Huawei’s flagship Mate 30 Pro has impressive specs but no Google

With an eye-catching circular camera bump.

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After a week that saw renders, photographs, and even a couple of hands-on video reveals much about Huawei’s latest flagship phones ahead of their announcement, the Mate 30 series is now official, starting with the Mate 30 Pro and the Mate 30.

The announcement of Mate 30 series comes at a difficult time for Huawei, whose presence on the USA’s entity list prevents US companies from doing business with the Chinese firm. Google said last month that these phones won’t ship with Google’s apps and services, nor will they come with the Play Store pre-installed, which is how most Android users outside of China download their apps.

HUAWEI WILL SHIP THE DEVICES WITH ITS OWN HUAWEI MOBILE SERVICES CORE

Huawei’s response to the problem has been to nurture its own ecosystem of apps which are available through the Huawei App Gallery. The company announced that rather than shipping with Google’s services pre-installed, the Mate 30 Series would instead ship with the Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) Core, which it claims is already integrated with over 45,000 apps. The company announced that it was investing $1 billion into its software ecosystem with an investment that would be split across a development fund, a user growth fund, and a marketing fund.

Turning to hardware, the phones have a more typical set of flagship specs. Both have a Leica-branded rear camera array contained within a circular camera cutout that Huawei is calling a “Halo ring design.” The Mate 30 has a main 40-megapixel camera with a f/1.8 aperture, an ultra wide-angle 16-megapixel f/2.2 camera, an 8-megapixel f/2.4 telephoto camera, and a “laser focus” sensor. Meanwhile, the Mate 30 Pro bumps the resolution of the ultra wide-angle camera to 40 megapixels with an aperture of f/1.8, and swaps the laser focus sensor for a 3D depth sensor.

In terms of video, Huawei claims that the phone can record in up to 4K 60fps, or else record in slow-motion at speeds of up to 7680fps when filming in 720p. Huawei showed off this ultra slow-motion camera in action with footage of a hummingbird in flight, where its wings were still visible despite the speed at which they were moving.

The screens of the two devices are slightly different. The Mate 30 Pro has a 6.53-inch screen which curves around the edges of the device, while the regular Mate 30 has a more traditional flat display that’s slightly bigger at 6.62-inches in size. Battery sizes also differ between the two phones; the Mate 30 Pro has a larger 4,500mAh battery, compared to 4,200mAh in the Mate 30. Both phones support fast-charging up to 40W wired, or 27W when wirelessly charging.

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Since the Mate 30 Pro’s display curves around the edges of the device, Huawei has ditched the physical volume buttons on the side of the device, in favor of a new touch-sensitive solution. It’s a similar technology to what we’ve seen on Vivo’s Nex 3.

The Mate 30 Pro is available in six colors in total, including two vegan leather options; green and orange. Other colors include silver, green, purple, and black. There’s also a new Porsche Design edition of the Mate 30, which uses a genuine leather finish on the rear of the device. The Porsche Design Huawei Mate 30 RS is available in red and black, and eschews the circular camera bump in favor of a more integrated quad-sensor array.

Internally, the Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro phones use Huawei’s Kirin 990 chip, which the company announced at IFA back at the beginning of the month. The chip is the first from Huawei to include a built-in 5G modem, and as a result there’ll be a 5G version of the Mate 30 Pro available. Along withe the 5G modem, Huawei says that the phone includes 14 antennas for 5G, and 21 antennas in total.

The Mate 30 series runs on EMUI 10, which Huawei’s consumer CEO Richard Yu says is based off Android 10. Features of the software include a dark mode and gesture control via the sensor in the phone’s notch. Huawei also advertises that at least one of the Mate 30 models will support both face unlock alongside an in-display fingerprint sensor.

THE MATE 30 PRO WILL BE AVAILABLE WITH 5G FOR €100 MORE THAN THE REGULAR MODEL

Were it not for Huawei’s continued presence on the entity list, we’d have said that — on first impressions at least — the Mate 30 series looks like another set of decently specced flagship devices from Huawei. However, it’s going to be hard to sell customers outside of China on the idea of an Android phone that doesn’t have software and apps officially supported by Google. Huawei’s announcement of these devices might have attempted to be business as usual, but their reception by customers is likely to be anything but.

The Huawei Mate 30 will be available with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, and will start at €799, while the Mate 30 Pro increases the internal storage to 256GB, and starts at €1099 for the 4G model, or €1199 for the 5G model. Finally, the Porsche Design edition will start at €2095, and will come with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of internal storage.

Source: Jon Porter|@JonPorty (The Verge).
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