- [Michael] There's a reason Huawei
puts all its branding sideways on its P series devices,
it wants you to think of them as cameras,
just as much as their smartphones.
And given the telescope crammed into this one,
that makes sense.
But the fact remains that when you're not using
it like this, you're using it like this.
So today, I'm tackling all the smartphone stuff first.
(upbeat music)
I wanna kick it off with a peek behind the curtain.
Huawei actually gave me a different color review device
than I asked for, and like Sheryl Crow might say,
it's my favorite mistake.
See, in photos and videos, the more striking color options
are the aurora and amber sunrise, but in person,
this breathing crystal finish is absolutely stunning.
So much so that I think the Polar Seltzer company
has a better name for it, I now call this Unicorn Kisses.
And if you happen to get a boring color
like poor Daniel Bader over at Android Central,
pay a visit to my sponsor dbrand
who hooked my up with this black Swarm Skin.
Or if you get a fancy color you really don't like,
you can always tone it down with options
from bamboo to matte black.
You've been watching these long enough folks,
you know the deal, they're the best vinyl skins
in the business and the link to dbrand
is down in the description.
Time for a salute to science.
As you may recall from my hands on video,
the P30 Pro does away with an earpiece.
In it's place, an electro magnetic actuator
that vibrates the display to produce sound.
I was skeptical about the audio quality,
I thought it was gonna be a mushy mess.
So I made a ton of calls on this thing
and it turns out, it's just like using a phone
with a conventional earpiece.
It's crisp and loud and callers said the same
about my sound quality too.
The only disadvantage is that we're now back
to only one speaker at the bottom edge
for media and speaker phone calls.
It's fine, but it's still kind of a bummer.
On the subject of bummers, the P30 Pro's software
is it's weakest offering, but in the spirit
of changing things up, I'm first
gonna talk about it's successes.
It's very useful for people like me
to have a builtin screen recorder.
In fact, Huawei is really good at screen capture in general.
With it's custom knock knock gesture and scroll capture
for those long lists of battery stats.
I'll show you those in a second.
It's also a very fast phone, even down
to the optical fingerprint sensor.
Typically a sluggish component.
And I like the mechanic of pinning an app
to the task switcher so you can prevent it
from being closed in the background.
But taken as a whole, the software is still bad.
And I think I finally figured out a short way
of saying why, it's a mishmash of ideas from elsewhere.
Huawei has taken it's look and feel from IOS,
so instead of a swipe down gesture giving you
the notification shade, you get a ripoff
of the iPhone Finder instead.
It even triggers when you're scrolling in widgets,
which is great.
The consolation prize is this quick trigger down here
copied from LG.
Try to edit an image with pinch to zoom
and you'll get Huawei's Amazon shopping clone instead.
My phone won't remember my browser preference
for some reason.
And the legendary battery life I keep teasing has a price.
The system militantly polices background processes.
I've had Pocket Casts close
while I was listening to a podcast.
Now to be fair, that's happened on other android handsets
as well, but typically not those with this much RAM.
And while I'm listening to those podcasts,
with the screen off, I still can't quickly open the camera
because Huawei maps the quick launch for the camera
to the volume key, not the power button like everyone else.
But you know what?
I'll put up with anything if it means
I get to use these cameras.
Call the new one a periscope, call it a telescope,
what it is is a 5X optical zoom assembly
that gets you much closer to a subject.
Now this kind of thing is only good
for peeping Toms and spies, right?
I don't think so, Tim.
Just look at the framing possibilities this gives you.
A popular one I shared from Paris was
putting my phone up against a shop window
and punching in on these wristwatches.
Or look at the fun you can have with depth
with the Eiffel Tower just looming in the background here.
Photos that would be dull were they framed wide
become intentional and compelling with zoom.
And because that zoom starts with a solid
optical foundation at 5X, it's still
crisp enough at 10X, at least for Instagram.
Yes you can crank it up to 50,
but that's just cropping further and further in,
introducing more wobble and more noise,
so I've taken to stopping at 10X in most settings.
Now that telephoto camera is not built for low light,
but fortunately the P30 Pro brings Huawei's Night Mode
which helps substantially in this evening photo
of the Schrafft's building here in Boston.
Same with the phone's ultra wide angle camera.
It's also not built to capture a lot of light,
so Night Mode makes what would otherwise be a dull
and dark washout into something usable.
You'll never wanna do this, shoot in pitch darkness
with any phone camera, but in this case,
it's interesting to compare the P30 Pro
with Google's Pixel 3, whose Night Sight feature was
the king of low light photography.
In less extreme settings, Night Mode helps
bring out the details in the shadows.
This photo wouldn't have gotten
the fully creepy mood I was after without Night Mode
bringing out the texture of the grass.
Now even phones that take great stills can choke
when it comes time to put those stills into motion.
And the P30 Pro does stumble a bit on video.
It's nice to see optical stabilization on two
of the three cameras, even the electronic stabilization
on the ultra wide is pretty good.
But it's the color science that suffers.
It's just so much saturation.
Flesh tones red shifting so hard, it looks like
every other person has a sunburn.
Here you can see the color shift across cameras
even more markedly, punch out to the ultra wide
and everything gets a bit more muted,
and therefore more accurate.
But here again, the zoom kind of rescues
it from those failings.
I spent almost the entirety of an hour long layover
at Dublin just filming inbound aircraft
because I've never been able to zoom like this.
Same goes for this chase shot out the window
of an Amtrak train along side a highway.
I've never played traffic helicopter before
because I've never been able to.
So how can it improve?
Well my friend Danny Winget has been saying for a long time
that Huawei phones tend to overexpose and he's right.
It would be nice if I didn't have
to manually bump it down with most shots.
Also, while the selfie camera has been substantially
improved, I'd have really enjoyed seeing
a wide angle lens fitted.
The Pixel 3 still wins here.
As much as I love watching Night Sight work,
it does tend to erase all the drama,
'cause it wipes out pretty much all the contrast.
It would be cool to be able to tune it more precisely.
And I'd like it if Huawei took a note from Samsung
and moved the zoom controls to where
you can actually use them with one hand.
If we were to confine this discussion
to just the primary camera, I'd probably still prefer
my Pixel 3 for a lot of stills.
And the iPhone 10S definitely wins
in terms of video processing.
But I tend to place the most value in phone cameras
that let me shoot across a wide range of situations.
And taken together, the ultra wide plus wide
plus telephoto with 10X usable zoom plus the best
night mode around and the ability to use that ultra wide
as a macro close up shooter, to me it's not even a contest.
The P30 Pro is now the most versatile camera phone of 2019.
It's an absolute stunner!
Let's bring it home with the battery.
Bottom line, you can use this phone all day long
and still bring it home with plenty of gas in the tank.
It's not about screen on time folks,
I listened to music or podcasts over Bluetooth all day long.
And I fired up the camera every 15 minute,
so my phones will never be SOT champs.
If you ask me, the only metric that matters
is charge left at the end of the day.
And in my 11 days with the phone,
I've never seen the low battery warning.
Every 16 to 18 hour day, I finish up
with more than 40% remaining.
And the one time I did intentionally run it down to 9%,
the 40 watt charger in the box shot it back up to 90%
in 40 minutes!
The P30 Pro is on sale now for 999 up to 1249.
Euros of course, since it's not sold in the US.
Whether that's a result of economic protectionism
or pragmatic strategic caution,
I'll leave to others to debate.
I'm here to talk about mobile technology.
And the Huawei P30 Pro is one of the most impressive pieces
of mobile technology that you can buy today.
Disclosure folks, portions of this review
where filmed at the P30 Pro launch event in Paris
for which Huawei provided travel and lodging
to members of the media.
The reviewed device you saw in this video
is a loaner from Huawei.
As always, I neither sought not accepted compensation
for this review and I don't grant manufacturers
copy review which Huawei is seeing this
at the same time you are.
If that's the kind of review you'd like to continue seeing,
please subscribe to the Mr. Mobile on YouTube.
See more photos from the phone at the same handle
on Instagram and let me know what you think of the P30 Pro.
Drop a comment below.
Until next time, thanks for watching.
And stay mobile my friends!