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

Google Services Missing- #1 Dealbreaker?

Having gone through the most of the hardware aspects of the Mate 30 Pro, the one missing piece of the puzzle that we didn’t cover is the fact that the device is lacking Google’s services out of the box. I’m a bit torn here in regards to trying to evaluate this aspect as there’s a lot of different people who will have different opinions on the matter, and it will highly dependent on whether you consider yourself an enthusiast Android user or whether you just want a phone that works out of the box.

For me, installing the Google services and the Play Store on the Mate 30 Pro was a quick task that was done within 5 minutes upon me receiving the phone. There’s an installation package floating around on the internet which makes use of Huawei’s internal APIs that allows the installer to install the core Google services APK as system applications – and almost everything works completely without issues. The only things missing is that the phone isn’t passing the SafetyNet checks, which means some applications which are relying on this will not work, such as banking apps or Netflix. The application has since been removed from its “official” site, however there are still ways to install it and to get the Google services working.

Now, for people who don’t care tinkering even the slightest bit with their phone, is the lack of Google services and the Google Play store a deal breaker? I would definitely say that yes, it is a deal breaker.

While it’s possible to side-load the vast majority of applications that one uses on a phone, there’s a few core applications that for me would be critical. If not the Google Play store itself, then it would be Google Maps and YouTube. Whilst these are still accessible via browser, they’re not the same streamlined experience as the applications themselves.

The matter of fact here is that the Mate 30 Pro is simply a lesser device without the Google services and core applications. For people who cannot live without these apps, then the Mate 30 Pro isn’t a device for you.

Conclusion & End Remarks

While the Mate 30 Pro missing Google services is an extremely important aspect of the phone, it should be put into context into the grand scheme of things of how the phone performs. If GMS missing is your #1 priority then read no further here as there’s no point in even considering the phone. However, if you don’t care too much about GMS and it’s not an issue for you, the very next question is whether all other aspects of the Mate 30 Pro actually make it a device worth considering?

In terms of design, Huawei wanted to make something very different this year and to differentiate itself from the competition. The Mate 30 Pro achieves this thanks to a bezel-to-bezel screen design which as the display panel and glass curved to the sides to an almost complete 90° angle, making it essentially purely screen from side to side.

Personally, I remain completely unconvinced of the design decision, for purely practical reasons. The biggest I have with the phone is that I feel the ergonomics just don’t work out. The device just feels odd in the hand, with the front of the phone having a larger curvature radius than the back, even though the more natural way of having a phone fit in your hand would be the other way around (Literally, flipping the phone the other way is actually more comfortable).

Huawei’s gesture navigation system always had side-swipe gestures as a thing, but with the new screen design this is now again weirder than before, although Huawei did a very good job in terms of calibrating the edge gesture activations to be accurate and working well.

Alongside the ergonomics of the design, the biggest nit-pick I have is with the viewing angles of the screen and how the curve just manages to draw attention to this fault of the display. When viewing things head-on, it looks fine but show showcase darker edges on the sides – a gradient fading to dark isn’t a bad thing. But when viewing the phone from the side, there’s a very apparent stripe of light that just looks gimmicky and cheap.

The core issue I see is that I just don’t understand the benefits of the design other than Huawei being able to say that they’re amongst the first to adopt it. It’s ergonomically inferior, you don’t have any practical advantages in regards to screen content available on the side of the screen, and the technical limitations due to the panel’s viewing angles make it look half-baked in practice.

The panel’s technical limitations are very much hindering the device from being something more than what it is. Huawei’s choice of regressing on the screen resolution compared to the Mate 20 Pro is akin to an admission the company isn’t able to achieve the feature in a technically correct and efficient manner. The Mate 30 Pro isn’t as sharp as the Mate 20 Pro and that’s just an odd generational change to make. Huawei this year again resorted on a panel from either LG or BOE and this shows in the lackings of the display – it doesn’t get as bright as the competition and doesn’t even get as bright as the Samsung panels on the P30 series. Colour calibration is again very mediocre and Huawei hasn’t improved over the P30 or Mate 20 Pro – some aspects being the same or even worse.

The screen is also hampering the battery life of the phone. Whilst the very large 4400/4500mAh battery of the device does have it land with “good” battery life in our charts, it’s short of what the competition from Samsung and Apple are able to achieve when using higher resolution, more efficient screens.

The Kirin 990 is a very good chipset and does end up being very competitive. In terms of CPU performance, even though HiSilicon opted to still use a Cortex A76 this generation, is actually improved more than just the increase in the clock frequency thanks to the new improved memory subsystem of the chip. While I do think it’ll be outpaced by the new flagship SoCs from Qualcomm and Samsung, it remains to be seen how big the gap will be. The Mate 30 Pro’s overall device performance is amongst the best of any Android smartphone out there, and definitely feels as amongst the most responsive and snappy devices on the market right now.

On the GPU side, the Kirin 990 is a little big better than the Snapdragon 855. The Mate 30 Pro also fares well in terms of sustained performance as well as keeping thermals in check. Again, while it will be outpaced in a few months’ time, I do expect it to remain competitive.

On the camera side of things, Huawei did some good improvements overall, although there’s some rough edges here and there.

Although the phone has the same main camera sensor as the P30 series, Huawei did changes to the processing. The biggest change visible is the removal of a degrading sharpening filter, allowing the phone to actually take advantage of the pixel-sharp clarity that the sensor is able to capture. In daylight as well as in most low-light scenes, this allows the Mate 30 Pro to showcase amongst the best spatial resolution and detail retention of any phone currently on the market.

I did wish Huawei generally would have improved the processing a bit more – Apple and Samsung still have better dynamic range in a lot of scenes, and the Mate 30 Pro’s HDR can be better tuned to better retain textures and depth of objects as it’s currently a bit funky in some parts compared to other phones and even the P30 series. I have no doubt that the phone will receive a lot of software updates in the future to possibly address this.

The new 40MP ultra-wide-angle lens is also a big step up in terms of picture quality. Huawei had the lead with their previous generation 20MP sensor, and although pictures land in at 10MP on the new unit, thanks to the bigger sensor, it’s a lot clearer than any other phone. This aspect is particularly prevalent in low-light photography, where the new sensor is just leagues ahead of any other UWA camera module out there. The negatives about the new unit is that it has a smaller field of view compared to its predecessors, especially in the vertical dimension, due to native 3:2 aspect ratio of the new sensor.

Video recording on the Mate 30 Pro fells short of Huawei’s promises. The processing here just isn’t any good and the new “cinema” sensor that acts as the UWA module is just wasted. There’s a severe lack of dynamic range, colours, and the bitrate at which the camera app records is just far too low.

While the Mate 30 Pro can be considered as amongst the best still-picture shooters, I feel that it has a lot of aspects that it can improve upon.

At the end of the day, the question is if the phone is worth its asking price. Google services issues aside, I do have the feeling that Huawei is asking too much for a phone that is cutting several corners. The lack of stereo speakers, a better-quality screen, and a more complete camera experience (HDR processing, video quality) are I think the three main gripes about the phone. 1099€ is just too much to ask given these weaknesses.

There’s a lot of uncertainty for Huawei's future in the western markets given their situation under us trade sanctions and the inability to ship their phones with Google services. If the situation continues, the company will need to deliver great or outstanding hardware experiences in order to convince buyers that it’s worth living without Google; the Mate 30 Pro unfortunately is merely “good”, and not great nor outstanding.