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.