The Huawei Mate 30 Pro Review: Top Hardware without Google?
by Andrei Frumusanu on November 27, 2019 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Kirin 990
- Mate 30 Pro
Battery Life
The Mate 30 Pro comes with a quite large battery measuring at 4400mAh rated / 4500mAh typical. This is 5% larger than its predecessor, and the new phone also comes with a new more efficient SoC. The question of how the new phone will end up in the battery charts is largely dependent on how its new screen will behave, and if it’s going to be nearly as efficient as some of the new generation Samsung panels we’ve seen employed in the new Galaxy and iPhones this year.
Starting off with the web browsing test, we do see the Mate 30 Pro edge out the Mate 20 Pro by 18% and achieving a good battery life result of 11.75 hours. While in absolute terms of a good result, it doesn’t manage to keep up with the more efficient devices from Samsung and Apple. Whilst the Mate 30 Pro has a good base power consumption of ~420mW, the screen panel’s luminosity efficiency doesn’t seem to have improved much compared to last year’s model, and this results in the Mate 30 Pro falling behind even though it has a bigger battery and more efficient SoC.
PCMark is more a heavier compute workload which puts more stress on the SoC and less on the display panel due to the lower APL, and here the Mate 30 Pro actually fares very well, landing in as amongst the most efficient devices. Keeping in mind that the performance exhibited here is excellent, the Kirin 990 does really make the phone shine.
The overall conclusion for battery life is that there’s two aspects to the phone. The phone itself is extremely efficient and sports a very large battery, however it’s hampered by a quite inefficient screen. This is a scenario where battery life will differ a lot depending on how you use your phone – if you’re the type of person using it outside at maximum brightness a lot of times, then the Mate 30 Pro won’t fare as well as the competition. If you’re using it more extensively at lower brightness levels, the inefficiency of the display will impact battery life less and here the phone’s excellent internal hardware will outpace other devices by greater margins.
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psychobriggsy - Wednesday, November 27, 2019 - link
After years on Android, and a set of Android Apps and Services that I own via the Play Store (or because they come with the phone), the lack of Google Services and the Play Store is a critical piece of missing functionality.Indeed I'd say that this is not Android at all, Android for most people being the combination of core operating system and Google Services.
imaheadcase - Wednesday, November 27, 2019 - link
Exactly, the whole point of a android phone is to have google services. Anything else you are are developers whim in updates to OS and apps. Which if anyone who got burned by Samsung tablets know..its not pretty.prisonerX - Wednesday, November 27, 2019 - link
There's something to be said for there being an alternative to the Google monopoly in that respect. Let's hope that something like that emerges from this fiasco.versesuvius - Thursday, November 28, 2019 - link
Vendor lock-in does not even begin to describe what the US government is enforcing on the mobile phone users around the world. If at one time it was Apple or Microsoft or some other OS maker, now it is a political and economical system that the US government and Google want to lock the world in. That said, a mobile phone is nothing but Browser as OS. And the entire Google offering is nothing but open web technologies. The half hearthed attempts at something different from Google never added up to much because they always chose Google to fall back on from the get go. With Huawei on the one side and the general drift of the Western world towards Trumpism and the asinine single mindedness of what passes for American political and economical infrastructure, we are going to witness many wonderful shifts towards true freedom and innovation around the world and Huawei is just a very wonderful start.melgross - Sunday, December 1, 2019 - link
I hope Huawei has problems. The Chinese have been stealing secrets for some time, and Huawei is benefiting from that. In fact, early this year, two Apple vendors in China stated that they had been approached by Huawei for just that purpose.I have no sympathy for them.
shabby - Wednesday, November 27, 2019 - link
The round ring on this phone looks amazing, wish more phones had that kind of ring.yetanotherhuman - Thursday, November 28, 2019 - link
Reminds me of my old Sony Ericsson P990, with the little selfie mirror :Dyetanotherhuman - Thursday, November 28, 2019 - link
oh, and the actual physical protection for the lens.s.yu - Thursday, November 28, 2019 - link
...are you being sarcastic? This looks so last-decade-compact sort of cliché.Also many are commenting that it looks like a stove.
Alistair - Wednesday, November 27, 2019 - link
Can't me in the group that detests curved screens. Don't copy Samsung's mistakes. Every time I use a flat version, it feels and looks much better. Even the S10e vs the S10, or the Oneplus 7T vs 7 Pro, much better.