Huawei thanks Apple and CEO Cook for warming up the crowd before tomorrow's "main event"
Today, Apple held its Show Time event and introduced new subscription services for news, video and gaming. Tomorrow, it will be Huawei's turn to be at the center of the mobile world when the company unveils the Huawei P30 and Huawei P30 Pro. Amazon already put up (and just as quickly took down) a premature listing for the premium version of the phone, which will feature a 6.5-inch AMOLED display with a 1080 x 2340 (FHD+) resolution. The screen carries a waterdrop notch, and there is an in-display fingerprint scanner. The home grown Kirin 980 chipset is under the hood along with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.
The Huawei P30 Pro will be equipped with a 4200mAh battery, an IP68 rating related to dust and water resistance, and a quad-camera setup in back. The latter includes a 40MP primary sensor, a 20MP ultra wide-angle sensor, an 8MP telephoto lens and a Time-of-Flight sensor for more accurate depth measurement and facial mapping. There will be 10x hybrid zoom and a Dual-View video feature that allows a user to use two different cameras to record a video with a split screen. The price works out to the equivalent of $1,168 USD.
The Huawei P30 will have a smaller 6.1-inch AMOLED display with the same waterdrop notch, resolution and chipset as the P30 Pro. This model offers 6GB of memory and 128GB of storage and comes with a 3650mAh battery. A triple-camera setup is on back with the same cameras found on the P30 Pro minus the ToF sensor.
Both phones will have Android 9 Pie pre-installed along with Huawei's EMUI 9.1 interface. The pair, while being unwrapped tomorrow, won't be released until April 5th.
While Huawei has been promoting the 10x hybrid zoom and the Dual-View feature on the P30 Pro, today it disseminated a tweet (via Evan Blass) thanking Tim Cook and Apple for performing the warm up today before it takes care of the main event tomorrow. Huawei will introduce its new high-end models in Paris at 2pm Central European Time (9am EDT, 6am PDT). Check in right here at PhoneArena for all of the information related to Huawei's event.
More powerful and efficient Kirin 985 chipset is expected for the fall's Huawei Mate 30 Pro
As we pointed out, the Huawei P30 and P30 Pro will be powered by the Kirin 980 SoC chipset. This is the same chip found inside the Huawei Mate 20 Pro. Later this year, we could see the Mate 30 Pro powered by the first chip to be manufactured using the 7nm Extreme Ultraviolet lithography (EUV) process. EUV allows chip designers and chip makers to etch a more precise layout on a silicon wafer allowing for more transistors to be placed in a single chip. That number gets into the billions, and the more components that fit into a dense space, the more powerful and energy efficient a chip will be.
Huawei has had quite a run of well received high-end phones starting with 2017's Huawei Mate 10 Pro. That was followed up with last year's P20 Pro, the first handset to feature a triple-camera setup. The Mate 20 Pro was released in late October of last year. Of course, no major U.S. carrier will touch these phones because of the U.S. government's portrayal of Huawei devices as a conduit sending personal data to the Chinese government. In January 2018, both AT&T and Verizon reached deals to sell the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, but both carriers backed out, presumably after getting a call from Uncle Sam.
Huawei shipped over 200,000 handsets last year, cementing its place as the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world after Samsung and Apple. This year, the company is going all out for the top spot. IT would be a remarkable achievement considering its lack of a carrier partner in the U.S., which remains the third largest market for smartphones globally.
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