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

Video Recording

Starting off with 4K30 on the main sensor, we notice that the image looks quite flat and lacking contrast. Throughout the various parts of the recording we see that this actually changes quite a bit depending on the lighting. Recording against a brighter background we however see a fundamental limitation of the camera and processing: it’s not able to deal that well with high dynamic range scenarios. The sky is either too blown up, or the foreground is too underexposed.

Zooming in while recording, the phone has issue with balancing exposure correctly and it takes a long time for the telephoto lens to focus, if at all.

Using 60fps recording I feel like the picture quality is actually better. This isn’t because it’s 60fps or somehow the bitrate is higher, in fact the bitrate of the resulting videos is seemingly capped at 28Mbps in the HEVC recording mode, no matter if it’s 30 or 60fps. The 60fps mode looks better because the EIS is disabled and the phone is just better able to hold details.

In the higher rate recording mode, you can only use the sensor with which you start with and not switch around. On the main camera I noted focus issues in this mode as the phone had trouble to autofocus on near objects, either taking a really long time or not doing it at all and requiring a manual tap in the viewfinder.

On the ultra-wide-angle, we see a similar slow focus. This time around, the camera is very slow in focusing out in far objects and takes up to a second to realise it needs to change. At 4K30, image quality in terms of detail is similar to the main camera, which I feel is a bit bitrate bound, the 4K60 footage looks better as less detail is blurred by the EIS.

Unfortunately, the exposure handling in switching between the main camera and the ultra-wide is just quite terrible in the scenes I shot, with extremely uneven exposures and slow switching between the modules.

Huawei always had weaknesses in regards to video recording, but I expected them to be able to achieve more this generation. The Mate 30 Pro just really isn’t competitive with what Samsung and Apple are able to offer in terms of quality.

Speaker Evaluation - Pretty Bad

Speaker quality on the Mate 30 Pro isn’t very high end. The phone only has a single mono bottom firing speaker for media playback – while it does have an under-screen speaker vibrator which uses the display panel as a speaker membrane, this can’t be used for general audio.

In terms of the audio quality of the main speaker, it’s very mediocre. While the unit has good lows, it’s lacking in the higher frequencies and thus sounds quite muted compared to what we’re used to from other flagship devices. It’s also doesn’t get nearly as loud as what we see from the competition, and seemingly is also quieter than what we saw from some previous generation Huawei devices.

Overall, audio quality on the Mate 30 Pro isn’t very up to par. The fact that Huawei still continues to leave out the headphone jack on the more expensive “Pro” models and choosing to integrate it in the regular models such as the Mate 30 still boggles the mind as to what exactly they’re thinking. Well, don’t answer that, I guess the company’s offering of wireless headphones is self-explanatory.