Honor 30 Pro Plus review: premium-phone specs at a mid-tier price make it great value, even if it lacks core Google services
- With the same best-in-class main camera as the much pricier Huawei P40 Pro, and wireless charging, the Honor 30 Pro Plus punches above its weight
- Its build quality rivals anything from Samsung or Apple, and makes it a value proposition if you can live without some Google features
Chinese phone sub-brands such as Huawei’s Honor, Oppo’s Realme, and Xiaomi’s Redmi began life as budget brands for developing markets and younger consumers with less spending power. In recent years, as their parent brands have released increasingly premium phones, the quality and specifications of models from these sub-brands have risen. The Honor 30 Pro series is “mid-tier” in price only – what’s on offer is almost tip-top flagship level.
Design and hardware
The model reviewed here is the top-end Pro Plus model, whose price point of 4,999 yuan (US$700) is just knocking on the ceiling of acceptability for a sub-brand.
The Honor 30 Pro phones are built just like the US$1,000-plus flagship phones I’ve been testing in the past few months: they have a high-refresh OLED display with curved edges that blends seamlessly into an aluminium chassis; a dense Gorilla Glass back with a matt coating that gives them a metallic appearance, and a Periscope zoom lens that can deliver almost lossless 10X zoom photography and digital zoom up to 50X.
The phone I tested has a giant Honor logo on the back that is likely to be divisive. Personally I don’t mind it too much. For those who can’t stand it, there are versions of the phone without the logo.