Honor has launched the Honor 30 Series of smartphones, encompassing the Honor 30, Honor 30 Pro, and Honor 30 Pro Plus, and there’s absolutely no doubt who these phones are made by. Just take a look at the massive Honor branding on the back of these three. It’s going to divide opinion, but we like the bold styling decision, especially with the frosted glass texture applied to it.
Once you look past the branding, the rest of the Honor 30 will begin to look familiar, as it’s definitely reminiscent of the Huawei P40 Pro. Inside the Pro and Pro Plus is a Kirin 990 5G processor too, meaning they are powered by the same chip as the Huawei flagship. What about the rest? Let’s take a closer look.
Honor 30 Pro Plus
This is the top Honor 30 phone in the lineup, and Honor’s pushing the camera as its big feature. The triple-lens camera is headed up by a 50-megapixel, 1/1.28-inch IMX700 sensor, and joined by an 8-megapixel periscope zoom which extends to 50x, and a 16-megapixel wide-angle lens.
Honor’s periscope zoom is shared across all three Honor 30 phones, and provides a 5x optical zoom, a 10x hybrid zoom, and a 50x digital zoom. It’s equipped with optical image stabilization for better control when snapping photos, plus it uses artificial intelligence to keep the image in the viewfinder steady when really zoomed in.
Features include the ability to blend together multi-exposure RAW photos using artificial intelligence before combining them into one RAW file for editing. It also shoots 4K video at 60fps, has optical image stabilization, and slow motion video capture at 1,920fps too. The phones run Android 10 with Honor’s Magic UI over the top, but will not come with Google Mobile Services.
The screen is a curved, waterfall-style 6.57-inch AMOLED with a 90Hz refresh rate and 180Hz touch sampling, plus there’s an in-display fingerprint sensor. In the top corner is a dual-lens selfie camera with a 32-megapixel main sensor and a second wide-angle 8-megapixel sensor. The 4,000mAh battery has fast wired charging and 27W wireless charging, and the Honor 30 Pro Plus has either 8GB or 12GB of storage space, plus 256GB of internal storage space.
To get the cool Honor branding you have to buy the silver model, but it’s also available in green and black without the Honor name splashed across the back.
Honor 30 Pro
The Honor 30 Pro takes the camera tech down a notch compared to the Pro Plus. It has a 40-megapixel main lens, but retains the same 50x periscope zoom and 16-megapixel wide-angle lens. The dual-lens selfie camera is the 6.57-inch AMOLED screen, which has a 2,340 x 1,080 pixel resolution, is the same, too.
While the Kirin 990 processor and 5G support is also the same as the Pro Plus, the 30 Pro has 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage space. The 4,000mAh battery has 40W fast wired charging and wireless charging. If you choose the silver or purple version you get the Honor branding on the back, but the green, black, and light purple models don’t have it. Instead, these have contrasting gold elements around the camera bump.
Honor 30
Finally, the Honor 30 is the baby of the bunch. It has a slightly smaller 6.53-inch AMOLED screen with a 2,400 x 1,080 pixel resolution, and uses the Kirin 985 processor instead. It’s matched with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage space, plus a 4,000mAh battery without wireless charging. The camera is also toned down. It has a 40-megapixel main lens, along with the 50x periscope zoom, plus a 8-megapixel wide-angle lens, and a 2-megapixel macro lens.
Price and availability
The Honor 30 series has so far only launched in China, and Honor says it does not have any information on global availability at this time. Traditionally, Honor has announced global availability a few weeks after its new devices launch in China, but over the past year this has not happened very often. It remains to be seen if these phones will be sold in Europe and the rest of the world.
Local prices convert over to approximately $425 for the Honor 30, $560 for the Honor 30 Pro, and $710 for the Honor 30 Pro Plus. The Honor 30 and 30 Pro are up for pre-order now and will ship on April 21, but the date for the Honor 30 Pro Plus is not confirmed yet.
