Ingress
Pre-release Specifications provided to NitroWare.net state that the P30 Pro is IP68 rated to dust and water ingress but no rating was provided for the standard P30. Anandtech in their report claim the P30 non-pro is rated to IP53 standard. Samsung’s S10 is IP68; the older S5 is IP67 as is the Huawei P20 Pro. P10 and Moto G6+ are “splash proof”
- IP68 - dust tight and protection from fresh water to a max of 1.5m for up to 30 minutes
- IP67 - dust tight and protection from fresh water to a max of 1.0m for up to 30 minutes
- IP53 - dust protected and protected from water spray for 10 minutes
IP53 should be sufficient for a rain shower where as IP67/68 simulate dunking in a pool or even the toilet.
Moto noted to us that one of the most common ways people ruin their phones is a leaking water bottle in their bag or backpack.
Battery
A short demo session with the Mate 20 last year and now the p30 does not give us a way to objectively test the claimed battery capacity (4200mah for the P30 Pro) and talk time (26hrs 3G and 19hrs Internet) but I can talk about the real world battery life I get for my daily carry P10 Plus.
With the P10 Plus, For Wi-Fi only and all radios and notifications enabled 2.5 days between charges. For mixed 4G, Wi-Fi, mobile internet use and camera, a typical workday with a commute I can get 24hrs between charges max with 12 hours worst case with heavy internet use. Note the P10 Plus has a 3750mAh battery versus 3650mAh for the P30 and 4200 mAh for the P30 Pro
Memory and CPU
P30 carries over the RAM upgrade the P20 received but takes the Kirin 980 processor from the Mate 20 rather than the 970 from the P20. The HiSilicon Kirin 970 was the first generation to contain a Neural-processing unit for AI computation tasks with the 980 having Dual Neural Engines to speed up AI computation tasks such a AI focus or Face unlock.
Clock speeds are unchanged for the Kirin 980 between the Mate 20 and both P30/Pro have the same processing platform. Huawei could have adjusted the clocks up or down given the form factor and battery but remarkably did not.
Modern Huawei platforms use a ‘Balong’ modem sourced from HiSilicon, Huawei’s semiconductor division instead of Qualcomm and increasingly more core logic is being brought in-house rather than using third party merchant silicon from the likes from Qualcomm or Broadcom.
The P10 takes a standard micro SDHC card as well as being dual-sim compatible. However since the Mate 20 and for the P30 Huawei have switched to a proprietary “NM (Nano Memory)” storage card. It is not a rebranded SD card to save royalties. It is shaped like a Nano SIM and the contacts resemble a SIM card more than a SD card.
Why Huawei Why. Samsung did not go down this path for the S10 and still support a ‘standard’ Micro SDHC card.
In this article I am not going to debate or contrast the merits of Samsung’s own custom developed in-house ARM CPU cores (their Exynos M series) versus the standard Cortex ARM cores used in the Kirin SOC but I do want to mention one important concept with a modern phone chipset.
These days, chipset performance in high-end devices is at a high level nearing desktop PC class performance in certain tasks but these advances are plateauing. As such performance is similar between flagship devices in the Android space however Apple has different ideas by focusing on single threaded performance in their chipsets rather than add more computing cores. This comes down to a efficiency versus raw power discussion. Apple has the human talent and finances to develop its own in house ARM based cores while other vendors make their own chipset using Compute cores licensed directly from ARM themselves and add value to these chipsets with other means such as improved image and AI processing.