A Day with the Huawei Mate 30 Pro: Kirin 990 and 7680 FPS Slow Motion Tests

[harlan4096]

Last week Huawei launched its latest flagship smartphone, the Mate 30 Pro, featuring its latest Kirin 990 chipset. At the heart of the new hardware is a waterfall wrap-around screen, as well as new camera tools to help it record slow motion video up to 7680 frames per second, above and beyond what is currently available. The new smartphones will not come with the Google Play Store and applications, due to the US-China trade war and Huawei being placed on the US Entity List, however Huawei has promised to look into unlocking the boot loader and injecting $1B into its own App Store to drive new applications. 5G versions of the Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro are due out later this year, but we managed to get access to a device for a day or so for some hands-on experience.

*For disclosure, in this mini-test we have a pre-production Chinese sample. The software is not yet in its current and final shipping state, and may differ compared to the launch version.

Huawei’s Mate 30 Pro: The Design

As with the most recent Huawei flagship devices over the past couple of years, the Mate 30 Pro is a hard device to ignore. With the trend of full-screen displays going beyond the edge of the device itself, Huawei has pushed its high-end device with a true wrap-around edge experience. This new ‘waterfall’ display, or ‘Horizon Display’, features an 88-degree curve at the edge, making its way half-way down the edge of the display.

This does one of two things. Firstly, it affects how we change the volume, as there is no volume button control. In order to adjust the volume, the user double taps on the edge of the display, and the volume pop-up allows the user to swipe up and down, using a thumb on the edge of the display, to adjust the volume. This can be done on the left or the right of the display, which personally is a good idea. Users can adjust it to only work on one side, depending if they use it left or right handed. (The power button is still on the right side).

The other query with this display might be how it feels to hold. I’ll be honest, it does feel a little more slippery than the standard sides of a phone, but not to the point where it drastically changes the way a phone is normally held.

The 6.53-inch Flex OLED display actually comes in at an odd resolution, 2400x1176, giving an aspect ratio of 18.4:9, because Huawei is counting that additional edge display. I’ve noticed that most apps, even Huawei’s own apps, seem to ignore the edges pretty much, and just focuses on a 2400x1080 style implementation for a 20:9 experience. As we can see from this image, the 'black' areas in the corners are where this application isn't even bothering to detect and cover up.
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