Review | Honor V30 Pro full review: no Google Maps is a problem, and a shame – mid-tier phone’s specs are close to pricier flagship Huawei Mate 30 Pro’s

This 5G-ready Honor handset is essentially the same as Huawei’s flagship phone bar its LCD display – which is accurate and vivid nonetheless – at half the price

Unfortunately, that means it is also subject to US sanctions, so it lacks Google apps. There’s no substitute for Google Maps, and the app store is a mess

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The Honor V30 Pro’s 6.57-inch LCD display offers vivid colours, its processor is the most powerful available for Android phones and its main camera identical to that of the pricier Huawei Mate 30 Pro. The lack of Google Maps and other apps because of US sanctions could be a deal-breaker for potential customers, though. Photo: Ben Sin

Published: 8:45am, 10 Jan 2020Updated: 9:00am, 10 Jan 2020

The line between flagship and mid-tier smartphones is becoming more blurred. The latest release from Chinese electronics giant Huawei’s sub-brand Honor, the Honor V30 Pro, offers very similar performance to the Huawei Mate 30 Pro – at half the price.

Unfortunately, from a consumer point of view the V30 Pro has the same disadvantages brought about by US government sanctions against Huawei as does the Mate 30 Pro.

Design and hardware

The three most important hardware components of a smartphone are the screen, processor, and camera. In the Honor V30 Pro two of the three are virtually identical to those in the much pricier Mate 30 Pro.

The Honor V30 Pro has a matt glass back, similar to the iPhone 11 Pro, that doesn’t attract fingerprints.

The V30 Pro runs on the 7nm Kirin 990 5G processor, Huawei’s latest and, until Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 tops it next month, currently the most powerful one available for phones running Google’s Android operating system.

As the name suggests, the Kirin chip is 5G ready, and – to get technical for a moment – supports both stand-alone access (SA) and non-stand-alone access (NSA) bands. This makes the Honor V30 Pro a “dual mode” 5G phone, while rival phones such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 5G has only single mode support.