Huawei P30 Pro review TechRadar

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The Pro comes in four colors: a light blue (called Breathing Crystal... we know), The purple / blue mix of 'Aurora', the orange 'Amber Sunrise' and the more standard... 'Black')

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The Pro design isn't earth-shattering, although the screen does taper away and curve into the sides of a rather thick aluminum band that runs around the outside of the device.

The Pro also has 10x lossless zoom, claims the brand, thanks to some inbuilt AI smarts – and it uses that feature to offer a 50x digital zoom, to do things like take a picture of the moon when it's doing something pretty, or just have a really close up look at a poster across the street from a demo area. Just for instance, not saying we're doing that.

So how does the camera work on the Pro? Pretty well. Indoor and outdoor shots look clean, and snap quickly, but do show that same level of sharpness that Huawei phones seem to deliver - it’s up to you whether that’s a bold feature or not.

The background blur on photos looks good too, although the shutter lag was pretty pronounced – in fact, most photos we took saw the Pro asking us to 'hold still' having snapped the shot so it could sharpen the pictures using its AI mode.

However, it's in the zoom department that the Pro really excels. The 5x telephoto zoom and 10x enhanced enlargement both work incredibly well (though not so much at night), and focusing on a small poster across the road showed that the 50x zoom actually gave strong, sharp photos too.

The battery life on the Pro wasn't disclosed by the brand, but it did unveil an increased power pack inside the phone that offers 4200mAh of power.

However, if the levels are looking a bit low before you're ready to leave work, the 40W fast charging on the Pro means you can get to 70% power in just 30 minutes, which is pretty incredible.

The Pro uses EMUI 9.1 a Kirin 980 chipset and an untold amount of RAM – no, literally, they've not told us what it is. We're assuming around 8GB, but like the internal storage there's no notion of what's on offer – although we're expecting storage to start at 128GB for a brand like Huawei.

The speed of browsing around the is much as you’d expect from a modern smartphone. There's a definite fluidity under the finger, and the lightning-fast reactions of the connectivity on our test impressed as we zipped through TechRadar.

EMUI 9.1, the latest version of Huawei’s overlay for Android, is less onerous than it used to be in days gone by, with the Google integration for Western versions of this phone on the left screen. There are also fewer messages popping up everywhere when you’re navigating around, and combined with the fast innards and clear screen, the Pro is adept at whisking you through everyday life tasks.

The Pro is one of the strongest phones the brand has ever produced, but the upgrades feel a little more incremental this year.

The speed under the finger is a nice touch, but we're looking forward to testing the real differences between the Pro and last year's Mate 20 Pro, or the Huawei P20 Pro, to see how much really has changed.

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