Huawei quietly launches the P30 Lite - it looks quite promising

[Djole123]

While it appears that Huawei just unveiled their two big flagships, the P30 and P30 Pro, the third sibling, the P30 Lite, has just been quietly launched.

 

 

The main reason I'm bringing up this phone is the fact that it's quite a lot cheaper than the P30 and P30 Pro without sacrificing much of the experience.

 

On the front is a 6.1" 1080p IPS display with a waterdrop notch up at the top housing the 32MP front facing camera, and up above it is a regular ol' earpiece (compared to the piezoelectric one found on the P30).

The back is a bit different now, there are three cameras now at the top left corner (compared to two on the P20 Lite), one is a standard 24MP sensor, one is an 8MP wide-angle lens and the third one is a 3MP depth sensor. From my experience, this combo should produce good photos even in lower lighting conditions. In the middle there is a standard fingerprint scanner, which should be pretty fast and reliable (more so than the in-display on P30 anyway).

There will be three colours at launch: black, blue and white (the blue one looks very interesting).

 

Under the hood there will be a Kirin 710 processor (octa core, 4x2.2GHz A73 and 4x1.7GHz A53), which should have decent if not great performance in all but the most demanding tasks (games especially considering the slightly weaker Mali-G51 GPU). The P30 Lite will *start* at 128GB of storage with 6GB of RAM, which is shocking considering that just a couple of years ago their P9 Lite used to start at a mere 16GB.

There will also be a 3.5mm headphone jack with FM radio, a rarity nowadays, a 3340mAh battery and Android 9.0 Pie with their custom EMUI 9.0 skin.

 

The price for the P30 Lite will be about 300-350 euros in Europe and Asia, and about 400-450 Canadian dollars in Canada, which at first glance might seem steep, but the price for the Lites usually plummet after a few months, so it's a non-issue for now.

 

Source:

 

https://www.gsmarena.com/triplecam_huawei_p30_lite_arrives_for_preorder_in_the_philippines-news-36241.php

 

[sof006]

Nice. High end slowly creeping its way into the affordable market.

[DildorTheDecent]

>300-350 euro

>steep

 

All my wat.

[brownninja97]

I think its one to ignore, in two or three months the next Honor phone will come out and if its anything like the trend the Honor 10 set last year it will cannibalise Huawei's lower end products. 

[williamcll]

Better off buying phones with last generation (or Nova 4i)  Kirin 970 chips if you choose Huawei

[Trixanity]

Too bad Huawei doesn't give their lower tier SoCs any love. Less than a year old and was outdated from the moment of release (and the previous ones were allowed to rot for years with occasional refreshes). They'll probably release a successor in a year or two that'll also be outdated. At least Qualcomm knows you shouldn't sandbag your other offerings.

[IAmAndre]

That's interesting and it looks like a solid competitor to the similarly-priced Galaxy A50. I would lean towards Samsung though because of the oled screen and the better software and QA but I'm curious to see the Huawei reviewed. The Samsung also has an in-display fingerprint sensor.

[Pasi123]

9 hours ago, brownninja97 said:

I think its one to ignore, in two or three months the next Honor phone will come out and if its anything like the trend the Honor 10 set last year it will cannibalise Huawei's lower end products. 

The successor of the Honor 10 will most likely be more expensive than the P30 Lite. Honor 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 all had the best HiSilicon Kirin chipsets that were available at the time so most likely it would have the Kirin 980.

 

My Honor 9 was 500€ when I bought it. Huawei's flagship, P10 was about 550€ back then.

[zhubaohi]

15 hours ago, brownninja97 said:

I think its one to ignore, in two or three months the next Honor phone will come out and if its anything like the trend the Honor 10 set last year it will cannibalise Huawei's lower end products. 

The build quality of Honor phones is generally worse than Huawei products tho.

[Quadriplegic]

Yeah, but still should remain a step or two above P30 lite.

P20 Lite doesn't really compare against Honor 10, at least from what I could see

[Trixanity]

14 minutes ago, Quadriplegic said:

Yeah, but still should remain a step or two above P30 lite.

P20 Lite doesn't really compare against Honor 10, at least from what I could see

P20 Lite was still on the Kirin 659 (8xA53 and Mali T830MP2) which was awfully outdated on all metrics and the rest of the phone followed suit.

[Quadriplegic]

12 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

P20 Lite was still on the Kirin 659 (8xA53 and Mali T830MP2) which was awfully outdated on all metrics and the rest of the phone followed suit.

What does choice of chipset have to do with build quality ? Tho it is my fault, as I meant to quote @zhubaohi

[CTR640]

I've got the Mate 20X and I love it. Big oled screen, stereo speakers and it's blazing fast too. The camera is damn good too, even at nights.

If P30 would have the same screen size too or 6.53" and oled too, I would have bought it but the Mate 20X having stereo speakers was a nice find.

 

Only Huawei have the balls to actually release really big phones like the P8Max with its 6.8" back in 2015(!) and Mate 20X with its 7.2".

Regulair Mate 20 is already 6.53" but only lcd screen. P30 Lite already explains: it's obvious it will have a slower soc but fuck it, Huawei makes really nice phones.

[Pasi123]

43 minutes ago, zhubaohi said:

The build quality of Honor phones is generally worse than Huawei products tho.

Maybe on cheap ones but at least my Honor 9 has good build quality. And it's still in almost perfect condition even after 1 year and 9 months of daily use.

[Trixanity]

4 hours ago, Quadriplegic said:

What does choice of chipset have to do with build quality ? Tho it is my fault, as I meant to quote @zhubaohi

When you target a price point you cut corners. You don't build a $300 phone like a $1000 phone just because you saved on SoC and display. I even said that in my comment: "the rest of the phone followed suit". It would be weird to drive up the price by going all in on build quality only for the phone to be speced to drop frames to the point the user experience is gone. Likewise the Honor phones are generally more expensive than the budget P/Mate from my experience so you'd have to buy last year's phone to reach any kind of price parity and then you'd have the same debate about whether to pick up last year's phone at X price or the latest at X price.

[kokakolia]

How’s EMUI? Is it as terrible as people say?

[Arika]

1 hour ago, kokakolia said:

How’s EMUI? Is it as terrible as people say?

My old phone was a Huawei, it was actually pretty nice. It was a little cluttered in some spots, but I think there was an update to modify how most screens are shown 

[Murasaki]

I've been with EMUI for a few years now and I don't really want to go back. Though with newer versions of EMUI, Huawei decided it was a good idea to disable the hidden applications menu, thankfully it can be enabled back with Tweaker for Huawei. Better off with a Siemens CF62 than to use app drawers.

 

By 2050 can I see Mars with the dodecagon camera setup they goin for?

[DrMacintosh]

I’d like to know the margins on this phone. The downside to selling a phone so cheap is that you don’t make a lot of money off of them. 

 

It seems like a decent device. But I can’t imagine it’s very profitable for them. 

[IAmAndre]

1 hour ago, DrMacintosh said:

I’d like to know the margins on this phone. The downside to selling a phone so cheap is that you don’t make a lot of money off of them. 

 

It seems like a decent device. But I can’t imagine it’s very profitable for them. 

The rumour has it the customer pays with their personal information...

[kokakolia]

I’ll probably snatch one up someday on the Koodo Tab for $360...when late December - early January hits. That’s the best time to buy a phone. Just definitely not now! 

[zhubaohi]

8 hours ago, kokakolia said:

How’s EMUI? Is it as terrible as people say?

EMUI is made for Chinese market, where Google and Stock android is banned by the Great Fire Wall. EMUI is easy to use when you don't have access to Google, but it is hard to use when you HAVE access to Google. People just prefer stock android when Google is available. As a person who travel between 2 countries very often, my experience is that EMUI is much worse than stock android when I'm in US, yet so much better when I'm in China.

[kokakolia]

1 hour ago, zhubaohi said:

EMUI is made for Chinese market, where Google and Stock android is banned by the Great Fire Wall. EMUI is easy to use when you don't have access to Google, but it is hard to use when you HAVE access to Google. People just prefer stock android when Google is available. As a person who travel between 2 countries very often, my experience is that EMUI is much worse than stock android when I'm in US, yet so much better when I'm in China.

I find that so perplexing because you can easily install Google apps and a different launcher in the US. But you might have a point with duplicate apps. 

[BuckGup]

6 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

I’d like to know the margins on this phone. The downside to selling a phone so cheap is that you don’t make a lot of money off of them. 

 

It seems like a decent device. But I can’t imagine it’s very profitable for them. 

It’s exactly OnePlus’s business model. They sell the phone for almost no profit but the data they collect is worth 9X the hardware cost.

[Djole123]

12 hours ago, IAmAndre said:

The rumour has it the customer pays with their personal information...

Especially when the company has the Chinese government behind it...

 

^Popup that appears when you open the Huawei Health app for the first time.