Huawei Malaysia Launch P30 series

2nd Apr 2019 : Huawei Malaysia today launched its latest P30 series mobile phone & related products 

2nd April 2019 : Huawei Malaysia proudly presenting our Malaysian the brand new P30 series products .

Here are the review by Malaysia Tech Online : -

Huawei’s P series of phones have become known for being fantastic devices for photography – that’s what the P stands for, after all – and with the Huawei P30 the company has clearly set out to create another handset that towers above the competition when it comes to its camera setup.

If you’re looking at the Huawei P30 it’s probably because you want a phone for photography, and its triple-camera loadout is enough to rival the best of Samsung and Apple.

The main camera is a 40MP wide-angle beast – Huawei calls it a Super Spectrum shooter, and it ‘sees’ RYYB (red, yellow, yellow, blue) light instead of the typical RGB (red, green, blue), enabling it to capture a wider range of colors for richly detailed images and, Huawei claims, making it particularly great in low-light conditions.

In addition the phone packs a 16MP ultra-wide camera and an 8MP telephoto camera, the latter of which lends itself to snappier autofocus as well as 30x optical zoom, enabling you to get up close and personal even to distant subjects.

All that sounds great on paper, and with the addition of a 32MP front-facing snapper for unnecessarily high-quality selfies, it seems like the Huawei P30 has the best camera setup on the market (other than the P30 Pro, which offers a 50x zoom and an additional ‘time-of-flight’ depth-sensing camera for better bokeh shots) – you’ll need to head to the Camera section of this review to check out how well it fared in practice.

In terms of size, the Huawei P30 is the very definition of a mid-sized phone – at 149.1 x 71.4 x 7.6mm, and with a weight of 165g, it’s almost exactly the same size as the Samsung Galaxy S10, although the P30 is a little heavier. 

The back and front of the phone are covered in Corning Gorilla Glass, which together with the rounded edges and sleek design give the P30 a premium feel; however, the top and bottom of the handset are flat where the sides are rounded, and together with the fairly prominent camera bump on the rear it arguably makes for a slightly sub-premium look – although we’ve seen phones like the Xiaomi Mi 9 on which this array was even more ‘bumpy’. 

The bottom of the device houses the USB-C and 3.5mm headphone ports, and on the right side is the volume rocker and power button. 

This presence of the headphone jack is a little surprising given the Huawei P20  didn’t have one, and personally we’re glad to see it return – although the P30 did launch alongside the Huawei FreeLace wireless headphones, which connect to the device through the USB-C port for charging and setup, so the company was under no particular obligation to bring back the jack.

The Huawei P30 stands out from other phones for its colorful body, as it comes in a range of gradient designs: Breathing Crystal (pale blue), Aurora (a more vivid blue), as well as standard black model. 

The 6.1-inch OLED display takes up an impressive amount of the phone’s frontage, broken only by a ‘teardrop’ notch at the top housing the front-facing camera. The screen has a 2340 x 1080 resolution and supports Full HD+, allowing for a greater brightness range and more vivid colors.

This display’s max brightness is noticeably brighter than the screens on other handsets we compared it to, but colors did seem a tiny bit paler – we only noticed this in side-by-side comparisons though, so the difference isn’t significant

The Huawei P30 has a sizeable 3,650mAh battery pack, which was enough to get through a day of moderate to heavy use with a healthy amount left in reserve. 

We could stream content, play games, or listen to music or podcasts for extended periods of time, and the battery wouldn’t drop too low, and Huawei’s Optimiser function tells you if idle apps are draining battery, so we never had to worry about cutting back our usage to save juice.

As with any phone, photography drained power a little more quickly, and since that’s one of the main draws of the P30 we found ourselves using the camera a lot; however, even prolonged photo shoots didn’t have enough of an impact on the battery to be a cause for concern.

The big selling point of the Huawei P30 is the camera – that’s likely why you’re considering buying the phone, and it’s what Huawei talked about the most at the launch. 

The three-camera setup the P30 boasts is impressive enough, but the range of photographic effects and tools on offer here are what cement the phone’s dominance.

The headline attraction is a 40MP f/1.8 wide-angle camera, backed up by 16MP f/2.2 ultra-wide and 8MP f/2.4 telephoto snapper, and together they’re capable of taking some amazing pictures.

The 40MP sensor uses Huawei’s Super Spectrum technology, which means it gathers RYYB light instead of the RGB that most sensors do; which according to Huawei enables the P30 to capture images with more natural-looking and vivid colors, and to take greatly improved low-light shots.

When we took pictures at night, or in dark indoor settings, we often found the camera took pictures that picked out the subject much better than other phone camera would, both for close-up and wide shots. 

This is the work of the camera’s Night mode, which requires longer exposure to take better pictures – so you’ll need to make sure to keep the camera steady – although we also got some great shots using the standard shooting mode.

The other benefit of the Super Spectrum sensor is that it captures more color detail, with the Vivid or Smooth color modes enhancing naturally bright colors, like the yellow tag on the pair of keys pictured below, without artificially boosting more muted colors, meaning objects retained a natural look. 

However we found the Night and enhanced color modes didn’t work together very well, with colors boosted a little overzealously in low-light conditions. 

The new Huawei P30 Pro takes a lot of what we saw with the Huawei Mate 20 Pro but improves some elements of the design as well as rebooting the camera somewhat - and is a distinctly more powerful phone than the Huawei P30 in a few ways. 

The overall effect of the screen quality is that, despite it being ‘only’ Full HD, you're getting a very impressive picture. The peak brightness stuns at times, with a bright sunset powering out from a dark scene. However, we're not sure there's any HDR support in the screen here, so that's something we're looking to follow up on soon.

If you're expecting vibrant OLED technology here, it's best to hold off clicking that ‘pre-order now’ button until  you've seen the muted, natural colors of the display on the P30 Pro. It's certainly not an issue, but it is something you'll want to check out in person.

The Huawei P30 Pro design isn't earth-shattering, although the screen does taper away and curve into the sides of a rather thick aluminum band that runs around the outside of the device.

That band houses the USB-C connector (but sadly no headphone jack, unlike the P30 ‘normal’), as well as the single, downwards-firing mono speaker. It feels a bit old-fashioned to not have a stereo speaker setup, but that’s because there’s no conventional speaker for taking calls – the screen itself vibrates, using a technology called magnetic levitation.

The output from said speaker is only fine – it's not the best we've ever heard, but for a single option it's better than expected in terms of volume and the clarity of music being pumped out.

The camera array sits proud from the rear of the phone, pulling in the four sensors together, which can create a rather lopsided feel when it’s laid on the table; but the volume and power button sit nicely where the thumb falls on the right-hand side of the phone.

The big feature Huawei spent so long briefing us on is the new P30 Pro camera system, which it claims will make us completely rethink smartphone photography. The main thrust is for the Super Spectrum Sensor, a 40MP effort that can pull in light at a ridiculously  high ISO and has an f/1.6 lens for quality night footage. 

The SuperSpectrum sensor is the feature Huawei is making the biggest deal of here: it's replaced each of the green pixels in a standard RGB sensor with two yellow pixels, so it reckons the sensor will be able to pull more light and color information as a result, with an enhanced ability to suck in red and green light.

Combined with Huawei's strong artificial intelligence (AI) photography smarts, the results should be impressive. This is flanked by a 5x telephoto camera (a feat achieved by turning the light coming in 90 degrees inside the phone to give it more space to reflect the image) as well as a time-of-flight range imaging sensor (for better background blurring) and an ultra-wide mode, using a 20MP sensor.

The Huawei P30 Pro also has 10x lossless zoom, claims the brand, thanks to some inbuilt AI smarts – and it uses that feature to offer a 50x digital zoom, to do things like take a picture of the moon when it's doing something pretty, or just have a really close up look at a poster across the street from a demo area. Just for instance, not saying we're doing that.

So how does the camera work on the Huawei P30 Pro? Pretty well. Indoor and outdoor shots look clean, and snap quickly, but do show that same level of sharpness that Huawei phones seem to deliver - it’s up to you whether that’s a bold feature or not.

The background blur on photos looks good too, although the shutter lag was pretty pronounced – in fact, most photos we took saw the Huawei P30 Pro asking us to 'hold still' having snapped the shot so it could sharpen the pictures using its AI mode.

The selfie camera is powerful – more powerful than is necessary, some might argue – at 32MP and takes a strong enough picture. 

There's smile mode to take a snap, but we found that we had to smile really widely to have a chance of the feature working – unless we were just jaded by the press room.

However, it's in the zoom department that the Huawei P30 Pro really excels. The 5x telephoto zoom and 10x enhanced enlargement both work incredibly well (though not so much at night), and focusing on a small poster across the road showed that the 50x zoom actually gave strong, sharp photos too.

Huawei's AI game is strong at the moment, using internal smarts to improve the quality of photos, and it's generally done the same here with aplomb. 

The battery life on the Huawei P30 Pro wasn't disclosed by the brand, but it did unveil an increased power pack inside the phone that offers 4200mAh of power.

Given we know that Huawei is great at providing battery management features, we're expecting this internal juice box to keep chugging along nicely for at least a single day.

However, if the levels are looking a bit low before you're ready to leave work, the 40W fast charging on the Huawei P30 Pro means you can get to 70% power in just 30 minutes, which is pretty incredible.

There's also speedy 15W wireless charging, and the capability to charge another phone or pair of wirelessly-powered headphones with some reverse wireless power delivery. Truly, we're living in the future.

In a month or two, when an update lands you'll even be able to record a video with a small window zooming in on the action... we can't see why you'd really want to do that though, so it not being a launch feature isn't the end of the world.