Huawei P30 Lite
Roughly half the price of Huawei’s flagship P-series phones, the P30 Lite looks as good but lacks key features
SCORE PRICE £274 (£329 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com
While Huawei always makes big headlines with its flagship phone launches, it’s also fond of Lite variants. If you don’t have mortgage-inducing sums of cash to splurge, but you love taking photos on your phone, the P30 Lite offers a similar design and experience to the P30 at half the price. There are a few cutbacks in key areas, though.
Let’s start with the processor. There’s no top-end Kirin 980 here, with the P30 Lite instead fitted with a comparatively low-powered Kirin 710 chipset. While the P30 Lite can’t keep up with its siblings or most other phones here ( see p71), a Geekbench 4 single and multicore benchmark result of 1,534 and 5,469 respectively show that it’s no slouch. That’s a much better score than Sony’s similarly priced Xperia 10 Plus.
Gaming isn’t the P30 Lite’s strong suit, with the Mali-G51 GPU struggling to play some of the latest games on the Google Play Store at a decent frame rate. You won’t find issues with older, simpler titles but don’t expect premium visual quality or smooth motion. Battery life is a greater disappointment, with the Lite only lasting 10hrs 19mins in our video rundown battery test. The regular P30 lasted over eight hours longer.
Then we come to the camera. The triple camera arrangement on the rear looks similar to the P30, but the Lite doesn’t benefit from optical zoom. The main camera is a massive 48-megapixel sensor with an aperture of f/1.8, which is reinforced by an 8-megapixel ultra-wide lens and a 2-megapixel depth-sensing unit, which helps to capture more efficient blurredbackground portrait photos. On the front, hidden in the drop notch, is a 24-megapixel sensor with a relatively wide f/2.0 aperture.
The quality of the P30 Lite’s images is actually rather good. Photos are filled with detail,
colours are accurately represented, and there’s little noise when used in low-light environments. Only the phone’s auto shooting mode annoys, with a tendency to over-expose images; you’ll need to drag the exposure slider to fix it. As with Huawei’s other smartphones, there’s a long list of shooting modes at your disposal, including time-lapse, night and portrait modes.
Video resolution is limited to 1080p, although you can choose to shoot at 60fps or in 18.7:9 aspect ratio. Footage can also be recorded in the H.265 video compression format, which is the same encoding format used by Apple’s new iPhones. This means that 1080p/60fps files occupy roughly half the space they used to on the phone’s 128GB storage (note the microSD card slot, too). For the price, this is an excellent camera setup.
Huawei has made few cutbacks with the P30 Lite’s design. While it lacks the iPhone-like silver tinted edges of the P30, the 3D curved glass rear is comfortable to hold and the iridescent, colour-gradient finish is stunning. The back of the phone I was sent to review, for instance, nicely fades from an ocean blue to a dark, orchid purple. This phone could easily
“The camera’s photos are filled with detail, colours are accurately represented and there’s little noise in low-light environments”
be mistaken for one that costs three times the price. Although, as is often the case with these glossy slabs, it does pick up smudges easily. The triple camera array also pokes out far enough that the P30 Lite doesn’t sit well on a flat surface.
Likewise, the P30 Lite lacks an in-display fingerprint reader. There’s a clumsily placed fingerprint sensor on the back of the phone, although you can still enable the speedy facial unlock if you prefer. The rest of the phone’s particulars all remain in the right places, however. The power button and volume rocker can be found on the right edge, with a USB-C port, speaker grille and 3.5mm headphone jack at the bottom. Sadly, the P30 Lite isn’t coated in Gorilla Glass and lacks any form of officially-rated dust and waterproofing, so it won’t hold up so well against the elements.
Another point of divergence is the screen. Like its stablemates, the P30 Lite includes a circular drop notch that eats its way into the top of the display, as well as skinny screen-bordering bezels on the sides and bottom of the phone. But, unlike the P30 and P30 Pro, the 6.15in, 1,080 x 2,312 screen uses an LCD panel rather than OLED. It’s not a bad screen for the price but this results in a black that doesn’t look quite as inky.
Technically, the P30 Lite’s screen could be better. On the Normal display profile, the P30 Lite managed to cover 93% of the sRGB colour gamut but its accuracy wasn’t great. You can choose the Vivid colour mode and this lives up to its description. A recorded contrast ratio of 910:1 isn’t the sharpest, although it is bright enough for most conditions with a peak luminance of 416cd/m². So, should you buy the P30 Lite? It has lavish looks and an excellent camera for the price, but it faces fierce competition: the Xiaomi Pocophone F1 is much faster and costs only a few pounds more. Although the P30 Lite is a good phone, I know which I’d buy.
SPECIFICATIONS Octa-core 2.2GHz/1.7GHz Kirin 710 4GB RAM Mali-G51 graphics 6.15in IPS screen, 1,080 x 2,312 resolution 128GB storage microSD card slot 3.5mm audio jack triple 48MP/8MP/2MP rear camera 32MP front camera 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4.2 NFC
USB-C connector 3,340mAh battery Android 9 72.7 x 7.4 x 152.9mm (WDH) 159g
1yr warranty