Honor 30 Pro Plus review - Forget the Huawei P40, buy this instead (if you can) - Android

You have to hand it to Huawei. While geopolitical wrangling continues to plague its fortunes, the Chinese giant has pressed ahead and continued to launch new phones with barely a break in its stride.

That implacable attitude has also carried over to its sub-brand, Honor. The latest phone(s) to emerge from the youth-orientated company is the Honor 30 series.

In this review, we’ll be casting our critical eye over the Honor 30 Pro Plus — an impressively spec’d phone that sees Honor’s portfolio edging closer than ever to Huawei’s own premium offerings.

Can it overcome all the challenges in front of it and emerge as a legitimate sub-flagship-level player?

Find out in Android Authority‘s Honor 30 Pro Plus review.

Honor 30 Pro Plus review: The big picture

The Honor 30 Pro Plus is the top model in the latest N series evolution. 2019’s Honor 20 line expanded to two phones, but this time around we’ve got the vanilla Honor 30, the Honor 30 Pro, and the all-new Honor 30 Pro Plus. If that naming scheme sounds familiar, it’s because it perfectly mirrors the Huawei P40 trio — the first of many comparisons that can be drawn between the two series.

While Honor has continued to release phones in spite of the Huawei-US trade ban, it’s done so on a much narrower scope than its parent company. Affordable devices like the Honor 9X Pro have enjoyed a broader release across Europe and in the UK, but the brand’s de facto flagship, the Honor View 30 series, never officially made it out of China or Russia.

Read more: The best Android phones you can buy

That’s the same deal with the Honor 30 family, which makes it a little tricky to accurately price the Honor 30 Pro Plus. It retails at 4,999 yuan and 54,990 rubles in China and Russia, respectively, which puts the phone at around $800 mark, or ~€700 in Europe.

There’s some tough competition in that price range from the likes of Xiaomi, OnePlus, and Realme. Can the Honor 30 Pro Plus compete?

Honor 30 Pro Plus specs

Honor 30 Pro Plus vs Honor 30 Pro vs Honor 30: What’s the difference?

Before we get to the Pro Plus, let’s quickly run through the differences between the three Honor 30 phones.

As you can see from the specs table in the section above, the Honor 30 Pro Plus and Honor 30 Pro are fundamentally the same. You do get some enticing extras with the Plus variant like the 90Hz refresh rate display, 27W wireless charging, and more storage as standard.

The standard Honor 30 is the outlier with its less powerful processor, flat display (vs the waterfall design), and lack of an IP54 rating.

All three phones differ in the camera department. Each uses Huawei’s patented RYYB color setup for the main camera, but the Pro Plus bumps the megapixels from 40MP to 50MP. The standard model drops the ultra-wide lens to 8MP instead of 16MP, but does gain a 2MP macro camera.

All of the phones are also 5G ready (non-standalone/standalone), but do not support mmWave.

What’s the Honor 30 Pro Plus like to use?

In many ways, the Honor 30 Pro Plus is a cheaper facsimile of the Huawei P40 Pro. That includes the overall design language, which is a near-perfect mirror of Huawei’s flagship.

I say near-perfect because of the branding. I don’t mind a little bit of flair or subtle logos on the rear of a phone, but the enormous, all caps Honor name plastered on the back of the Honor 30 Pro Plus is an obscenity.

If you can look past that massive eyesore, the phone’s frosted glass gives off a soft blue/purple glow that is really pleasant on the eye and, ironically considering the unforgivable logo situation, far less gaudy than many recent China imports.

I should note that this branding monstrosity is only a problem with the Titanium Silver model and not the Midnight Black colorway, which also has a bling-tastic gold accent around the camera bump.

The enormous logo on the back of the Honor 30 Pro Plus is obscene.

One significant change from the Honor 20 series is the move to an in-display fingerprint sensor instead of a side-mounted reader. However, my success rate for unlocking the phone first time was much lower. Software-based face unlock is also available as an alternative.

What is a welcome upgrade is the display… mostly. The Full HD+ AMOLED panel pops with color, gets plenty bright, and like all Huawei/Honor phones, can be tweaked to the nth degree in Settings. It’s also a 90Hz panel which made zipping around the phone’s UI fluid and responsive.