A meeting with Huawei at MWC confirmed the P30 series will have a periscope zoom camera and new Leica hardware designed to crack low-light quality.
At Mobile World Congress 2019 Huawei wanted to share. First it shared a supposed mock-up P30 handset with Digital Trends – important information because that site’s photographs depict three cameras, not the four we were expecting. Are four-camera phones the new norm? Huawei P30 Pro suggests so
Next, Huawei confirmed to Pocket-lint that the P30 series will feature a zoom camera – being the first device to market with a periscope lens solution, which we now know will be revealed in full on 26 March in Paris.
Pocket-lint was one of a handful of publications invited to a behind-closed-doors ‘open discussion’ session at MWC 2019. It was hosted by Clement Wong, Huawei’s VP of global product marketing, in an on-the-record session. Although Wong refused to budge on certain details when pressed, we did manage to extract some interesting details about the new camera setup.
“Instead of treating [the P30] in a similar way as we did before [from P9 to P10 to P20] – increase the number of cameras, or [add/remove] the black and white module – we’re going to introduce some really revolutionary technology,” said Wong. “But it’s not an obvious change unless you use the camera.”
Which, to us, suggests the quad camera solution – as leaked by the company’s own CEO, Richard Yu, in a shot of the moon on Weibo – might be realised with a three lens setup, treating the periscope as a multi-capable lens and deriving the ‘quad’ term from that.
