Huawei Mate 30 Pro vs Mate 20 Pro - Worth a yearly upgrade - Android

The Mate 30 Pro takes the baton from last year’s Mate 20 Pro as Huawei’s flagship phablet for those who love maximum screen real estate and cutting edge technology. Both handsets received solid scores in our reviews, offering impressive battery life, camera capabilities, and performance. Of course, you’ll have to pay upwards of €1,000 or £1,000 to get your hands on all the goodies, making them some of the more expensive phones around.

Huawei’s Mate series is its showcase for the latest and greatest technology it has to offer. The question this year is whether Huawei’s latest hardware is convincing enough to entice premium tier customers, despite the absence of the Play Store. If not, does the Mate 20 Pro still stand up as a worthy purchase?

Huawei Mate 30 Pro vs Mate 20 Pro specs

The Mate 30 Pro boasts Huawei’s latest Kirin 990 chipset paired with 8GB of RAM and either 128 or 256GB storage. However, the Kirin 980 is no slouch. There are only minor clock speed differences between the two that you certainly won’t notice for most day-to-day apps. However, the Kirin 990 pulls ahead with machine learning and image processing capabilities. It also boosts Huawei’s graphics efficiency up another notch, making it a better choice for gamers.

It’s tougher to pull the phones apart on memory configurations. Both offer 128 or 256GB of internal storage. There’s the option to expand further through Huawei’s proprietary Nano-Memory card slot. Although a more universal microSD card slot would be preferred. Needless to say, the performance is great on both phones.

Design, display, and hardware

The two handsets share similar hardware elsewhere, with 3D face unlock capabilities, 40W wired charging, and a fancy in-display fingerprint scanner. The Mate 30 Pro offers a few updates though, supporting 27W wireless charging, up from 15W previously. The screen adopts the P30 Pro’s “Sound on Screen” technology, negating the need for a front speaker by playing sound through the display. All very cool features that go some way to justify the phone’s high price tag.

Speaking of displays, this is where you’ll find one of the most noticeable differences between the two. The Mate 30 Pro debuted a waterfall curved display that extends right around the side of the handset. Bezels are even thinner than the Mate 20 Pro, making for an undeniably striking look. However, I agree with Bogdan’s assessment that function is definitely sacrificed to form here. The power button is oddly placed due to the display and the software volume controls are a pain to use.

The Mate 30 Pro offers iterative rather than revolutionary hardware improvements.

Despite the Mate 30 Pro’s larger 6.53-inch display, the panel’s lower resolution produces a pixel density of 409ppi compared to 538ppi with the Mate 20 Pro. Even so, the Mate 30 Pro’s display is still very sharp and goes to show that Quad HD verges on overkill.

The waterfall display also makes the Huawei Mate 30 Pro feel heftier in the hand, despite only being 0.2mm thicker than the Mate 20 Pro. The phone also weighs 9g more, which adds to the effect, though neither phone is too bulky. Overall, the Mate 20 Pro does a better job of making the phablet form factor feel slim and easy to handle.

Quality photos in every situation

Huawei prides itself on photography excellence and both of these two handsets live up to the hype. On paper, there are some clear similarities between the two. Both feature a 40MP main camera, 8MP telephoto lens with a 3x zoom, and a wide-angle camera. Unsurprisingly, both are some of the best shooters around.

The Huawei Mate 30 Pro differentiates itself with its SuperSpectrum RYYB sensor for superior low light capture, 40MP wide-angle lens (albeit with a smaller field of view), a higher-resolution selfie camera, and a dedicated TOF sensor for better software bokeh processing. These small changes add up, but refine rather than overhaul Huawei’s familiar photography experience. Thanks to some processing enhancements, the Mate 30 Pro is the marginally better shooter in certain scenarios.

Cropping in on pictures reveals some slight detail improvements with the Mate 30 Pro, particularly when using the 3x zoom camera. The phone’s pictures are also slightly more colorful and offer a bolder contrast between light and shadow. This isn’t always for the best. See the wide-angle camera sample above. The biggest difference comes when shooting in the dark. The Mate 20 Pro is very capable and boasts a Night shooting mode when the main camera can’t cope. However, the Mate 30 Pro offers superior point and clip capabilities. The main sensor captures remarkable amounts of color and detail even in almost complete darkness.

Read: Huawei Mate 30 Pro camera review – Low-light king!

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