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Huawei P30 Pro review: The best smartphone camera gets even better

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Huawei’s P30 Pro is probably the best phone that you can buy today. Somehow, the company improved on the already stellar camera that was found in last year’s P20 Pro, and it’s just amazing.
Last year’s Huawei P20 Pro introduced a triple-lens camera with a 40-megapixel main sensor. It was the first real lossless zoom that we’ve seen since the Nokia Lumia 1020’s 41MP camera, and it was awesome. Over the next year, I wondered how Huawei could possibly improve on this amazing smartphone camera.
The company delivered when it announced the P30 Pro at an event in Paris last month. This camera does things that I’d never have thought possible on a smartphone. The low-light capabilities can see more at night than I can see with my eyes. Here’s a quick example before we dive in:
These pictures were taken in my hotel room at night, with the lights off. What I could actually see is closer to what the iPhone captured.
Huawei pulls this off with its new SuperSpectrum lens, which uses RYYB instead of RGB. It’s pretty great.
Let’s talk a little bit about colors. It was with last year’s P20 series that Huawei introduced the color Twilight, a gradient color that blended from blue to purple. It was beautiful, and what was really cool was that no one was doing it. If you were tired of yet another black phone, the P20 was a great option. Then the Mate 20 came along with a different version of Twilight, a gradient from black to purple to blue.
This time around, there’s no Twilight. When asked why, we were told in a group interview session that when Huawei did Twilight, everyone copied it, and now the firm is doing something new. Along with Pearl White and Black, the sexy new colors include Aurora, Breathing Crystal, and Amber Sunrise.
I’m lucky to say that I’ve got my hands on all three of them, including an Aurora P30, a Breathing Crystal P30 Pro, and an Amber Sunrise P30 Pro. Aurora is different shades of green and blue with a wavy pattern, and it’s my favorite one. Breathing Crystal can look completely white or baby blue from an angle, but from another angle it looks like a gradient from light purple to baby blue. Amber Sunrise combines shades of red, orange, and yellow to look like a sunrise.
Aside from the camera, this is my favorite thing about Huawei phones. It seems like every phone I review is a standard black or maybe white. Sometimes it’s even that dark blue color that’s most other companies’ version of a colorful phone.
The device has a vertical camera module on the back, and the bottom of the three lenses is square. That’s the new periscope zoom lens that we’ll talk about later. To the right of that is an LED flash and below that, a time-of-flight sensor.
On the bottom of the device, there’s a slot for dual nano-SIM cards, a USB Type-C port, and a speaker grille. On the right side, there’s a power button and above that, a volume rocker. Other than that, there are just two antenna lines on the top and bottom of the phone.
I’m a big fan of this design, where things are kept to one side of the device. It really just keeps things easier.
Another thing is that the phone doesn’t actually have an earpiece. Sound for calls actually comes through the screen, and you’ll see an image indicating where your ear should go during a call. Surprisingly, this didn’t cause any issues for me, and call quality seemed fine.
The Huawei P30 Pro has a 6.47-inch 19.5:9 display, with a resolution of 2340×1080. It seems that 1440p is reserved for the Mate lineup, and I don’t think it makes a difference. I don’t think many people can actually see a difference between 1080p and 1440p on a screen this size.
I also want to point out that this screen isn’t particularly large, something that people love to point out when they hear that it’s 6.47 inches. That doesn’t mean what it used to. The screen is measured diagonally, so with the particularly small aspect ratio of 19.5:9, the surface area of the screen is smaller than a six-inch screen with the 16:9 aspect ratio that everyone was using a couple of years ago. It also means that the phone is narrow, so you can comfortable fit it in your hand.
It’s an OLED display, which means that you get vibrant colors and deep blacks. The key to this is that pixels can be turned off with OLED, providing for the true black that can’t be done with an LCD, which is entirely backlit.

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