Great cameas; long battery life; high-quality design and build; powerful
No Google apps; invites the security risks of sideloading; irritating gesture volume control; screen vignetting
You don’t often see international politics manifest visibly in phones, miniature totems of globalisation as they are. But the Huawei Mate 30 Pro is tangled up in politics throughout.
This is Huawei’s second hero phone of 2019, following the P30 Pro. On the outside it has some of the usual upgrades expected, to the design, display and cameras. Trouble brews on its inside.
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro runs Android 10, but this is the AOSP version. It’s the Android Open Source Project, free to use across the world. All previous Huawei Mate phones used the “standard” version of Android, which includes all the proprietary software many of us use every day.
Goole Maps, Mail, Google Play, Drive are important elements of Android, but they are not part of AOSP. Huawei’s US blacklisting means it can no longer get its phones certified for “full” Android, so it is left with it's skeleton, AOSP.
Huawei already has the software, the apps, needed to replace much of the Google suite. It has an app store, a mail client, a browser, a fitness tracker and a cloud storage service. But these are the apps people often either ignore, delete or complain about, calling them “bloat”.
Huawei sent us the Chinese version of the Mate 30 Pro, packing each of these once-bloat-now-essential apps with Chinese characters. You won’t see these if the phone ever actually makes it to the UK, but the alienating effect of these on a tech writer likely only brings us up to the same level of disorientation as a normal buyer who suddenly finds their Android phone has none of the parts they recognise.
The Mate 30 Pro learning curve
So, what can we do? The Huawei AppGallery is of limited help. Browsing it is like looking through a slop bucket of Google Play offcuts. While most of the store’s apps are likely represented in Google Play, too, many wouldn’t show up in the first page of search results.
There’s no Netflix, no WhatsApp, no Evernote or Microsoft Word. And, obviously, no Google apps.
The first few hours with a Huawei Mate 30 Pro are disorientating. It’s the first-world equivalent of being stranded on a deserted island. You scramble around looking for the twigs on the beach that might vaguely work as a knife and fork, prod the round things hanging off trees wondering if they are edible.
But this isn’t a holiday or a Channel 4 survival show, so it is time to see if you can actually get some more familiar apps on the Mate 30 Pro. You can.
Tooling up
You can install the Amazon Appstore just as you would on any Android device. The same goes for other third-party app stores like Aptiode and the apps from APKMirror. There is also a website that lets you install the necessary back-end to load Google Play, too. This is the holy grail for the Mate 30 Pro, as it opens the door to (almost) everything the phone lacks.
9to5mac has published an article on the link you need. It takes you to a page filled with Chinese instructions we couldn’t read, and buttons whose purpose was not exactly obvious.
But after around five increasingly frustrating attempts and one full factory reset, the Mate 30 Pro had Google Play. And possibly some malware. Let’s hope not.
From here you can install Google apps, BBC iPlayer and most of the other bits you’d miss. There are still signs this is a bodge, though. The Mate 30 Pro’s Google Play still won’t let you download Netflix.
There are other ways to get the app, like APKMirror, which offers the app installer file. We needed to restart the Mate 30 Pro before Netflix would login, and it will only stream at 480p. Just like Android, HD Netflix requires certification. This phone isn’t Netflix certified, and very well may never be given Netflix is a US company. This is not the experience we expect from a £1,000 phone.
And it gets worse. Reports online now suggest this route to a Google Play install has now been blocked: yet more headaches await.
Mate 30 Pro vs P30 Pro: progress?
There is also a real question of whether the Mate 30 Pro hardware is better out in the real world than the Huawei P30 Pro’s, which also arrived early enough in 2019 to gain full Google certification.
The Mate 30 Pro has a significantly more powerful processor, the Kirin 990 with 16 graphics cores. But not all the other changes are entirely welcome. Huawei has come up with a gesture-led approach to volume control. To change volume you tap the side of the Mate 30 Pro twice, remove your finger and wait for the slider UI to appear on-screen. You then slide up and down the side to change the volume.
It works about five times in 100, when you have the phone held comfortably in front of you. If the Mate 30 Pro pipes up in the cinema or theatre after you forgot to turn it to Silent mode, you are stuffed. And there’s no altering the volume from your pocket, or from the standby display here either. This isn’t progress.
Even one of the lead design changes of the Mate 30 Pro is questionable. The phone has a curved screen made by Samsung, just like the Galaxy S10. But this one curves around by almost 90 degrees.
This looks and feels neat, but exacerbates the problems of this curvy design motif. The OLED display appears to dim at the sides, creating an unwanted vignette effect. Samsung’s Galaxy S10 displays a similar effect, but it is more noticeable here.
The good bits
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro can elicit disappointment, irritation and despair. But in almost other senses this is a brilliant phone.
Like recent Huawei flagships, the camera is a highlight. The Mate 30 Pro has four rear cameras, three of which are very interesting. There’s a standard-view 40-megapixel sensor, an 8-megapixel 3x zoom and a 40-megapixel ultra-wide. The less interesting one is the ToF (time of flight) depth sensor, largely because there’s still no killer reason to have one.
The Mate 30 Pro has a less pronounced zoom than the P30 Pro, but the ultra-wide is quite probably the highest quality of its kind seen in a phone to date. Its sensor measures 1/1.54 inch across, very large for any kind of phone sensor.
The experience of shooting with the phone is much like the P30 Pro. It is hugely fun as you don’t feel constrained by the hardware. You can zoom in by 5x and still get usable photos, or up to 30x if you don’t mind that your images look rubbish. The night mode makes very dark scenes look detailed and well-exposed, although the phone does seem more prone to distracting lens flare than most.
Ultra-wide photos look brilliant, too, although this camera does not have the same macro ability as the Mate 20 Pro, perhaps a result of the new demands put on the lens by the larger sensor.
Slo-mo is the real stand-out here, at least on the page – 960fps has become the high-end mobile standard for slo-mo video, but the Mate 30 Pro goes up to 7,680fps, for 256x slo-mo.
This, unsurprisingly, uses a whole lot of interpolation. That is where you take two consecutive frames and then add one or more interstitial frames, using clever algorithms to guess what the content of them might be were they were not fabricated.
Read more: These are the best Android phones you can buy in 2021
Testing when shooting a room lit by an LED strip light, and a higher-pitch guitar string, made this pretty obvious. The string and its shadow moved unnaturally at points and the LED’s illumination level looked as though it were a slide show of three or four different brightness settings. Huawei’s motion interpolation is likely better at dealing with a moving object than the shining global light level of a scene.
This doesn’t really matter, though – 7,680fps footage is both a technical marvel and incredibly dull to watch. But you can drop down to 64x, 32x, 8x and 4x to suit the scene. As ever, Huawei likes to cater for the extremes of mobile photography. But it doesn’t just cover those extremes.
The Slo-Mo Guys may have a use for 7,680fps shooting and beyond, but you probably don’t, particularly when this isn’t “true” 7,680fps and therefore won’t accurately portray the refresh of a CRT display, for example.
Is this a downer? Absolutely not. Once again the flexibility Huawei offers is just about unparalleled. You can even have a choice of two fields of view for slo-mo footage.
Similarly, the “blurry background” Aperture mode is great, and lets you choose not just the blur intensity but one of three zoom levels. Apple has caught up with Huawei in the sense it finally offers properly optimised low-light shooting in its iPhone 11 range. But the Huawei Mate 30 Pro still provides many more toys that open up opportunities for creative composition.
It’s a delightful jumble, a box of delights you can rummage around in for days. Apple’s approach is obviously more tasteful and organised, but doesn’t let you play around at mobile camera tech’s margins with the same abandon.
Dynamic lighting effects are the exception. Apple’s Stage Lighting modes offer ways to create dramatic-looking semi-fake selfies, if that’s your bag. Huawei attempts to do something similar, but let’s just say we won’t be using these modes after this review.
And the other new areas?
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro is a glass and metal phone like most others. But it does manage to stand out with a fairly neat-looking circular camera array surrounded by what looks like a shiny coaster you might pick up at IKEA. And just like the Mate 30 Pro and P30 Pro, battery life is superb.
Verdict
Every great part of the Huawei Mate 30 Pro comes with a bitter aftertaste, like a Facebook Memories post of a sweet memory from a soured relationship. The Mate 30 Pro fits fairly neatly into the high-end Huawei line of phones. It looks smart, the battery life is great, it’s powerful and the camera is brilliant.
But you shouldn’t buy it. An Android phone without the best bits of Android is unappealing. That you might be able to “hack” those bits back in if you more-or-less abandon mobile security best practices doesn’t solve the problem.
If this phone didn’t have such issues, it would be among the very best. However, it arguably wouldn’t have quite the appeal the Mate 20 Pro had a year ago. A plateauing of progress in some areas has seen Huawei try too hard in others, such as using a stupid volume control mechanic and a show-off screen curve that highlight the underlying panel tech’s limitations.
We would not be surprised if Huawei had a “full Android” update half-prepared, should the spat between Huawei and the US government resolve, and leave Google free to sign off Huawei phones for the full Android treatment. And if that happens you can more-or-less forget this review and buy with full confidence.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
