Huawei Mate 30: Specifications, prices and details of the mobile without Google

Huawei launches the rumored Huawei Mate 30, the company's first mobile that does not have access to Google services. We bring you all the information about the camera, screen, battery, processor and more.

We are at a very delicate time for Huawei, which just a few weeks ago announced new headphones as the US contemplated lifting trade restrictions on the company and its subsidiaries. Rising tensions with China threaten to put short-term bondage plans to the test, and Huawei's founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei estimates the resulting lost revenue will be $ 30.000 billion. But that doesn't stop the Beijing company from going ahead with the Huawei Mate 30 series.

At a press event this morning in Munich, Huawei announced the Mate 30 and the Mate 30 Pro. They are the successors to last year's Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro, and they have improved in almost every aspect. Among the highlights is a quad rear camera with a 40-megapixel primary sensor and an edge-to-edge screen that extends almost to the back cover of the phone. In addition, not in vain, they are the first to show off Huawei's new Kirin 990 5G, a SoC with full 5G.

Design

The Huawei Mate 30 Pro differs from the Mate 30 mainly by size, as was the case with the Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro. It is slightly larger and heavier (198 grams versus 196 grams), and has a notch with the camera. front and sensors, unlike the wider notch of the Mate 30 Pro.

The tough glass protects the IP68 aluminum that frames the Mate 14.4 Pro's 9: 30 aspect ratio OLED display 2400 × 1176 pixels, which follows 88 degrees around the sides and extends almost to the USB-C port, microphone and speaker. The Mate 30, by contrast, has a flat screen. It complies with DCI-P3 HDR and minimizes blue light that interrupts sleep by 25% compared to traditional OLED displays.

The upper part of the screens vibrates to produce sound, practically being a headset. And the lower half hides integrated optical sensors with fingerprint recognition, unlike the ultrasound system in the Samsung Galaxy S10, S10 + and Note10. In terms of screens, the Mate 30 Pro measures 6.53 inches diagonally and the Mate 30 6.62 inches, compared to the 20-inch Mate 6.53 Pro.

Like the Mate 20 series before it, the Mate 30 family dispenses with the 3.5mm headphone jack, a move Huawei claims is justified by the phones' larger batteries and 21 MIMO antennas. As a kind of consolation, they get a front camera, a gesture sensor, and a 3D depth sensor.

At the rear of the Mate 30 Pro is what's interesting, as there's a circular four-sensor camera module accented by a stamped ring around its outer edge, which features lenses supplied by longtime Huawei collaborator Leica. They will come alongside a dual LED flash, a laser phase detection autofocus system, and a depth sensor.

Cameras

The Mate 30 has a 16-megapixel main camera (f / 2.2 aperture, 17mm) that reaches up to ISO 204800 and an improved ultra-wide sensor that reaches 40-megapixels (f / 1.8 aperture, 27mm). They complement it with an 8 megapixel telephoto sensor (with aperture f / 2.4, 80mm) capable of 3X and 30X optical zoom with digital zoom.

As for the Mate 30 Pro, it does so with a 40-megapixel main camera (f / 1.8 aperture, 18mm) reaching up to ISO 409600, and a 40-megapixel ultra-wide-angle sensor (f / 1.6, 27mm aperture) and 8 megapixel telephoto sensor (with f / 2.4 aperture, 80mm).

Huawei's SuperSpectrum technology, which made its debut with the P30 and P30 Pro, is there to give its best. It basically makes adjustments with the filters so that the Mate 30 series absorbs up to 40% more light than conventional photosensors. That's due to the wider wavelength of yellow, which is about 600 nanometers compared to 550 nanometers for green.

One of the main photography features of the Mate 30 Pro is a Super slow motion video recording that captures clips at 7.680 frames per second. It's a software-enhanced version of the Mate 960 Pro's 30-frame-per-second recording mode. Huawei says it employs a host of computational techniques ensuring they look as smooth as they would if they were shot at the sensor's native speed.

At conventional speeds (30 frames per second), the Mate 30 series phones can shoot up to 4K HDR at 30 frames per second with real-time bokeh. It does so by benefiting from an AI stabilisation algorithm. The sensors on the Mate 30 series phones have an advantage in other areas, thanks to sophisticated post-processing technology. The 40-megapixel main camera supports long-exposure shooting, while Portrait mode squeezes more frames into the composition, bringing out details that would normally be lost – not to mention bokeh. Add an improved Night mode that combines the best photos from a burst shot taken at multiple exposures, along with AI-assisted stabilisation and “4D” focusing that predicts where subjects move to keep them in focus, and intelligently crops frames to smooth out uneven images.

Rounding things out is Master AI, which recognizes scenes similar to Samsung's Scene Optimizer and LG's AI Cam. It automatically adjusts camera settings based on ambient lighting, contrast, and other factors. Lastly, a dual-view video mode displays two of the phone's four camera shots at the same time in a split-screen view, allowing budding cinematographers to frame close-up and wide-angle shots simultaneously. It's something we've already seen in iPhone 11 Pro.

Unlimited

Historically, Huawei anticipates the chipset within its Mate phones long before launch, and this year was no exception. The Kirin 990 5G, the chip the company unveiled at IFA 2019 in early September, provides the silicon heart of the Mate 30 series.

The Kirin 990 5G, which like the Kirin 980 is manufactured in a 7nm process but with extreme ultraviolet lithography, boasts 10.3 billion transistors in total. This offers a revamped eight-core architecture with two high-performance 76 GHz Cortex-A2.86 cores for demanding computing. Also two 76 GHz Cortex-2.36, intermediate cores that handle daily workloads, and four 55GHz Cortex-A1.8 efficiency cores. These work on lighter tasks like music playback and file transfers.

It is accompanied by 8 GB of RAM in the Mate 30 Pro. The storage capacity reaches a maximum of 256 GB, expandable with Huawei's NanoMemory storage cards.

There is a powerful 12-core graphics chip inside the Kirin 990 5G that is paired with the eight-core processor - the Mali-G76. It contains six more cores than the Mali-G76 in the Kirin 980 and a cache that serves to reduce bandwidth usage and power consumption. These and other enhancements allow the new Mali-G76 to outperform the Snapdragon 640's Adreno 855 chip, according to Huawei, by 6% in terms of overall performance and 20% in efficiency.

Huawei's Neural Processing Unit (NPU) made its first appearance at IFA 2017, where it debuted on the Kirin 970. In short, it is a coprocessor optimized for the kind of vector math that is the lifeblood of machine learning algorithms. . Qualcomm's AI engine and Samsung's own neural processing unit achieve the same ends through different means, but Huawei claims its local Da Vinci architecture is the most capable. According to Huawei, a single small core is up to 24 times more efficient than a large core for tasks such as facial recognition.

Everything is cooled with a graphene film, which Huawei says keeps the Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro 3,9 degrees Celsius cooler than competitors. This will help us not to burn our hands when we have been using it for a long time.

5G on the Huawei Mate 30

The Kirin 990 5G will be one of the first all-in-one full-frequency 5G chipsets to ship later this year, in an area that occupies 36% less than the competition. It supports four sub-6Hz antennas in total and non-autonomous (NSA) and autonomous (SA) architectures, as well as full TDD / FDD frequency bands, but not millimeter wave.

The performance of the chip will not disappoint if the results shown by the company are to be believed. Huawei claims that the Kirin 990 5G machine learning-based adaptive receiver and its design increase download and upload speeds in moving weak signal environments such as cars, trains and buses, achieving up to 5.8 times the maximum upload speed of leading chipsets. preliminary tests. In places with stronger signals, it is theoretically capable of reaching download and upload speeds of up to 2.3Gbps and 1.25Gbps, respectively.

Only the more expensive of the two available Mate 30 Pro models features a 5G modem. The normal Mate 30 stays in 4G connectivity.

Battery life and charging

The Mate 30 series has an identical chip system on all models, but the batteries are another story. The Mate 30 Pro has a 4.500 mAh capacity (slightly higher than the Mate 4.200 Pro's 20 mAh) versus the Mate 4.200's 30 mAh (versus 4.000 mAh), and Huawei says they will last 9,2 hours and 8,2 hours. hours, respectively.

Both are compatible with Huawei's 40-watt SuperCharge technology, which can get up to 70% charge in half an hour. On the subject of wireless charging, the entire Mate 30 series is wirelessly charged up to 27 watts with reverse charging on its rear. Reverse wireless charging is nothing new for Huawei, but this iteration is a bit more powerful than previous generations.

Software

The Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro run Emotion UI (EMUI), Huawei’s custom skin on top of Android 10. However, as a result of the US government’s executive order preventing Huawei from sourcing “hardware, software, and technical services” from US-affiliated companies, it is expected to be the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) version of Android that doesn’t offer access to Google services out of the box. This prevents access to Google Play, Maps, Photos, and all of the company’s services.

«We cannot use the core of Google Mobile Services, we can use the core of Huawei Mobile Services (HMS)"said Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei's consumer division.It is due to the US ban that these phones cannot pre-install the GMS kernel. It has forced us to use the HMS Core running a suite of Huawei apps on the Mate 30 series phones. «.

It was recently rumored that Huawei would offer a system that will allow users to access some Google applications, but how it might work is unclear.

Much like the last publicly available version of EMUI (EMUI 9.0), this new EMUI is packed with features with varying degrees of usefulness. Most can be disabled, ignored, or replaced without too much fuss if you’re looking for a purer Android. One is the use of SwiftKey as a standard keyboard, as opposed to the stock Android keyboard or Google’s Gboard. You’ll also get a low-power ambient display mode and a system-wide dark mode and a “dark mode engine.” This inverts the colors of third-party apps so you always have dark mode. They also include AI-powered auto-rotation that follows your gaze to rotate on-screen content in your direction.

There's a lift-to-wake feature, plus a split-screen view and a versatile screenshot tool. As with the P30 series, the appearance of the notch can be customized through software, to some extent. You can hide it by darkening the notification shade.

Finally, if you have an Audi, the Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro work as keys for some models. Huawei has partnered with the automaker to preload an app that unlocks your car (Connect Key) on both phones.

Availability and prices of the Huawei Mate 30

Huawei has given prices for Europe despite rumors that it would be difficult to sell them in our continent. These are the advertised prices.

• Mate 30 Pro 8GB RAM and 256GB phone: € 1.199
• Mate 30 Pro Smartphone 8GB RAM and 256GB (4G): € 1.099
• Mate 30 Phone 8GB RAM and 128GB (4G): € 799

Source Huawei