Huawei today announced its flagship Mate 30 series that will take on the likes of the Galaxy Note 10+ and the iPhone 11 Pro. Huawei phones have become a spec monster over the last couple of years and the Mate 30 Pro perfectly highlights that.
While Huawei announced the Mate 30 Pro and Mate 30 today, its the former that’s going to steal all the limelight. The phone features a 6.53-inch OLED Hozion Display that has an 88-degree curvature at the edges. It is not a QHD panel though and sports a resolution of 2400 x 1176. There is also a notch at the top of the display on the front which houses the 3D face unlock hardware, the selfie shooter, and a new sensor for gesture control. There are no volume buttons on the Mate 30 Pro and Huawei is instead offering virtual volume buttons using the waterfall display. The buttons placement can be adjusted as per one’s liking. Thankfully, there is still a physical power button on the device. The highlight of the Mate 30 Pro is going to be its quad-camera setup at the rear which comprises of dual-40MP sensors. The primary 40MP RYYB SuperSensing Wide camera has a 27mm focal length, f/1.6 aperture, and OIS. The 40MP ultra-wide Cine camera has an f/1.8 aperture. There is also an 8MP f/2.4 telephoto sensor with OIS and 80mm focal length. The fourth camera sensor is used for depth sensing purposes. The camera highlights include an ISO level of 409600, 45x zoom range, and dual OIS + AIS. The 40MP sensor on the Mate 30 Pro is 1/1.54-inch big make it notably bigger than the Galaxy Note 10 and iPhone 11 Pro’s 1/2.55″ sensor. The bigger the sensor, the more light it will be able to absorb which gives the Mate 30 Pro a major advantage over other smartphones in the market. Huawei smartphones have never been known for their video recording capabilities but that’s going to change with the Mate 30 Pro. Thanks to the powerful ISP inside the Kirin 990 5G chipset, the Mate 30 Pro can record ultra slow-mo videos at 7680fps. It can also record 4K videos at 60fps, 4K HDR+ videos, as well as videos with real-time bokeh. There’s also ultra-stable video recording using a combination of OIS and AIS. Below is a demo from Huawei highlighting the 7680fps slow-mo video recording on the Mate 30 Pro:
Just look how slow we can go…up to 7680 frames per second!#RethinkPossibilities pic.twitter.com/yq3TbiXr8K — Huawei Mobile (@HuaweiMobile) September 19, 2019 Other specs of the Huawei Mate 30 Pro include a 32MP selfie camera, a 4500mAh battery with 40W wired fast charging and 27W wireless fast charging, 5G connectivity, dual-SIM with dual-VoLTE, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, IR blaster, IP68 certification, in-display fingerprint scanner, bottom-firing mono speaker, under-display earpiece speaker, and more. The Mate 30 Pro is the first phone to launch with an integrated 5G modem that makes it notably superior to other first-generation 5G phones which feature a separate 5G modem. Huawei also announced the Mate 30 which is a slightly cut down version of the Mate 30 Pro. It features a 6.62″ FHD+ Rigid OLED display with HDR support, Kirin 990 chipset, and a slightly cut down camera setup from the Mate 30 Pro which misses out on the 40MP Cine camera. It also comes with a smaller 4200mAh battery. The Mate 30 series runs on EMUI 10 based on Android 10. The catch here is that since the phone has been announced after the U.S. ban on Huawei, it does not ship with Google Mobile Suite. Huawei is encouraging app developers to use its own App Store and it will likely provide users an option to sideload Google apps as well, but it did not provide any details about it on stage. Pricing for the phone starts from €1099 for 8GB RAM variant with 256GB storage. It will be available in Space Silver, Cosmic Purple, Black, and Emerald Green colors.
