Huawei’s leak ruined most surprises surrounding its P30 and P30 Pro launch

Huawei has made its P30 series official with its Paris launch today, led by the feature-packed P30 Pro housing four rear cameras and 5x periscope-like optical zoom. Unfortunately, Huawei’s presentation was lacking in surprises after the company leaked most of the details at the end of last week.

As expected, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer has opted for an increasingly bezel-less design but has forgone Samsung’s hole-punch cutout in favour of a single teardrop notch on both the P30 and P30 Pro. This helps the P30 Pro’s 6.47-inch OLED display and the P30’s 6.1-inch OLED panel achieve unprecedented screen-to-body ratios.

Despite being smaller, the standard P30 contains a sizeable 3,560mAh battery and three rear-facing lenses. These consist of a “smarter” 40-megapixel primary lens with Huawei’s SuperSpectrum Sensor, a 16-megapixel ultra-wide angle lens and a 3x optical zoom telephoto lens akin to that of last year’s P20 Pro. Unfortunately, this model doesn’t have optical image stabilisation (OIS), but it does contain a 32-megapixel selfie camera.

Image: P30 (left) and P30 Pro (right)

The premium P30 Pro contains the same front-facing camera as its little brother, but is unsurprisingly better in almost every way, from its 4,200mAh battery, to its four rear cameras with OIS. While it is headed by the same 40-megapixel lens and SuperSpectrum technology, it’s supported by a 20-megapixel ultra-wide angle, an 8-megapixel SuperZoom telephoto lens with 5x optical zoom and 10x hybrid zoom, and a new “time of flight” (ToF) camera for greater clarity in the dark. Essentially, this swaps out the company’s previous red, green and blue subpixel sensor in favour of a new red + yellow + yellow + blue setup to draw more light in and preserve detail.

“We’re going to completely rewrite the rules of smartphone photography, and we can do this because we own the complete ecosystem within the smartphone. All the little elements, not just the camera,” said global senior product marketing manager, Peter Gauden.

Huawei packs in its latest hardware for each, featuring the company’s proprietary Kirin 980 processor at their core. The P30 will contain 6GB of RAM, while the P30 Pro houses a sizeable 8GB of memory. Prices will depend on internal storage, starting at £699 for the standard P30 with 128GB, £899 for the P30 Pro with 128GB and breaching £1,099 for the P30 with 512GB.

KitGuru Says: It’s great to see a company attempt to take Google’s crown for the title of king of the smartphone cameras, but Huawei’s leaks certainly led to an underwhelming presentation. While its rivals push new software capable of screening calls, full AI enhancements and intuitive new ways to interact with the device, Huawei tends tunnel vision on boosting hardware. Hopefully this is something the company will address later down the line.

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