Name: Huawei Mate 30 Pro
Brand: Huawei

6.53 inches

Display size

1176 x 2400px

256GB

Internal storage

40MP + 40MP + 8MP

Rear camera

4,500 mAh

Battery size

Finder rated as Excellent vs similar phones

Details

Device features

Rear camera megapixels	40MP + 40MP + 8MP
Rear camera aperture size	f/1.6 + f/1.8 + f/2.4
Video recording	4K
Front camera megapixels	32MP
Front camera aperture size	f/2.0

Processor	Kirin 990
RAM	8GB
Operating system	Android 10
Internal storage	256GB
External storage support	Up to 256GB
Battery capacity	4,500mAh

Headphone jack	No
Fingerprint sensor	Yes
Water resistance	IP68
Wireless charging	Proprietary

Launch price (RRP)	$1,599
Launch date	2019-09

Alex Kidman was the tech and telco editor at Finder and is now a freelance technology writer. He's been a technology writer with experience spanning more than 20 years, writing and editing at Gizmodo, CNET, PC Magazine, Kotaku and many more. Alex has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New England and a serious passion for retro gaming.

The good

Camera works well for stills and video
Battery life is good
Kirin 990 is a high-performance chip

The bad

No Google apps or Play store is a killer problem
Difficult to buy at launch
Touch volume controls are more awkward than useful
Gesture controls don't work well

2019 absolutely should have been Huawei's triumphant year. The Huawei P30 Pro sat atop our best smartphone list for much of the year, thanks to the combination of its astonishingly good camera, superb battery life and pleasing design.

Then the US government issued a ban on US companies having ongoing business dealings with Huawei, which cast a deep shadow over its future as an Android phone maker. The Huawei Mate 30 Pro is Huawei's first phone released outside China lacking Google's inbuilt apps and the Play Store. Huawei might like to pretend that everything's fine with that approach, but it really isn't.

It's a crying shame because the hardware continues that amazing journey that the Huawei P30 Pro began. However, without the software to back it up, there's really very little point to picking up the Huawei Mate 30 Pro.

Possibly, if the trade ban is lifted and Huawei can update it to having full Google access there could be a good reason to buy it, but otherwise, this is a superb phone – in the hardware sense – that you shouldn't buy.

Design

6.5-inch curved OLED display
Virtual volume buttons
Wide central notch
Halo ring for rear cameras

The Huawei Mate 30 Pro is certainly a visually striking smartphone, from either the front or the back. It's a full-screen phone with a 6.5-inch OLED display that curves gently around both the left and right hand sides of the phone.
While that's not a new design idea in itself, what is unique here is that the only button you'll find on the Huawei Mate 30 Pro is the power button, located on the right hand side. Huawei's done away with the volume buttons altogether in favour of a "virtual" approach that relies on double tapping either the right or left hand upper sides of the phone to bring up a visual slider that you then touch to adjust volume parameters.
It's an interesting idea to minimise the impact of buttons on the design, but it's not one that's 100% effective. A couple of times while watching a video or playing games in landscape mode, the Huawei Mate 30 Pro interpreted my holding pattern as being an attempt to adjust the volume, which wasn't terribly welcome.
The core idea behind the wrap-around screen is that you get even more screen real estate, but this too is a design idea with a few drawbacks. Watching a full-screen video or playing games that do wrap around the edges just looks plain odd in most circumstances.
The core push here for no buttons extends to the sensors for unlocking. There's a prominent centre notch – a solid departure from the Huawei P30 Pro's teardrop notch – used to house the cameras used for face unlocking as well as an in-display fingerprint sensor at the front.
Flip the Huawei Mate 30 Pro over and you'll spot the "halo ring" camera array. If your Huawei Mate 30 Pro is anything like mine, which was the "Space Silver" variant, it'll be awash in fingerprints pretty quickly too. Still, given Huawei's strong commitment to camera technology, it's nice to have a phone that really does look like a camera to point at the world. There's little doubt as to what you're up to when you're taking a photo with the Huawei Mate 30 Pro.

Camera

Quad-camera array delivers great pictures
Huawei finally gets video right
Superb low-light performance

Huawei set itself an immense target to beat with the Huawei P30 Pro, still one of the very best camera phones you can buy today.
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro certainly isn't lacking in raw camera chops, with a pair of 40MP lenses, a single 8MP telephoto lens and a 3D depth-sensing time-of-flight lens. The two 40MP lenses give you wide and ultra-wide shooting, so it's automatically better than the Huawei P30 Pro, right?
It very much depends on what you want out of a smartphone camera because what you don't quite get here is the same level of telephoto zoom found on the Huawei P30 Pro. Hybrid zoom, which combines pixel count from those 40MP cameras along with the 8MP 3x optical zoom lens, maxes out at 5x zoom, whereas the Huawei P30 Pro can manage 10x optical zoom pretty comfortably. The Huawei Mate 30 Pro can push zoom even further digitally, up to 30x, but the shots you get that way are fairly awful.
What's not awful are the general photos you can take with the Huawei Mate 30 Pro. It's another winner of a phone for either hardened pros looking for fine control or solid macro performance as well as a great experimental phone for the more casual crowd. While it's a different mix of features to the Huawei P30 Pro, it's still a great phone for general stills shooting.
The reality for flagship handsets is that they've got to be able to shoot more than regular everyday photos. If that's all you want, there are plenty of mid-range phones that will shoot everything you'd ever want. Huawei's focus of late has been on exceptional low-light performance, and I was keen to see how the Huawei Mate 30 Pro compared, especially given how good the Huawei P30 Pro was.
So it was off late one night to the local park to put 2019's top flagship phones through their comparative paces. First up, the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+:
Samsung's 2019 flagships haven't excelled in low light, and the same is sadly true for the more expensive Samsung Galaxy Fold:
Google's Pixel 4XL has its own astrophotography mode, but here I was shooting purely in handheld mode:
Stepping up, the Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max impressed, but then it had its update to access its new "Deep Fusion" mode, and that's definitely made a difference in its low-light muscle:
Then the current champion, Huawei's own Huawei P30 Pro:
So how does the Mate 30 Pro compare? Very well indeed:
There's not an immense difference between the P30 Pro and the Mate 30 Pro, but when you're already excellent, that's not too much of a problem.
Where the Huawei Mate 30 Pro does differ is in video shooting, which was a notable weak point for the Huawei P30 Pro. It can handle 4K video at up to 60fps, and this time around it does so with little of the rolling artefacts that plagued a lot of the Huawei P30 Pro's video output. There's also support for slow-motion shooting at up to a frankly astounding 7680 frames per second. It's way beyond the slow-motion capabilities of any other flagship phone, and it's not even a close race.
Now, there are some caveats to that insane slow motion speed to bear in mind. Like any slow motion shooting, getting the lighting and focus right for a slow-motion shot can be a right pain.
Also, like many competing phones that offer a sliding scale of slow-motion speeds, if you want to shoot at 1920fps (64x by the Huawei camera app) or above, you can only do so at 720p; anything slower can be shot at 1080p, but then that's nothing that other handsets can't do.
At up to 8x slow motion, you can pretty much record as much as your storage space will allow, but for the higher speed rates, you're limited to what the Huawei Mate 30 Pro can handle. At top whack, you're grabbing just 0.125 seconds of video and stretching it out into around 32 seconds of video. It can look super cool – but there's not that much of it.
What all this encourages is experimentation, whether with stills or video, and this is something that Huawei's done for the past few P-series and Mate phones.
I might miss the Huawei P30 Pro's zoom modes just a little, but given the choice on camera grounds alone, the Huawei Mate 30 Pro is the camera phone I'd stow in my bag.
Huawei Mate 30 Pro sample photos

Performance

Kirin 990 lives up to the Huawei hype
nm storage expansion is still painfully expensive
Android 10, but no Google apps makes it actively annoying to use
Huawei App Gallery is a mess of apps you don't want
Sideloading can work, but not reliably
It is hackable, but for how long?
Motion gestures onboard, but don't bother

The Huawei Mate 30 Pro is Huawei's first phone to launch in Australia using its new Kirin 990 processor. That follows in the trend of previous Mate handsets, where Huawei's launched a processor that also sees duty in the following year's P-series handsets.
As such, if there's a Huawei P40 Pro lurking in the labs at Huawei HQ, smart money says it'll be running the Kirin 990 as well. Huawei matches that up with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage. You can expand that internal storage, but only with Huawei's own proprietary "nm" media cards. The issue here is that Huawei is the only manufacturer of nm cards that you can buy, and it charges much more for them than the equivalent microSD card storage size. Yes, they're interesting engineering in that they're smaller than a microSD card, but who cares about that once they're inside the phone?
Huawei's claim is that the Kirin 990 is up to 18% more efficient than the Kirin 980 found in the Huawei P30 Pro, and the benchmarks largely back that claim up. Apple's A13 is still the processor of choice from a benchmark/number crunching point of view, but the Kirin 990 manages a fair hop over its Qualcomm Snapdragon 855-based competitors. Here's how it compares using Geekbench 5's CPU test:
And here's how the Huawei Mate 30 Pro compares for 3D graphics performance using 3DMark:
So far, so excellent for Huawei's latest flagship, but then the story of the Huawei Mate 30 Pro, at least at launch, is one where the excellent hardware sits in sharp contrast to the underlying software.
Huawei's phones in Australia to date have all been Android handsets, and technically speaking, the Huawei Mate 30 Pro is as well. It's based on Android 10, with Huawei's own EMUI 10 launcher on top, but it's the open-source parts of Android only. The US government's trade ban on Huawei dealing with US companies means that Google's effectively prohibited from licensing Google apps and services to Huawei. The US can't stop Huawei from accessing the open-source parts of Android, but it certainly can block access to Google's own provided platforms.
So why does that matter? It means that the Huawei Mate 30 Pro is an Android phone, but one with no pre-installed Google Maps, Chrome, YouTube or Google Assistant on board, as you'd find on every other Android phone you can buy in Australia right now.
What's more, Google Play services are also notably absent, which means no Google Play store, so it's not just a simple matter of installing them at will. Out of the box, you simply can't, and they're not present at all.
What you get instead is Huawei's own "App Gallery", which it proudly states has over 45,000 apps that integrate with Huawei's own mobile services platform.
Not only is that a pitiful fraction of the apps available on Google Play, but the notable heavy hitters are all missing.
Don't expect to find much in the way of social networks – aside from Chinese-state-approved platforms, of course – on App Gallery. Or Netflix. Or your bank's own app. There are a lot of very poorly produced clones of mobile games that were popular about five years ago if that tickles your fancy.
Huawei's claim here is that apps you can't find in the App Gallery can be sideloaded in their APK form, but that presumes that you're both technically savvy enough to do that, happy to proceed and that you can find the APKs in the first place.
I experimented with APKs that I extracted from a Huawei P30 Pro – a phone with full Google access – to the Mate 30 Pro, with very mixed results. Some apps were happy enough, but many refused to install at all, including any video apps, most social network apps and benchmark apps.
That leaves the Huawei Mate 30 Pro as a badly crippled device in comparative terms because the real value of an Android smartphone lies in that near-endless customisability that full Google Play app access affords.
If you're paying attention, you've probably noticed those benchmark scores above and the fact that I just said benchmarks wouldn't install as APKs. So what gives?
At the time of writing, if you're feeling brave, it is feasible to sideload Google Play apps and services onto the Huawei Mate 30 Pro, but this is in no way supported by either Google or Huawei.
I get the feeling that Huawei would rather happily turn a blind eye to it for the most part, but since the Mate 30 Pro's release in other markets, we've seen methods for adding Google Play to the Mate 30 Pro actively blocked off by Google. I can't say that the method I used will stay open for all that long, so it's no real basis to suggest anyone buy a Mate 30 Pro with the expectation that it's hackable this way.
In any case, even with Google services added, there's a host of catches. I used the Mate 30 Pro for benchmarking and everyday usage, but the fact that it's effectively a hacked handset meant that there was no way I was happy adding Google Pay details to it, despite the presence of NFC. From what I hear from other Aussie tech journos, this may actually function, but I wouldn't be happy with the security implications of doing so where my money's concerned.
There are also whole classes of apps that won't install at all even with Google Play onboard. Forget installing Netflix or Disney+, for example, because they won't even come up as compatible apps if you search for them.
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro picks up on one of 2019's big buzzwords for mobile phones, with support for motion controls thanks to its front camera array. Well, I say "picks up", but "drops" might be a more apt description.
I've tested out the major phones that support this kind of feature, including the LG G8s ThinQ, the Samsung Galaxy Note10+ and the Google Pixel 4XL, and the Huawei Mate 30 Pro is easily the worst of them. I struggled just to make it through the simple tutorial designed to let you master screen scrolling and screenshot taking, and it got no better in real-world usage. There's a pretty simple reason why Huawei disables motion gestures by default on the Huawei Mate 30 Pro. It's because they're terrible.

Battery

4,500mAh battery gives good but not great battery life
App management is still quite aggressive
Very fast wired or wireless charging
Reverse wireless charging is still mostly a silly gimmick

Huawei packs in a 4,500mAh battery behind the Huawei Mate 30 Pro's display, and its track record in delivering great battery life has been nothing short of exemplary.
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro mostly continues that trend. Geekbench no longer includes a battery test score, so we've switched over to a more real-world test, running a YouTube video full-screen at maximum brightness and at moderate volume for an hour to get a comparative picture of ongoing battery endurance.
Here's how the Huawei Mate 30 Pro compares against a range of flagship handsets.
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro and Huawei P30 Pro run neck and neck in that test, and it's not hard at all to get a full day's battery life out of the Mate 30 Pro.
However, because I've been using the Huawei P30 Pro as my go-to handset for much of 2019, I'm particularly aware of its overall battery endurance, and I did notice the Mate 30 Pro dropping power just a little faster than its older and smaller sibling. A day's usage is no problem, but the two or more days that I can sometimes get out of the Huawei P30 Pro aren't really within the Mate 30 Pro's capabilities, probably due to that larger display and the Kirin 990's extra power.
Like the P30 Pro, it's also somewhat over-aggressive when it comes to closing apps unless you tell it not to. It is a balancing act because it can save you serious power, but it can come at the cost of notifications not appearing unless you tell it to leave specific apps alone.
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro can recharge very quickly if you're using Huawei's own supplied 40W charger, and even acceptably so with wireless charging. That rate will vary depending on your charger of choice, but with support for up to 25W charging, it's a more feasible option than on many flagship handsets.
What's still a largely unworkable charging option is reverse wireless charging. Yes, you can use the Huawei Mate 30 Pro to wireless top up the battery on an Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max. Yes, I tested that. But it's still embarrassingly slow, making it really only desirable for charging up smaller wireless gadgets such as Apple's AirPods Pro or Huawei's own FreeBuds 3 headphones.

Verdict

Not "smart" enough without Google apps
If the ban is overturned and Huawei's able to deliver full app access, it would be a must-buy

Huawei's hardware engineering, not only around cameras but also battery life and industrial design, is among the best in the business. At a pure hardware level, there are very few phones that can touch the Huawei Mate 30 Pro.
However, a phone is more than just hardware, and software is where the Huawei Mate 30 Pro stumbles as it goes plummeting off a cliff face-first towards the jagged rocks below.
The lack of Google Play access means that far too many of the apps you're likely to want aren't available, and there's not much market pressure for them to jump camps to App Gallery. It's possible at the time of writing to hack your way around that somewhat, but it's not a secure matter or one that may stay "open" all that long.
All of that makes the Huawei Mate 30 Pro a very risky proposition, even if you are tech savvy enough to get it sort-of working with Google Play. It's a huge shame because the hardware proposition is so very good, but as it stands, the Huawei Mate 30 Pro isn't a phone I can recommend anyone buy.
Now, if the ban's overturned and Huawei can deliver an update to the Mate 30 Pro that brings full Google access into the fold, it's a different story altogether, and a phone that could well top our best phones list. Until such a time comes – if it ever does – it's an interesting case study in how much impact the loss of apps has on a smartphone, but not one worth spending flagship money on.
Actually getting hold of a Huawei Mate 30 Pro in Australia – at least officially – is a tricky exercise. Huawei at first put up just 200 handsets for sale in Australia at an outright price of $1,599, but you had to enter a competition in order to even qualify to buy one of them.
Huawei Australia has said that more official stock will be sold in Australia, but at the time of writing, it hasn't said when that would be or how consumers might buy them.
Alternatives
The most obvious competitor to the Huawei Mate 30 Pro is Huawei's own excellent Huawei P30 Pro. It's a phone with similar camera prowess, better battery life and full Google Play access.
If you're after a Chinese-made flagship with good battery life and 5G compatibility, consider the Oppo Reno 5G.
If you want to stay very safe within the Google space, you may find the Google Pixel 4XL to your taste.