Less than a week away from the March 26 unveiling of the Huawei P30 and P30 Pro, it looks like the whole picture has already come together on the Chinese smartphone maker’s latest handsets.
This week, photographer Parker Walbeck posted a video to YouTube that claims to show sample footage and pictures taken with an “unreleased smartphone.” The video, spotted by BGR, doesn’t mention the Huawei P30 Pro by name, but the feature-by-feature demo of the mystery phone’s impressive zooming capabilities, made possible by its multi-lens array, and its rich low-light shooting kind of give it away. Both of those features are rumored to be coming to the P30 Pro’s camera.
In general, the sizzle reel Walbeck put together from footage taken with the phone looks impressively cinematic. There’s no mention of the edit tricks used for the piece, but we think it seems safe to say that, if this is the P30 Pro, smartphone photographers should be excited to get their hands on the new phone. In the video, Walbeck calls the mystery phone camera the “best I’ve ever used.”
If the real-life camera performance of the P30 Pro does beat out the Galaxy S10, iPhone XS or Pixel 3, that could give Huawei's new phone one leg up on the on its competition. And it could also enjoy an edge in terms of price, if leaked pricing details about the P30 wind up coming true.
German gadget news website WinFuture published a report this week that has the 6.1-inch P30 (6GB RAM and 128GB storage) starting at €749, while the 6.5-inch P30 Pro will run €999 for the 8GB RAM and 128 GB of storage version and shoot up to €1,099 for the double-storage 256GB variant.
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On a Euros-to-Euros basis, that’s pretty attractive pricing. The iPhone starts at €849 for the XR, with the XS Max reaching €1,249. The Galaxy S10 starts at €749 for the S10e and €899 for the S10.
Converting those leaked European prices for the P30 to U.S. dollars means a higher price tag ($856 for the P30, $1,142 for the P30 Pro). But it’s likely that if Huawei brings the phone to the U.S., it would adjust prices. That’s a big “if,” though, since Huawei has avoided selling phones in the U.S. as its ongoing dispute with the U.S. government drags on.
All that’s yet to be shown on Huawei’s P30 models — which, after all these leaks, doesn’t seem to be all that much — will be revealed at the company’s March 26 event in Paris.
