The Huawei P30 & P30 Pro Reviews: Photography Enhanced
by Andrei Frumusanu on April 18, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- P30
- P30 Pro
GPU Performance
Much like the System Performance section, I’m not expecting any big surprises in the GPU performance section. The Kirin 980 uses a Mali G76MP10 at 720MHz and while the chip isn’t blazing as much as the competition, it still performs adequately well and is a significant upgrade to last year’s Kirin 970.
In the 3DMark Sling Shot physics test, the P30s are taking the top spots in terms of performance, both in peak as well as sustained figures. The limitation here lies mainly on the part of the CPU as well as its thermal throttling characteristics. Both the P30 and P30 Pro barely throttle in this regard, at least not in GPU power constrained scenarios.
In the graphics test, we see expected results on the P30 Pro, however on the smaller P30 there’s essentially no thermal throttling at all, which is extremely peculiar.
P30 Overheating Warning & App shutdown
Shockingly enough, I didn’t manage to make the P30 throttle at all in any of the tests, as before it could even get to a point of thermal equilibrium, the OS would shut down the application and raise a thermal overheating warning. I don’t know what’s going on with devices nowadays that this keeps happening as I’ve encountered the issue in last year’s Qualcomm Galaxy S9+ with release firmware as well. The last time this happened, it was due to disabling of the thermal throttling when the OS was detecting benchmarking applications, however in our case we’re using altered application IDs. Still even with this the smaller P30 overheated repeatedly. The fact that this is an OS warning means it’s triggered by a different driver than the usual SoC thermal drivers, so something must be off on the current firmware.
In the GFXBench Vulkan High benchmark we see both P30 and P30 Pro neck-in-neck with quite excellent performance. Again what is interesting here is that both devices perform significantly better than the Mate 20s and the View20 with the same chipset. I explain this through the fact that the P30s come with newer GPU drivers, and Arm must have made more significant improvements in their Vulkan drivers.
In the Normal variant of the Aztec benchmark, we see the P30 Pro throttle a little more, yet it still manages to showcase much better performance figures than the Mate 20, and also higher peak figures than the Mate 20 Pro & View20. The smaller P30 here posts the best figures, however its sustained performance is so high simply because the device is getting extremely hot. I’ve argued if I should be posting the figures for the P30 at all since if you continue to load the device in this manner it’ll simply crash the application.
Overall, GPU performance of the P30s is in line with that of last year’s Snapdragon 845 phones, which is still great. Huawei and HiSilicon still trail behind Samsung’s Exynos Mali GPU implementations, although the difference isn’t all that big this generation.
I hope that Huawei figures out the thermal issues on the smaller P30 and issues a firmware update, I’ll be updating the article with the relevant data once this is all sorted out.
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hawkie - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
So advanced and yet still unable to adjust notifications volume separate from ringing volume.s.yu - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
I know that the volume control of some apps are just broken, for example Wechat will destroy your hearing passing the ringtone through the earphones at maximum volume if somebody calls using the VoIP function while you're wearing IEMs listening to music. This app probably has a billion users, it's ****ing ridiculous and extremely annoying.amosbatto - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
Let's see whether the P30 and P30 Pro pass my standard for what is important in a smartphone:1. Removable battery: No.
1A. If not removable, how hard is it to crack open the case to replace the battery:
Pretty hard. iFixit gives the P30 Pro a repairability score of 4/10. It is very hard to pry open the case without breaking the glass back. In other words you are probably going to throw away this device after 2-3 years when the battery is degraded.
2. How well will it survive drops? Probably not well.
2A. How hard is it to replace the screen and the glass back panel if broken? Hard and expensive.
3. MicroSD slot for memory expansion: No. It has expensive proprietary memory.
4. Can I root the phone? No
5. Can I unlock the bootloader? No
6. Can I install LineageOS? Never. All info on the Kirin SoC is proprietary.
7. How long will Huawei offer updates? 24 months with updates every 2 months, which is decent for Android, but not as good as the Pixel 2 and 3 which will get 3 years of updates or Apple which is 4-5 years.
In other words, I can only expect to use the P30/P30 Pro for 2 years and I can only do what Huawei wants me to do with the phone. I'll pass. Strange how little attention Anandtech pays to these issues in its reviews.
I am now so fed up with the mobile industry, that I preordered the Purism Librem 5, because at least Purism respects my rights as a user.
Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
> 4. Can I root the phone? No> 5. Can I unlock the bootloader? No
> 6. Can I install LineageOS? Never. All info on the Kirin SoC is proprietary.
> Strange how little attention Anandtech pays to these issues in its reviews.
Speaking as somebody who used to compile his own kernels on his smartphones; it doesn't matter. I don't even root nowdays. The vast majority of readers will not, and I say that they should not care about these things. There is simply no benefit to the user experience.
> It is very hard to pry open the case without breaking the glass back.
I've opened plenty of glass back phones and replaced the batteries, it's not terribly hard. The glass backs are also a lot tougher than you think.
> 2A. How hard is it to replace the screen and the glass back panel if broken? Hard and expensive.
Glass back is very easy. Screen is something that no phone of the last few years will be easy to replace anymore.
> 7. How long will Huawei offer updates? 24 months with updates every 2 months, which is decent for Android, but not as good as the Pixel 2 and 3 which will get 3 years of updates or Apple which is 4-5 years.
Fair enough and true. All Android vendors do lag behind Apple.
Quantumz0d - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
>The vast majority of readers will not, and I say that they should not care about these things. There is simply no benefit to the user experience.Wrong, I've seen so many people commenting on the articles here about the Bootloader unlock for Huawei phones specially and also how the Android is devolving with killing hidden APIs to disable all developer powerful programming skills, for instance Devcheck by Elemental X dev needed to go full Root else the app wont work. Nova Launcher needs root for D2W functionality.
Draw over other apps is dead, Clipboard access is dead officially, and so many other ton of restrictions how about you read up on Scoped Storage mentioned here by a hardcore Android Developer on the Google's intent on dumbing down Android ?
https://commonsware.com/blog/2019/03/28/death-exte...
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/128591846
Anandtech technical insight "write-ups" are not some YouTube mainstream pleb "talk" instead they focus on extremely geeky stuff. This is exactly what power users care for. As an XDA member every thread there focuses on EAS and other kernel optimizations which go perfectly in line with the AT pieces done by you and Matt.
Root users are less indeed and it's becoming more scarce that doesn't mean you can write off that part entirely. Android by it's right uses GNU GPL V2 and the abusers like MediaTek are left in a dumpster oblivion without a lending hand to make the software patching for the end users like how the community does it for *FREE* when the OEM abandons them and how Qcomm CAF contributed which made them so popular and welcoming for the developers, Running RR 7.1.2 with latest patch thanks to community else that OS was outdated and left in dust.
And I have an LG V30S as well go to WTF thread on XDA and see how many people root that phone, that's not even a OnePlus or Xiaomi phone which are mostly customization centric and root friendly devices. And LG screwed up the DTS X patch in their Official Software update for US998, and guess what ? Community helped it by modifying the Build.prop with ROOT and enable that functionality. Same goes for the G7 EQ app on the V30, with Magisk. So this is not user experience ? and the ESS HiFi mode as well. All this is for one phone.
I think you underestimate AT readers with normal Mainstream people. Sad
Andrei Frumusanu - Saturday, April 20, 2019 - link
> Wrong, I've seen so many people commenting on the articles hereThat's just a loud minority, you have a warped view of general users.
> Anandtech technical insight "write-ups" are not some YouTube mainstream pleb "talk" instead they focus on extremely geeky stuff. This is exactly what power users care for.
Deep-dives such as on Apple's SoCs and µarch are not for power users, they're for the technically curious. There is overlap in this audience, but you're overestimating it.
> Android by it's right uses GNU GPL V2 and the abusers like MediaTek are left in a dumpster
*Android* isn't GPL. The kernel is, and MediaTek VENDORS (they have the responsibility) largely adhere to it.
> I think you underestimate AT readers with normal Mainstream people.
I think I have a good view on who most AT readers are, they're not mainstream people, but they're also definitely not persons like yourself.
Quantumz0d - Saturday, April 20, 2019 - link
Okay. I may have overestimated. But that doesn't explicitly give an impression that Root / BL unlock / Custom ROM are completely useless / lacks any UX improvement because there is a fair share of people using Lineage OS (1.73 Million active installs as we speak -> stats.lineageos.org) and quoting AT articles directly at XDA for new devices.Another instance apart from my own device, the MIUI OS it has tons of Ads. How do you block it ? you need root or BL unlock to improve the user experience be it root or flashing another custom ROM OS or the Pixel GCAM mods with Magisk modules without breaking stuff here and there because system app locations and etc are complicated for even an intermediate user when uninstalling or etc.
Rooting is like getting the keys to your castle back and own it and feel responsible, not handling the keys to the corporations and rely on other entities, which most of us enjoy this part doesn't matter just wanted to mention it.
I think, a little mentioning of BL unlock and acknowledging it (for ownership of the HW one paid) doesn't hurt anyone (Idk if it hurts AT from Huawei POV like how Samsung avoided you out for showing the truth, if that's a case then it's an unfortunate situation that consumer is put in dark)
Thanks
jabber - Saturday, April 20, 2019 - link
Yeah rooting is so 2012. I did it back then (Nexus 4 days) and nightly builds and to be honest it was a waste of life.I do not know ANYONE now personally that roots their phone or puts custom builds on it. Just not worth the effort.
It's only important to a small minority on tech forums. Unfortunately, those kind of people have little perspective of 'normal life' and 'normal people'.
BabelHuber - Monday, April 22, 2019 - link
I think you are confusing rooting with "permanently messing with a device" 😎Also for me the days of custom ROMs and nightlies are over, but I still have a rooted Pixel 2 XL and could hardly use it without root, even though I am on the stock ROM.
The blinding white UI of Android 5 to Android 9 I couldn't stand, so I painted it black with Substratum for years. Night and day difference for me.
My phone had a multitouch bug for months, but there was a Magisk module to fix this.
Google switched off Pixel 3 camera features which my phone is perfectly capable to handle (they gradually added them, though). No need to mess around with hacked Google cameras, a simple build.prop change fixed this.
System-wide add blocking FTW!
So each month I apply the new patch now, then I flash TWRP and Magisk. Afterwards, it's Substratum's time to turn everything black again. Finally, I activate the ad blocker again and quickly change some values in the build.prop.
This is 20 minutes of time every month, and I think it's well spent.
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, April 23, 2019 - link
Everything you mention Samsung had for years, out of the box, without root.