Huawei Unveils Mate 30 Pro with Leica Triple Cam and 7680fps Slow Mo

Earlier today, Huawei officially unveiled its new Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro smartphones, trying to distract consumers from their current issues with the United States by packing the phones full of some impressive photo and video specs.

It’s been a tough year for Huawei, who is fighting an uphill battle against the United States. As a member of the US’s “entity list,” the company has been forced to release the Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro that without any support from Google—that means no pre-installed Google apps and no Google Play store, the most common way Android users outside of China actually download apps.

But Huawei is not giving up, and it’s hoping that baking some serious Leica-branded camera specs into the Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro will convince at least a small number of US and European users to give the phones a look.

The Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro come with a large, circular camera bump that Huawei is calling the “Halo Ring.” Apparently, this strikes the perfect balance between light reflection and refraction coming into the lenses, but it’s also a bit of a knock against Apple and Google, both of whom are releasing cameras with square camera bumps.

Inside that “Halo Ring” are three cameras and four total sensors.

The lower-tier Mate 30 features a main camera with 40MP and a f/1.8 aperture, a 16MP ultra-wide angle camera with an f/2.2 aperture, a stabilized telephoto camera with 8MP resolution and an f/2.4 aperture, and a laser sensor for focusing. The higher-end Mate 30 Pro bumps the aperture of the main camera to f/1.6, swaps the unstabilized 16MP f/2.2 ultra-wide cam for a stabilized 40MP ultra-wide with f/1.8 aperture, and swaps the laser sensor for a 3D depth sensing Time of Flight sensor.

Here’s a quick intro video from the Huawei Twitter account:

Huawei claims that the camera system in its Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro phones can do two things better than the competition. First of all, the low-light capabilities of the Mate 30 and 30 Pro for both stills and video should blow users away:

And second, they’ve baked in super-slow motion capture that can go all the way up to a mind-boggling 7680fps when shooting in 720p:

Additional features include the ability to shoot 12-hour long 4K timelapses, add real-time bokeh effects to video, capture 960fps slow mo at FullHD 1080p resolution, and shoot regular old 4K/60p as well.

Here’s a 12-hour 4K timelapse sample published by Huawei:

All of these camera specs are certainly impressive, but it’s still unclear whether anybody will be willing to purchase and use these phones outside of China without support from Google or the Google Play store. Huawei has promised to pump $1 billion into its own app ecosystem (Huawei Mobile Services), which they say already boasts over 45,000 apps.

Huawei isn’t announcing when or where these phones will be available, but you can pretty much bet they won’t be selling in the United States, and may not make it to the UK either. When they are available, the Mate 30 will be available with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage for €800 (~$885), while the Mate 30 Pro will start at €1,100 (~$1,215) for 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage and a 4G antenna, or €1,200 (~$1,325) for the same model with 5G.

The phones are not listed on Huawei’s US website, but you can find more info on the Huawei Mobile Twitter account.

Credits: Photos courtesy of Huawei