Huawei’s latest flagship phones athe Mate 30 series is now official, starting with the Mate 30 Pro and the Mate 30. The announcement of the Mate 30 series comes at a difficult time for Huawei, whose presence on the USA’s entity list prevents US companies from doing business with the Chinese firm. Google said last month that these phones won’t ship with 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.
Huawei’s response to the problem has been to nurture its own ecosystem of apps, which are available through the Huawei AppGallery. The company announced that rather than shipping with Google’s services preinstalled, the Mate 30 Series would instead 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 with an investment that would be split across a development fund, a user growth fund, and a marketing fund.
This means Huawei will only be able to bring security updates to the Mate 30 phones when those updates hit open-source Android. The new phones particularly the Mate 30 Pro will compete with Apple’s new iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro, Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 phones and the upcoming Google Pixel 4, which launches on Oct. 15.
Key specs
6.53-inch OLED display
88-degree ultra curve form, with “side touch” functionality
Kirin 990 CPU, 16-core Mali G76 GPU
IP68 dust and water resistance
40-megapixel wide angle; 40-megapixel ultrawide angle; 8-megapixel telephoto; Time of Flight quad-camera setup
32-megapixel selfie camera with AI HDR
198 grams, 8.8mm thick
4,500-mAh battery
Reverse wireless charging
EMUI 10, based on open-source Android
Colors: Space Silver, Cosmic Purple, Black, Emerald Green, Vegan Leather Forest Green, Vegan Leather Orange, Porsche Design Mate 30 Pro RS edition
Huawei claims that the phone 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 screens of the two devices are slightly different. The Mate 30 Pro has a 6.53-inch screen which curves around the edges of the device, while the regular Mate 30 has a more traditional flat display that’s slightly bigger at 6.62 inches in size. 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.
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.
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.
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.
The Huawei Mate 30 will be available with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, and will start at €799, while the Mate 30 Pro increases the internal storage to 256GB, and starts at €1,099 for the 4G model or €1,199 for the 5G model. Finally, the Porsche Design edition will start at €2,095, and will come with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of internal storage.
