With Motorola P30 leaks teasing buyers throughout August 2018, the P30 is now here for real. The company has officially launched the device in China. The phone comes with a mid-range, yet quite capable Snapdragon 636, dual rear cameras, and an affordable $300 price tag. And keeping up with the trend, the phone has a notch too with many calling it an iPhone clone.
In fact, Brandon Ackroyd, a phone critic at the UK mobile phone comparison site Tiger Mobiles left a scathing review on the firms private mobile phone leaks Slack channel.. He said ‘The P30 is just another phone we do not need. Aside from Lenovo and Motorola copying the design of the iPhone X, I’m wanting to know why they have included a 3000 mAh battery on a 6.2 inch phone in 2018? This will not end well.”
Despite the phone receiving large amounts of criticism let’s take a look at the device:
Display
The first thing you’ll notice after you pick up the device, besides the iPhone X replica that it is, is the large 6.2-inch screen and its Full HD+ resolution. The display is an IPS LCD panel with excellent viewing angles, thanks to IPS technology. Though not as punchy as an AMOLED screen, you are not going to have any complaints here. The screen comes in the now common 19:9 ratio, which makes the phone fairly tall. It, however, isn’t too unwieldy, thanks to the 82% screen-to-body ratio.
Internals
The P30 is powered by the Snapdragon 636 octa-core CPU and Adreno 509. The storage options are 64 and 128GB – both coming with 6GB RAM. There is also the option to extend storage via microSD by up to 256GB. This is a dual-SIM phone with a hybrid setup. This means you can have either one SIM card and a microSD card or just two SIM cards at a time. The battery is a modest 3,000 mAh pack, which shall keep the phone up and running throughout the day. There is also 18W fast charging support for quick top-ups.
Cameras
The phone has three cameras – one at the front, and two at the back. The selfie camera is a 12MP shooter with an f/1.9 aperture, which also has AR capabilities. The iPhone X-like dual rear camera setup comprises a 16MP primary camera with f/1.8 aperture, and a 5MP secondary rear camera with f/2.2 aperture, for bokeh shots. The rear camera has PDAF (phase detection auto focus) and is capable of 1080p video recording. There is also dual-tone, dual-LED flash for low-light photography.
Software
Motorola P30 comes with Android 8.0 out of the box. It’s no news that Lenovo owns Motorola, and the Chinese tech giant has quite expectedly not missed out on layering Google’s software with its ZUI 4.0 custom skin. In case you don’t remember, ZUI was introduced with the now defunct ZUK line of Lenovo phones. Android Pie (9.0) can be expected for the P30 soon.
Extras
The phone has a bottom-positioned USB-C port that is flanked by two speaker grilles on its sides. Thankfully, Motorola bucked the no-headphone jack trend; the 3.5mm jack sits at the top of the phone. There is Bluetooth 5.0 on-board too, along with 4G LTE and dual-band Wi-Fi. The sensor list comprises an accelerometer, gyroscope, ambient light sensor, rear-mounted fingerprint sensor (with the Motorola logo embossed), etc. The phone comes in three colours: ice white, aurora blue and bright black. This colour scheme should remind you of the Huawei P20 Pro’s colour options.
The smartphone is expected to ship from September 15 in China. Motorola is likely to launch the phone globally at IFA, 2018. Retail availability in global markets would likely be announced then but we don’t have high expectations after the firm exited the Kenyan market earlier this year.
