Huawei has unveiled its flagship Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro but the launch comes at a difficult time for Huawei, whose presence on Trumps’s entity list prevents US companies from doing business with the Chinese firm.
This means if you want to buy these the Mate 30 Pro now, it will not come with Google Mobile Services i.e no Google’s apps and services, nor will they come with the Play Store preinstalled, which is how most Android users outside of China download their apps. The company has opened up its bootloader and also the Mate 30 Pro Series and will ship with the Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) core, which it claims is already integrated with over 45,000 apps.
The company announced that it was investing $1 billion into its software ecosystem for future phone including the Mate 30 Pro with an investment that would be split across a development fund, a user growth fund, and a marketing fund.
The Mate 30 series runs on EMUI 10, which Huawei’s consumer CEO Richard Yu says is based on Android 10. Features of the software include a dark mode and gesture control via the sensor in the phone’s notch. Huawei also advertises that the phones will support both face unlock and an in-display fingerprint sensor.
Mate 30 Pro has a halo ring design
When it comes to hardware, the phones have a more typical set of flagship specs. Both have a Leica-branded rear camera array contained within a circular camera cutout that Huawei is calling a “Halo ring design.” The Mate 30 has a main 40-megapixel camera with a f/1.8 aperture, an ultra wide-angle 16-megapixel f/2.2 camera, an 8-megapixel f/2.4 telephoto camera, and a “laser focus” sensor. Meanwhile, the Mate 30 Pro bumps the resolution of the ultra wide-angle camera to 40 megapixels with an aperture of f/1.8, and swaps the laser focus sensor for a 3D depth sensor.
In terms of video, Huawei claims that the Mate 30 Pro can record in up to 4K 60 fps, or record in slow motion at speeds of up to 7680 fps when filming in 720p. Huawei showed off this ultra slow-motion camera in action with footage of a hummingbird in flight, where its wings were still visible despite the speed at which they were moving.
The regular Mate 30 ships with a pretty typical curved OLED display, but on the Mate 30 Pro, you’re getting Huawei’s all-new “Horizon Display.” The Horizon Display is also curved on either side, but the curve is far more drastic — 88-degrees, to be exact.
With such a drastic curve, you can use the extra screen hanging over on either side for expanded functionality, such as controlling the phone’s volume or “quad-finger game control.”
Battery sizes also differ between the two phones: the Mate 30 Pro has a larger 4,500mAh battery, compared to 4,200mAh in the Mate 30. Both phones support fast charging up to 40W wired, or 27W when wirelessly charging.
Full Specs Mate 30 Vs Mate 30 Pro
| Category | Mate 30 Pro | Mate 30 |
| Operating System | EMUI 10 Based on Android 10 | EMUI 10 Based on Android 10 |
| Display | 6.53-inches OLED 2400 x 1176 | 6.62-inches OLED 2340 x 1080 |
| Processor | Huawei Kirin 990 | Huawei Kirin 990 |
| Memory | 8GB RAM | 8GB RAM |
| Storage | 256GB | 128GB |
| Rear Camera 1 | 40MP SuperSensing Camera f/1.6 aperture | 40MP SuperSensing Camera f/1.8 aperture |
| Rear Camera 2 | 40MP Cine Camera f/1.8 aperture | 16MP Ultra Wide Angle Camera f/2.2 aperture |
| Rear Camera 3 | 8MP Telephoto Camera f/2.4 aperture | 8MP Telephoto Camera f/2.4 aperture |
| Rear Camera 4 | 3D Depth Sensing Camera | N/A |
| Front Camera | 32MP f/2.0 aperture | 24MP f/2.0 aperture |
| Battery | 4,500 mAh | 4,200 mAh |
The Mate 30 Pro is available in six colors total, including two vegan leather options: green and orange. Other colors include silver, green, purple, and black. There’s also a new Porsche Design edition of the Mate 30, which uses a genuine leather finish on the rear of the device.The Porsche Design Huawei Mate 30 RS is available in red and black, and eschews the circular camera bump in favor of a more integrated quad-sensor array.
Internally, the Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro phones use Huawei’s Kirin 990 chip, which the company announced at IFA at the beginning of the month. The chip is the first from Huawei to include a built-in 5G modem, and as a result there’ll be 5G versions of the phones available. Along with the 5G modem, Huawei says that the phone includes 14 antennas for 5G, and 21 antennas in total.
Pricing
The Huawei Mate 30 will be available with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, and will start at UGX 3.2 m = €799, while the Mate 30 Pro increases the internal storage to 256GB, and starts at UGX 4.5 = €1,099 for the 4G model or UGX 4.9 m = €1,199 for the 5G model. Finally, the Porsche Design edition will start at UGX 8.5 m = €2,095, and will come with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of internal storage. All prices quoted are exclusive of local taxes.
