like. Yes, it does actually work, and it has generally pretty impressive results. But most of the time do people really actually zoom in that much like here's. How far 50 times really? Is its absurd, like how many photos do you really take like that? Are you a spy? Is this really super creep mode? It's funny. There was so much attention on it that I actually found myself like knowing I.

Had this feature taking tons of zoomed in photos much more often than I usually do, even though I've had a telephoto camera in smartphones before, but I think I, topped out at around 10x zoom before it stopped being crisp and useful and started being soft and gimmicky still funny, though I definitely found that the ultra-wide was way more useful for when you're close to large subjects, or you want to change up the perspective a bit or do a bigger landscape shot. It does a great job of minimizing than getting and Distortion I use. This more often than I actually ever went past 10x zoom, but then the night mode, the night mode, is the real game-changer here, which was way more useful and impressive to me. So go into any dark environment, first, go out at night or in a dark room or a dimly lit and being a restaurant. Anything like that, the viewfinder right off the bat is showing more than most, and then you snap the photo and let it process for a quick second and boom.

It's showing the scene with way more light than real life, usually showing more than the actual human eye is seeing. So I did a couple: comparisons myself with the iPhone 10s, which doesn't have a night mode versus the pixel threes night sight, which has been pretty much class-leading by a long shot up until this month and then versus the P30 Pro, literally in auto mode, and the results were absolutely sick. So the BYB, debater and image processing are clearly making a huge difference here. Images from the P30 Pro in literally basically pitch-black, look like you're shining, a light into your scene. It's wild, and it's actually kind of addicting and fun to play with the only downside, is the fact that it does this in auto mode.

All the time, which means sometimes you're dimly lit bar shots will actually look too bright. You know it's funny during Huawei's presentation of this phone. They showed pretty much exclusively like nighttime and low-light shots, especially when comparing to the competition to the point where they pretty much didn't even talk about daylight photography at all, not that they're bad in daylight. Of course, the May 20 Pro just won the blind smartphone camera test, but it's just kind of funny they're, so dialed in with low light that they almost don't even talk about daylight stuff, but I think that's actually a pretty good idea. That's where most people take a lot of photos, I will say daytime photos from the P30 Pro fell in line with what we saw from the mate 20 Pro they're, coming down from their hyper over-processed sharpened land into a more toned-down, realistic, look for sure it still loves to overexpose, but that can be fixed and the 40 megapixel sensor down sampling to 10 megapixel photos still turns out plenty details, I feel like I can still identify Huawei color science, though on site, because especially with the Reds, it's a little behind the rest.

Compare it like this shot, for example, with the skin tones on the pixel versus the P30 Pro. It consistently has this sort of magenta cast on skin, that's actually hard to edit out. So with that in mind, if we're talking about overall image quality, the P30 Pro still not quite the best, and we've had this conversation plenty of times now. Oh, is this the new best smartphone camera in a lot of ways it is, but in some ways it is n't turning out the best smartphone camera is a little more nuanced than that. There is more than one best smartphone camera and that's not a cop-out.

That's just true. If you just want the absolute best image quality and nothing else, then the best smartphone camera. That person is the pixel 3. It still is. It has the best color science, especially and on there's dynamic range and detail and white balance, but that's in an aging phone, that's starting to get kind of slow and also not multiple cameras.

So if you take a lot of low-light shots, and you want the best fastest, low-light camera, the best smartphone camera for that person is the P30 Pro. If you want the most versatile smartphone camera, the best smartphone camera is the P30 Pro. But if you want the best video camera in any smartphone, the best smartphone camera is the iPhone 10s Bayamon. So you got to know what you want in a smartphone camera that'll determine what's the best for you, P30 Pro is awesome, it's probably the best right now for most people. But if you happen to be someone who wants to take a lot of video, that's an area where this falls short date/time, photography, you're gonna, get better image, quality out of the pixel camera, so those things are worth knowing about and that whole summary kind of works for the P30 Pro as a whole phone -.

You got to know what you want if you want a phone that has an amazing battery life and then checks pretty much all the boxes. You don't worry too much about speaker quality. This is an awesome phone. If you want a great fast camera, you take a lot of low-light shots like a lot of people. Do this is gonna, be really impressive, but yeah.

That's that's what you got in out. This is a great phone, so if you're cool with buying a Huawei phone in 2019 with that huge asterisk- and you know about it, then uh is a great step up until the next one. Thanks for watching catch, you guys later peace.

Source : Marques Brownlee