The Banned Huawei Mate 30 Pro: Best Phone You Shouldn't Buy! By Marques Brownlee

What's up guys, I'm, Q PhD here, okay, so whey. Why was in a really odd place in 2019 being banned in the U. S. I? Did an entire video about their situation. I'll leave that link right up there so because of that, every single Huawei phone that's come out since then comes with like a giant asterisk next to it, at least in the US, because it doesn't make sense to buy here an Android phone without Google Play Services and that whole connection to Android. So the new flagship came out and that's one of those, the Huawei Mate, 30, Pro and I bought one, but I didn't really get to use it too much until now, and it turns out.

This is a really, really nice piece of hardware, one of my favorites of the year, but it still can't make up for this software situation. Here's what I mean just look at this phone. This is actually one of my favorite designs of all of last year, I've always been a fan of boxy designs like I've said, and this is one of those, but it's also quite unique, mainly because of this next level. Waterfall display now I typically do not like when phone displays curve a bit over the edges. Like that's one of my complaints for the OnePlus 7 pro the Galaxy S 10, a bunch of others, but this one is so dramatic.

It falls off so steeply that it gives it that boxy square look again. It gives the phone and actually pretty, futuristic and impressive. Look in the hand, it's a six and a half inch bright slightly above 1080p OLED display. It's got the fingerprint reader underneath the glass in the middle, where it's reachable, the forehead and the chin are pretty thin and the notch it isn't tiny, but it isn't as big as the iPhone either and overall, it just makes for a nice viewing experience, unlike any other smartphone, that's come out, but that is about where the good stuff ends. As far as the display goes, and then you start to notice the quirks as far as the Cork's and features.

First, there is light fall-off on both edges. It's kind of hard to capture exactly what it looks like on camera, because the light's still coming from the OLED, seems to fill that in, but looking at it in person, both sides of the phone have this darker edge to them, and then this screen curves so far back onto the side of the phone that it is this. The phone like it actually is legitimately half of the side, and it's pushed that red power button all the way to almost the back of the phone. It's like really offset from the center line, and since it's the only button on the phone that you press every day, you definitely notice that, and also, as a matter of fact, it is the only button on this entire phone, meaning there's no volume rocker. So instead you again use the side of the phone and literally tap on the display on the side and then swipe up and down on that side.

Part of the screen to control the volume like it's a volume, rocker and then, of course, you get the feeling of that haptic motor clicking as you swipe, and you can do it wherever you want on the top half of the left or the right side of the phone. It is really cool, and it feels like a futuristic solution to the problem, but the more times you use it the more times it fails and or takes you two or three times to activate it and then the more you just wish she had a regular set of buttons. But the rest of this hardware is pretty excellent, though it's not too big of a phone despite the huge screen size and a feels solid and weighty in the hand. That's Gorilla, Glass 6 in case you're, wondering since screen protectors are probably not very protective on this phone, and you've got a good-sized 4500 William hour battery that Nets you pretty great battery life. There's an optical fingerprint reader underneath the display, like I, said nice and close to the bottom.

So it's easy to reach and works quickly, and you do get 40 watt, wired, fast charging and also 27 watt fast wireless charging and reverse wireless charging. If you're into that, then the speaker at the bottom, it's small and kind of easily blocked, but it does get pretty loud and the whole phone is ip68 water-resistant, and you even get an IR blaster at the top. Remember these from back in a day you can program them to turn your TV on and off, or just troll other nearby people and turn their TVs on and off really about the only cons I can come up with for this phone's hardware are nitpicks, there's no headphone jack, which feels like a nitpick in 2020. Not a lot of phones in this range have them anymore. Also, the back it's glass and glass breaks, but also that camera bump is not small, and it sticks out the back of the phone a little in a way that, like catches, a lot of lint, because it's a sharp edge, and it's hard to get the dust from around the circle.

If you put it in your pocket, even once, the expandable storage is by a proprietary Nan memory card, so it's not a micros card. Slot is technically expandable storage, but you might not be able to use the one you currently have lying around and also no high refresh rate on the display. That is a nitpick for 2019, but coming into 2020, that's starting to feel like a pretty big deal, but other than that. You can clearly tell there's a lot to like with this phone, and it doesn't just stop on the outside. It gets to the inside too.

You get the high silicon Karen 990, which, if you haven't heard of it, is a high-end chip, not quite matching the power of the snapdragon, a 55 but very close, and with eight gigs of ram and UFS 3.0 storage. This phone is quick. It's no slouch at all. It games, just fine Scrolls around multitasks as good as any other 60 Hertz phone and the camera hardware is beastly too we're talking. Well, you can see the quadruple cameras on the back 40 megapixel main camera at F.1.6 with oh is- and it is a big sensor at 1-over 1.7 inches, and you also have an 8 megapixel 3x telephoto with IS and a 40 megapixel ultra-wide at F 1.8, and it's an even bigger sensor than the main camera at one over 1.5 4 inches, and then that fourth sensor is a 3d time-of-flight camera plus the dual LED flash, in my opinion. Now that I've actually gotten to use this more the ultra-wide best technical performance of any ultra-wide that I've seen in any smartphone camera.

It's not the best camera quality, still it's kind of weird, with the colors, but technically speaking, very impressive, ultra-wide. The sensor is so big that I found myself just switching to the ultra-wide and shooting with it all the time. It's not super fish eye wide, and then you can still get up close and be near subjects and get a naturally blurred both without needing portrait mode. Skin tones and overall color were a little weird I think they could use some work. Dynamic range was good, though focus was on point and, of course, all those pixels give you a lot of detail that most secondary cameras are not exactly crushing, so the primary camera is good, but the ultra-wide was fun, so this phone is clearly capable of doing pretty great things, but that's the problem is I've been using this phone and kind of having a hard time doing almost anything, see because of Huawei's relationship with the US right now me importing this phone buying it online and getting it shipped here means I get a phone with its Android ten point: oh right now, and the latest version of EMU I also ten point, oh, but with no Google Play Services and none of that connection to Google at all.

This has created the biggest delta between awesome hardware and software, holding it back that I've ever seen. No play services means no Google Play Store on this phone, which means no Instagram, no Gmail, no google calendar. There is, of course, a Huawei app store called app gallery, but a lot of stuff is region-locked, and you can change your region, but good luck. Finding pretty much anything of the same selection of apps that you'd find working functionally in the Play Store, there's no twitter or YouTube here. You can still download or side load other apps from their respective websites if they host them so like Dropbox and WhatsApp, and things like that and there have been attempts to side load Google Play Services onto the phone as well, with varying levels of success.

Basically you're getting really deep into you got a know what you're doing territory here. So all this change has brought Huawei phones in the U. S. anyway from very good alternatives to basically unusable, which is a shame, because this is actually kind of a really nice phone and Huawei's emu software. On top of android.

It's never been my favorite, but it's actually getting better too. They have really gone out of their way and started cloning. Other popular stuff, they've seen they built a copy of apple's measure, app called it AR measure. It seems to work pretty decently. They also have smart display resolution switching in the settings to save battery and an overall much nicer cleaned up, Settings app, which is important with a functional search, so yeah, it's not perfect, but they have been getting better, but now this phone is just clearly so hobbled by the lack of Google connection that it's clearly not just bad for Huawei, but bad for competition like this is bad for us too.

So, at the end of the day, this phone will be fine in China and Huawei will be fine in China, where millions of their customers are, who just don't need. Google Play Services at all, China is the biggest smartphone market in the world. They'll be just fine, but I'm, just not about to go out of my way and recommend anyone goes in imports. One of these, like I, did so moral of the story. Re-emphasis on the importance of software.

You and me we already knew for a smartphone. You know the builds got to be good. The batteries got to be big. The displays got to be crisp, but behind the scenes with software, the battery optimization the displays, responsiveness, the quality of the camera, which you can get out of a sensor. All these things are software and that'll.

Never be not important. Don't forget that thanks for watching catch, you guys the next one face.

Source : Marques Brownlee