Huawei’s sub-brand Honor announced the Honor 20 series last year in May. The least powerful device in the bunch – the Honor 20 Lite, also known as Honor 20i in India – received a quick upgrade in the form of the Honor 20S in September 2019. Today, Honor has launched its new premium mid-range device – Honor 30S with punch-hole display and side-mounted fingerprint sensor. The Honor 30S is the first smartphone to use the company’s latest Kirin 820 5G chipset. The starting price for the 8/128GB trim is CNY 2,399 ($338), while the 8/256GB version will go for CNY 2,699 (380). Preorders open today, while official sales are scheduled for April 7. The Honor 30S arrives in four colors, such as Black, Blue, Green, and a new Feather Red gradient model.
Design and Display
The Honor 30S builds on the design of its predecessor. So it features the same rounded corners and the butterfly 3D glass back design as seen on the Honor 20S. There’s a side-mounted fingerprint sensor too. One big difference at the back is the new rectangular matrix camera housing that features four cameras and a flash module. Upfront, the phone features a single punch-hole camera similar to its predecessor. The smartphone has a power button and volume rockers on the right bezel. The Honor 30S features a 6.5-inch LTPS LCD punch-hole display upfront with 2400 × 1080 pixel resolution and HDR10 certification. It offers 83.8 percent screen-to-body ratio at 405 PPI density and a 20:9 aspect ratio. The front panel of the device is coated with Corning Gorilla Glass 5, and it also has HDR 10 feature. In terms of dimension, Honor 30S measures 162.3 x 75 x 8.6 mm and its weight is 190 gram.
Front and Rear Cameras
The Honor 30S, like its predecessors, focuses on impressing users with a great camera. It features an L-shaped quad-camera setup on the back panel. The Honor 30S comes with a quad-camera setup at the back. The primary camera is a 64MP f/1.8 shooter, which is paired with an 8MP f/2.4 telephoto shooter with 3x optical zoom, 5x hybrid zoom, and 20x digital zoom. There’s another 8MP f/2.4 ultra-wide-angle lens and, finally, a 2MP f/2.4 macro shooter, which can take close up shots up to 4cm. Unfortunately, the phone doesn’t get OIS. The new Honor model supports 4K videos and 960fps slo-mo video at 720p resolution. You also get AIS and EIS for stabilization. The punch-hole at the top left corner houses a 16MP sensor with f/2.0 aperture for selfie experience. You can record Full HD videos at 30fps by using a 16MP front-facing camera. There is also a Huawei’s scene optimization tool. When this is enabled, the phone will recognize the subject from a range of options, including greenery, blue sky, and certain pets, and subtly adjust the colors and lighting to enhance images. It regularly turned a good picture into a great one – and sometimes it helped us take photos that we wouldn’t dream of normally.
Software, Processor, and Battery
The Honor 30S announced with the new 7nm Kirin 820 processor. Despite its mid-range placement, the chipset offers incredible performance and AI capability comparable to some of the best processors of 2020. The chip comes with 1 x Cortex-A76 core clocked at 2.36GHz, 3 x Cortex-A76 cores clocked at 2.22GHz, and 4 x Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 1.84GHz. Thanks to this chip, the Honor 30S does way better than some of the best flagships in the market today in terms of AI performance. The new SoC has 1 Big core for the NPU and a Kirin ISP 5.0. The new ISP is 15% more energy-efficient and brings a 30% reduction in image noise with support for BM3D SLR image noise reduction. This is the same ISP used in the Kirin 990. The phone comes with 8GB of RAM and up to 256GB of storage. Note that these are LPDDR4X and UFS 2.1 standards, respectively. Thanks to Kirin 820, the phone supports 5G SA/NSA dual-mode standards and Wi-Fi ac, and BL 5.1.
The Honor 30S has Mali-G57 6-core GPU taking care of graphics. On the software side, it runs Magic UI 3.1.1 based on Android 10 without GMS services. The Honor 30S also supports a special e-Reader mode (Black & White), eye-protection mode, Link Turbo, GPU Turbo, and an anti-aging software feature that the company claims will keep the UI smooth and snappy for more than 30 months. In terms of battery, the Honor 30S get a 4,000mAh battery with 40W fast charging support. The battery can be charged to approximately 70% in just 30 minutes.