I believe by now you have also acquired your copy of The Huawei P30 Lite, or if you were waiting to read a comprehensive review from a user before shopping for one, then here we go. Alongside the other two P30 series handsets unveiled on March 26th, Huawei P30 Lite is one of the gadgets set to define smartphone lifestyle in 2019 and beyond. For one, it is sleek, light, and beautiful. And functional too. Way too affordable for its features. Having used this beauty of a beast for over two weeks, it is exactly the right time to write a comprehensive review of the gadget, covering all the technical aspects, as well as saying something on how it holds up on day to day life.
The Core Specs
The Huawei P30 Lite is a mid range smartphone all housed in a body measuring 52.9 mm by 72.7 mm by 7.4 mm, a phone slim enough to fit inside an ordinary palm, and not too tall for the index finger to reach the top of the screen for scrolling through, or clicking on a link/thumbnail when browsing or opening Apps. Thanks to the new tech that has enabled phone manufacturers to almost get rid of bezels, both side and top/bottom bezels, this phone is featuring a whooping 6.15 inches screen on a body that is expected to house a 5 inches screen. The body itself is made of fine plastic that looks and feels like glass. Huawei itself calls the back cover “curved glass”. The plastic itself shouldn’t deter you though, as it is the reason the phone sells for a meager Kshs 30K instead of the Kshs 73K that you’d cough for the Huawei P30 or Kshs 100K for the Huawei P30 Pro.
The 6.15 inches screen on the other hand is made up of LTPS IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen. If you are wondering what the LTPS means (I believe by now you know what IPS LCD is), Decanchronicles provides that “The standard LCD display uses amorphous Silicon as the liquid for the display unit as it can be assembled into complex high-current driver circuits. This though restricts the display resolution and adds to overall device temperatures. Therefore, development of the technology led to replacing the amorphous Silicon with Polycrystalline Silicon, which boosted the screen resolution and maintains low temperatures. The larger and more uniform grains of polysilicon allow faster electron movement, resulting in higher resolution and higher refresh rates. It also was found to be cheaper to manufacture due to lower cost of certain key substrates. Therefore, the Low-Temperature PolySilicon (LTPS) LCD screen helps provide larger pixel densities, lower power consumption that standard LCD and controlled temperature ranges”. The beauty of the screen is cemented by the 1080 x 2312 pixels and that resolution on a 6.15 inches screen gives the viewer a 415 ppi density, one of the high pixel densities one can get on a smartphone today.
The information shown on the display is powered by the Huawei’s Hisilicon Kirin 710 (12 nm tech) which is an eight core processor divided into two parts, a 4 cores part with each core clocking 2.2 GHz that run on cortex A-73 CPU and a second 4 cores part each clocking 1.7 GHz running on Cortex A-53 CPU. The phone also has a separate processor for graphics and that is the Mali-G51 MP4 GPU, which handles gaming, videos and other graphics pretty fast, smooth, and efficiently. For the two weeks that I have used the phone, I haven’t seen any App hanging even when playing some intensive games that I got from the Playstore.
Talking of the Playstore, that means the phone is running on Google’s Android and the Android version is the Android 9.0 (Pie) which is again augmented by Huawei’s own EMUI 9.0 for the User Interface. Compared with other interfaces, the only thing I haven’t liked with EMUI is the rather old school style of thumbnails/icons – the design part is quite boring.
One thing that makes smartphones expensive is the Internal storage. At as at now, most phones prized at Kshs 30,000 and below do come with 64 GB or less, but somehow Huawei managed to pack a whooping 128 GB of storage in the Huawei P30 Lite, the same amount of storage you will get in the Huawei P30. However for the same amount of money other phones do offer up to 6 GB of RAM so the 4 GB RAM in the Huawei P30 Lite looks like a big compromise, but as I have mentioned up there, I haven’t experienced any lag or hanging when using the device.
Lastly on core specs, it is important to mention how the battery holds up on day to day use. The battery packed in the Huawei P30 Lite is a fast charging Li-Po 3340 mAh battery and by fast charging I mean the battery can charge from 0% to full in under one hour 30 minutes. Once fully charged, and under normal use meaning no heavy taxation on system resources (the display isn’t too bright, no too much gaming, no too much video playback etc), you can use the phone for a whole 36 hours without having to recharge. When heavily used though, the battery should be able to take you for well over 12 hours.
Triple Camera Setup on The Huawei P30 Lite
If there is one thing Huawei is trying to achieve, is to make it possible for the general public to be able to capture pictures of a similar quality a professional photographer can capture using one of the high end professional cameras like the Canon 5D Mark IV or even the 1D series. However, the limitations of smartphones is that it is practically impossible to fit them with interchangeable lenses let alone the full frame sensors that define professional cameras. To compensate for those, manufacturers like Huawei have devised two solutions: 1. Software gimmicks powered by AI, and 2. Multi-lens Multi-sensor setups that enable the smartphones to somehow achieve certain professional-like quality image.
Of the P30 series phones that Huawei released this year, it has been mentioned by other reviewers that the camera setup on the Huawei P30 Pro is the best yet on a smartphone, beating even the camera on Samsung Galaxy S9 that was released earlier in February, a feat that can’t be said of the Huawei P30 Lite. This is not to say that the pictures taken with the P30 Lite aren’t fantastic, but they are not anywhere near to reach the professional quality photos that the Pro version can technically achieve – at least at reasonable lighting setup. I am however waiting to see professional photographers carrying these high end smartphones for their professional photos.
Together with AI, the three camera setup on Huawei P30 Lite enables the phone to give you one of the best pictures you can get on a phone under Kshs 30K. At this price range, there is no phone that beats the Huawei P30 Lite, none. To make matters even interesting, you can use the phone to take a clear image even at 6X zoom. Typically ordinary phones provide up to 4X digital zoom, but at these zoom levels you’d get pictures distorted with digital noise, something that Huawei P30 Lite is able to avoid, at times even on low light.
Conclusion
The Huawei P30 Lite is a great smartphone that everyone who wants to upgrade her smartphone lifestyle should own. The specs are top, the features are latest, and of course the pricing is more than reasonable.
