Huawei P30 Pro/P30 first look: handsets raise bar for smartphone zoom photography

New flagship phone has everything you’d want, and everything rivals offer, including in-display fingerprint sensor and curved 6.5-inch OLED display

Telephoto lens and re-engineered main camera lens produce world-beating 10x lossless zoom images, and we can’t wait to test phones’ lowlight shooting prowess

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The Huawei P30 Pro (left) and the P30. Both models have an improved triple-lens main camera on the rear that set a new bar for smartphone zoom photography. The P30 Pro has a fourth sensor which functions as a 3D scanner. Photo: Ben Sin

Published: 9:30pm, 26 Mar 2019Updated: 9:39pm, 26 Mar 2019

The Huawei P20 Pro released in 2018 was a breakthrough device for the Chinese technology giant. The smartphone’s triple-camera system, anchored by a whopping 40-megapixel sensor, and the neural processing unit that powered it, set a new bar for mobile photography. The P20 Pro was arguably the device that gave Huawei global recognition in the smartphone market.

This year’s follow-up has a lot to live up to, therefore. At first glance the Huawei P30 Pro handset appears to be an iterative update: the phone looks like a blend of the P20 Pro and the Mate 20 Pro, with a 6.5-inch curved OLED display and the usual graduated-colour glass back finish.

The notch housing its front-facing camera is smaller than that on the P20 Pro, but after seeing the hole-punch design for front-facing cameras offered by Samsung and, ironically, Huawei’s sub-brand Honor, it feels tired. This is still a nice-looking phone, but nothing grabs your attention like the P20 Pro’s design did.

However, dig a bit deeper and one can see that the P30 Pro has taken the features that made the P20 Pro so special and added further innovation and refinement.

The Huawei P30 Pro has a 6.5-inch OLED screen that’s curved on both sides. The notch at the top housing a 32-megapixel selfie camera looks dated, however. Photo: Ben Sin

The P30 Pro adds a fourth camera to its main photography system; a TOF (time-of-flight) sensor flanks its triple-lens array, which features a 40-megapixel main lens, 20-megapixel wide-angle lens, and 8-megapixel telephoto lens. The new sensor, which is essentially a 3D scanner, is said to help produce better bokeh images (shots with a sharp focus on the subject against a blurred background). However, I only tested the device briefly in a small room and didn’t get to try that feature.

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