Huawei’s P30 Pro is announced with a set of excellent cameras and a tiny notch

Huawei has finally announced the often-rumored P30 and P30 Pro, and it's looking to be one of the most impressive smartphone cameras of the year. That's true for the Pro, at least, although if you're looking for something moderately high-end without spending an absolute ton of money, the regular P30 still looks great.

Signature Huawei hardware

First up, let's talk about specs. The P30 Pro packs in one of Huawei's in-house Kirin 980 CPUs with 8GB of RAM, plus two options of either 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB of storage. The 6.5-inch OLED display has a fairly decent resolution of 2340 x 1080, IP86 water and dust resistance thanks to a missing headphone jack, and a 4200mAh battery.

The battery is interesting with the P30 Pro, and not just because of its above average size. Huawei is including a blazing fast 40W Super Charge speed with the P30 Pro, which means you can get about 70% of a charge in just 30 minutes, which is insane. Battery life barely even matters when you can almost completely recharge the phone in just a few minutes. Wirelessly you can also get 15W of speed, which is a big jump from the 5W ceiling of wireless charging from just a couple years ago.

Oh, reverse wireless charging is here, too.

These specs change a little with the regular P30, including a drop to IP53 certification, a smaller battery with only a 22.5W charging capability, and a smaller 6.1-inch screen. It does still have a headphone jack, however.

Rewriting the rules of photography

Huawei's tagline for the P30 Pro announcement has been about “rewriting the rules” of photography, and that's their game plan here. The phone has a wild quad-camera system with three more traditional sensors and a ToF sensor for depth detection. These cameras combine to allow for up to 10x lossless zoom, starting with 5x optical zoom then some digital software wizardry to double your zoom on top of that.

The last depth sensor allows for some drastically improved portrait mode shots, and Huawei has upgraded one of the RGB sensors to a full red, blue, and yellow sensor that allows in up to 40% more light, so you should see much better low-light shots as well. These cameras are also capable of taking Dual Video shots, which is fancy marketing speak for recording video from two of the sensors on the back of the phone. One part of the video will be the ultra wide capture, while the other is a little more zoomed in on your subject.

Huawei's sticking with an in-display fingerprint scanner, which is another hit-or-miss spec on these kinds of phones, and you can expect the latest EMUI on these devices.

Availability

If you're interested, the P30 Pro will be available for €999 up to €1249, depending on whether you want 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB of storage. The smaller P30 will run just €799 with 128GB of storage. You won't be seeing these in the US, but otherwise they look to be a strong start to Huawei's 2019.