Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Huawei P30 Pro Redux: Bittersweet”.
Believe it or not, it’s been two years since huawei launched a flagship smartphone with google services. If you want the highest spec, google supported huawei phone. The p30 pro is the smartphone to get. We love the p30 pro in our initial review and gave it our editors choice award.
We enjoyed its battery life charging, speed performance and incredible camera setup in particular, but how does it hold up in 2021 and is it worth going and buying a two-year-old smartphone just to get a huawei flagship with google services? Let’S find out in this episode of redux? I want to give some context for the rest of the video, so i’ve reviewed the mate 30 pro the p40 pro and the mate 40 pro, and so i’ve used rather extensively the more modern huawei flagships that don’t have google services. With this in mind, using the p30 pro is a bit bittersweet, because it’s a taste of what could have been with these new huawei devices with the p30 pro you still get to enjoy huawei’s fantastic battery and cameras, as well as google’s great software ecosystem. With the downside being that both of them are two years out of date, huawei re-released, the p30 pro in may of 2020 in a single sku, 8 gigabytes of ram and 256 gigabytes of storage. It came in some different colors, but it’s otherwise identical to the p30. Pro and yes, it still runs google services.
You can actually still buy this from huawei for 799 pounds in the uk, but that’s not a great deal when you can get a standard p30 pro brand new on amazon for just over half the price, regardless of which device you’re coming from the p30 pro is Still pretty stacked when it comes to its specs, so it’s got 8 gigabytes of ram akira, 980 and 128 to 512 gigabytes of storage. There’S. Also a 1080p oled display a 4 200 milliamp hour battery 40 watt charging and 15 watt wireless charging. What does that all mean? Well that when you’re using the phone day-to-day, it doesn’t feel two years old, it feels perfectly usable doing all my usual social media browsing and flicking between apps.
I noticed very few stutters, even when gaming it performed really well in real racing 3 and pubg mobile. However, it’s not going to feel quite as quick as a galaxy s21 or oneplus 8 pro because of its lack of a high refresh rate display. This panel is 60 hertz.
Whilst theirs is 120.. The battery in charging tech isn’t bad in 2021 either. So it’s got a 4 200 million power battery, which is a little less than what we’re used to seeing now, but not that much and the charging is still plenty quick too. Even on this used and therefore degraded battery, i was still able to get well over a day’s usage out of the p30 pro. The same goes for the design. It’S still a very good looking device. It doesn’t quite match the latest and greatest, though, we’ve moved on from the teardrop notch style and while itself has been using a punch, hole layout since the p40 and p40 pro. However, there are still some modern features like ip68 water and dust resistance. The aforementioned wireless charging, five gigahertz wifi and a stacked camera setup which we’ll get back to later you’re missing out on 5g, wi-fi 6 and a high refresh rate display, but other than that.
It’S not like the phone is ancient or anything as long as you don’t need bleeding edge features. The p30 pro is still very serviceable. The software is getting a little dated at this point, though. Our unit is running. Emui 10, based on android 10 huawei, is currently rolling out emui 11 to devices like this one, but even then emui 11 is only based on android 10.2, with no sign of android 11 coming anytime soon, while you are getting google services, the services are aging pretty Quickly, the software isn’t bad by any means. Its design is a strong departure from vanilla android, but it’s still very usable.
The issue lies in the lack of support going forward. It’S almost as if the p30 pro is trapped in time. I’D. Imagine that a lot of people looking to buy the p30 pro are interested in its fantastic camera. Stack huawei was the first to mass produce a smartphone with a periscope telephoto lens this one being a five times optical zoom unit. This combined with the still sizeable 40 megapixel one over 1.7 inch sensor and solid ultra wide, still makes for a solid set of rear cameras and the 32 megapixel selfie shooter doesn’t look bad on paper, either the images from the p30 pro don’t look like they come From a two-year-old smartphone, thanks to the device’s, fantastic, versatile and powerful camera hardware, and software huawei has a pretty contrast, heavy look which you might love or hate, but objectively, the p30 pro’s photos are sharp, have a good level of detail and recreate color accurately across its Three lenses, despite the vastly different resolutions of the three main sensors quality consistency, is pretty good.
It’S not all about standard photos. With this thing, though, the p30 pro can see in the dark with its fantastic night mode. It might not be the king of low light anymore, with newer huawei and samsung models, besting it, but still mighty impressive.
The same can be said in huawei’s, aperture portrait and pro modes. There’S still plenty of options for simulating aperture and changing bokeh shape. The edge detection is pretty good too.
The only downside really is that the portrait mode only works with human faces. Aperture mode works with non-humans too, but you don’t get that control to shape the bokeh. The way you like even the device’s super macro mode, something i’d, consider more of a gimmick than a useful feature is very usable with solid detail and good color, thanks to the use of a high quality ultra wide to take close-up photos selfies taken with the p30 Pro can look a bit odd and that’s because of the skin smoothing effect and selfies can look a bit soft but they’re not too bad even for 2021. Overall, the p30 pro’s cameras are fantastic. Given the device’s age, it’s powerful, it’s versatile and it’s that huawei camera package that we love in a smartphone that runs google services, which brings us to the question of the hour, is the p30 pro worth using in 2021 and is it worth buying in 2021? The answer to the first question is yes, the p30 pro is still an excellent smartphone in 2021, it’s still relatively fast, with good battery life and charging performance and truly brilliant camera system. It might not get any more security updates, making its viability going forward questionable.
But if you don’t mind that it’s worth holding on to to answer the second question on the renewed market, it costs 250 pounds or around 350 dollars, and this is an absolute steal for what you’re getting it’s not bleeding edge and its lack of saucer support will Deter some from purchasing it, it’s generally not recommended that you buy a smartphone outside of software support, and so we’re not going to recommend it for this. But if it’s say your second device or something you want to use to take better photos, then by all means go for it because it’s a brilliant package, it’s a bittersweet experience as someone who’s tried the newer models that, unfortunately, don’t support google’s apps, because those devices Are so good, but the lack of the ever so important features? Well, they made them almost unrecommendable to the western market. This was the last one and being as good as it is. It makes me wonder what the market would have looked like if huawei was able to use google services once again. I’Ve no doubt in my mind, however, that the mate 30 pro and onwards would have been in the top three smartphones of their generations with google support, and that concludes my final episode of redux guys. This is my last video for android authority.
I’Ve loved working with the guys over a and making videos for you lot, but it’s time for me to go and do something else. So thank you all so much for watching this and all of the content that i’ve made for android authority. Please do hit like and subscribe to never miss a video like this one, i’m around thomas with android authority and i’ll catch. You later .