Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Banned Huawei Mate 30 Pro: Best Phone You Shouldn’t Buy!”.
What’S up guys, i’m kbhd here, okay, so huawei was in a really odd place in 2019 being banned in the us. I did an entire video about their situation, i’ll leave that link right up there so because of that, every single huawei phone – that’s come out since then comes with like a giant asterisk next to it, at least in the us, because it doesn’t make sense to buy Here an android phone without google play services and that whole connection to android, so their new flagship came out and that’s one of those, the huawei mate 30 pro and i bought one. But i didn’t really get to use it too much until now, and it turns out. This is a really really nice piece of hardware, one of my favorites of the year, but it still can’t make up for this software situation. Here’S what i mean just look at this phone. This is actually one of my favorite designs of all of last year. I’Ve always been a fan of boxy designs like i’ve said, and this is one of those, but it’s also quite unique, mainly because of this next level waterfall display. Now, i typically do not like when phone displays curve a bit over the edges. Like that’s one of my complaints for the oneplus 7 pro the galaxy s10, a bunch of others, but this one is so dramatic. It falls off so steeply that it gives it that boxy square look again. It gives the phone an actually pretty, futuristic and impressive.
Look in the hand, it’s a six and a half inch bright slightly above 1080p oled display. It’S got the fingerprint reader underneath the glass in the middle, where it’s reachable, the forehead and the chin are pretty thin and the notch it isn’t tiny, but it isn’t as big as the iphone either and overall, it just makes for a nice viewing experience, unlike any Other smartphone that’s come out, but that is about where the good stuff ends. As far as the display goes, and then you start to notice the quirks as far as the quirks and features. First of all, there is light fall off on both edges. It’S kind of hard to capture exactly what it looks like on camera, because the light still coming from the oled seems to fill that in, but looking at it in person, both sides of the phone have this darker edge to them and then the screen curves. So far back onto the side of the phone that it is the side of the phone like it actually is legitimately half of the side, and it’s pushed that red power button all the way to almost the back of the phone. It’S like really offset from the center line and since it’s the only button on the phone that you press every day, you definitely notice that, and also as a matter of fact, it is the only button on this entire phone, meaning there’s no volume rocker. So instead, you again use the side of the phone and literally tap on the display on the side and then swipe up and down on that side. Part of the screen to control the volume like it’s a volume, rocker and then, of course, you get the feeling of that haptic motor clicking as you swipe, and you can do it wherever you want on the top half of the left or the right side of The phone it is really cool and it feels like a futuristic solution to the problem, but the more times you use it the more times it fails and or takes you two or three times to activate it and then the more you just wish. You had a regular set of buttons, but the rest of this hardware is pretty excellent, though it’s not too big of a phone despite the huge screen size, and it feels solid and weighty in the hand.
That’S gorilla glass, 6 in case you’re, wondering since screen protectors are probably not very protective on this phone and you’ve got a good sized 4 500 milliamp hour battery that nets you pretty great battery life, there’s an optical fingerprint reader underneath the display, like i said nice And close to the bottom, so it’s easy to reach and works quickly and you do get 40 watt wired, fast charging and also 27 watt fast wireless charging and reverse wireless charging. If you’re into that, then the speaker at the bottom, it’s small and kind of easily blocked, but it does get pretty loud and the whole phone is ip68 water resistant and you even get an ir blaster at the top. Remember these from back in the day you can program them to turn your tv on and off or just troll other nearby people and turn their tvs on and off really about. The only cons i can come up with for this phone’s hardware are nitpicks. There’S no headphone jack, which feels like a nitpick in 2020. Not a lot of phones in this range have many more also the back. It’S glass and glass breaks, but also that camera bump is not small and it sticks out the back of the phone a little bit in a way that, like catches, a lot of lint because it’s a sharp edge and it’s hard to get the dust from around The circle, if you put it in your pocket even once the expandable storage, is via a proprietary nano memory card.
So it’s not a micro sd card slot, it’s technically expandable storage, but you might not be able to use the one you currently have lying around and also no higher fresh rate on the display. That is a nitpick for 2019, but coming into 2020, that’s starting to feel like a pretty big deal, but other than that. You can clearly tell there’s a lot to like with this phone and it doesn’t just stop on the outside.
It gets to the inside too. You get the high silicon karen 990, which, if you haven’t heard of it, is a high-end chip, not quite matching the power of the snapdragon 855, but very close and with eight gigs of ram and ufs 3.0 storage. This phone is quick. It’S no slouch at all. It games just fine scrolls around multitasks as good as any other 60hz phone, and the camera hardware is beastly 2.. We’Re talking.
Well, you can see the quadruple cameras on the back 40 megapixel main camera at f 1.6 with ois, and it is a big sensor at 1 over 1.7 inches, and you also have an 8 megapixel, 3x telephoto with ois and a 40 megapixel ultra wide at f. 1.8 and it’s an even bigger sensor than the main camera at one over 1.54 inches and then that fourth sensor is a 3d time-of-flight camera plus the dual led flash in my opinion. Now that i’ve actually gotten to use this more. The ultra wide best technical performance of any ultra wide that i’ve seen in any smartphone camera. It’S not the best camera quality, still it’s kind of weird, with the colors but technically speaking, very impressive, ultra wide. The sensor is so big that i find myself just switching to the ultra wide and shooting with it all the time. It’S not super fisheye wide, and then you can still get up close and be near subjects and get a naturally blurred bokeh without needing portrait mode. Skin tones and overall color were a little weird. I think they could use some work. Dynamic range was good, though focus was on point and, of course, all those pixels give you a lot of detail that most secondary cameras are not exactly crushing.
So the primary camera is good, but the ultra wide was fun, so this phone is clearly capable of doing pretty great things. But that’s the problem. Is i’ve been using this phone and kind of having a hard time doing almost anything, see because of huawei’s relationship with the us right now me importing this phone buying it online and getting it shipped here means i get a phone with it’s android, 10.0 right now And the latest version of emui also 10.0, but with no google play services and none of that connection to google at all. This has created the biggest delta between awesome hardware and software, holding it back that i’ve ever seen.
No play services means no google play store on this phone, which means no instagram, no gmail, no google calendar. There is, of course, a huawei app store called app gallery, but a lot of stuff is region locked and you can change your region, but good luck. Finding pretty much anything of the same selection of apps that you’d find working functionally in the play, store, there’s no twitter or youtube here. You can still download or sideload other apps from their respective websites if they host them so like dropbox and whatsapp, and things like that and there have been attempts to sideload google play services onto the phone as well, with varying levels of success.
Basically uh you’re. Getting really deep into you got to know what you’re doing territory here. So all this change has brought huawei phones in the us anyway, from very good alternatives to basically unusable, which is a shame, because this is actually kind of a really nice phone and huawei’s emui software on top of android.
It’S never been my favorite, but it’s actually getting better too they’ve really gone out of their way and started cloning other popular stuff they’ve seen they built a copy of apple’s measure, app called it ar measure it seems to work pretty decently. They also have smart display resolution switching in the settings to save battery and an overall much nicer cleaned up settings app, which is important with a functional search. So yeah, it’s not perfect, but they have been getting better.
But now this phone is just clearly so hobbled by the lack of google connection that it’s clearly not just bad for huawei, but bad for competition like this is bad for us too. So, at the end of the day, this phone will be fine in china, and huawei will be fine in china, where millions of their customers are, who just don’t need. Google play services at all. China is the biggest smartphone market in the world, they’ll be just fine, but i’m just not about to go out of my way and recommend anyone goes and imports.
One of these, like i did so moral of the story, a re-emphasis on the importance of software. You and me we already knew for a smartphone. You know the build’s got to be good. The battery’s got to be big. The display has got to be crisp, but behind the scenes with software, the battery optimization the display’s responsiveness, the quality of the camera, which you can get out of a sensor. All these things are software and that’ll.
Never be not important. Don’T forget that, thanks for watching catch, you guys the next one peace .