The Huawei Mate 30 Pro Review: Top Hardware without Google?

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It’s been roughly 2 months now since Huawei announced the new Mate 30 Pro as well as the Kirin 990 chipsets. As an unusual hectic fall season finally calms down, it’s been due time to have a closer look at the new the company’s new flagship device and new silicon chipset.

There’s no beating around the bush that one aspect that vastly overshadowed the actual device itself, is the fact that Huawei had been banned from using Google’s mobile services. The Mate 30 Pro consequently is one of the first phones released by the company which doesn’t come with any Google applications preinstalled. There’s a lot to talk about in this regard and we’ll address this more in depth later on in the article, but I’d like to flip the narrative upside down here first and first discuss the hardware aspects of the new phone and see if Huawei had been able to create a competitive device, and if the worry about the software actually makes sense in the first place in terms of considerations of the device.

Today we’re reviewing the higher-end model of the Mate 30 series, the Mate 30 Pro. Specifically, we’re reviewing the 4G variant of this phone. The new Mate 30 Pro promises a brand-new design with a unique 90° curved screen on its sides – a first not only for Huawei but for the smartphone market overall. The phone is powered by HiSilicon’s latest Kirin 990 processor which will be powering power of Huawei and Honor’s devices for 2020 and is undoubtedly one of the more interesting aspects we’re looking forward to test. On the camera side, Huawei employs the same main sensor as on the P30 series and adopts the 3x telephoto module seen in the Mate 20 Pro and the regular P30, but innovates on the ultra-wide-angle module by adopting a second 40MP sensor alongside its main 40MP unit, which is undoubtedly going to be a unique feature for the phone and the company’s devices in 2020.

tarting off on the hardware side, the new Mate 30 Pro employs the new Kirin 990 chipset. This year we’re actually seeing two versions of the chip: The 4G and the 5G variant, representing actually completely different chips even though the hardware specifications of the two are quite similar to each other. We’ll be dwelling more into the new chip on the next page so sit tight.

The phone this year comes in a static 8+256GB configuration in terms of DRAM and storage. The very high base storage of the phone isn’t necessarily just a case of goodwill and more aggressive competitive positioning of the company, as the phone’s price does come at a rather steep 1099€ for the 4G model, so one would expect a higher storage configuration at this price.

The phone comes with support for Huawei’s “NM” or nanomemory card standard – essentially, it’s an SD Card alternative in the form of a nanoSIM. Huawei seems to make these cards quite widely available and the price mark-up over regular SD cards isn’t too high, but it’s still a weird peculiarity that till now hasn’t seen adoption by any other vendor.

Other internal hardware aspects for the phone that do stand out a bit is the device’s WiFi capabilities. As 2019 comes to an end, we’ve seen more vendors adopt WiFi 6 / 802.11ax being adopted by the big vendors, particularly Samsung adopting it in both the S10 and Note10 series, and more recently Apple also launching its whole new line-up with support for the new standard. Given the Mate 30 Pro’s flagship positioning and respective pricing, it is a bit unfortunate that we’re seeing the phone make due with a WiFi 5 / .ac solution.
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