Review For Samsung Gear Fit 2 A great fitness

The fitness band world has some very entrenched incumbents, but Samsung wants to get in on the party.

 

Check It Out On Amazon US$94.93

The quick take

Samsung learned a lot of lessons with its Gear S2 smartwatch and applied them smartly to the Gear Fit 2, its newest fitness tracker. The light, comfortable, powerful and nice-looking wearable handles all your fitness and activity tracking needs, while also adding in a little bit of the experience you'd expect to find on a fully fledged smartwatch. The software can be a bit more than some will want to deal with, and not everyone wants to use S Health for their data tracking, but the price is right and Samsung has put together a great total package.

The Good

• Dedicated GPS
• Smartwatch-like notifications
• Great display
• Solid hardware

The Bad

• Too big for small wrists
• Screen shape isn't ideal for notifications
• Less battery life than other fitness bands
• Some won't want to use S Health

Time for a successor

Samsung Gear Fit 2 Full review

With a seemingly infinite number of smart wearables in the world today, we're quickly getting into situations where we have more tech than body parts on which to put it. On your wrists alone you might have a smartwatch on one arm and a fitness tracker on the other ... with overlapping functions that quickly turn into an annoyance.

The smartwatch certainly looks nicer, has a bigger screen and lends itself to interaction, while the fitness tracker is more comfortable, gets better battery life and has vastly better activity tracking.

Rather than fully giving into our cyborg future by having connected doodads on both our wrists, why not try to split it down the middle and get just one device? A single wrist-bound wearable that tracks your activity every single day, while also allowing you to receive notifications and get other information on the same display.

Samsung is attempting to do just that with the Gear Fit 2, a refresher to the fitness-focused Gear Fit of 2014 and a sibling to the Gear S2 smartwatch of last year. The Gear Fit 2, as the name would suggest, is designed for fitness tracking first and foremost. But what the name doesn't reveal is what else you can do with its 1.5-inch screen — it also offers notifications and interaction features you'd expect in a smartwatch.

So does it strike the balance of fitness tracker and smartwatch perfectly? Or does it come up short trying to do too much? We answer these questions in our full Samsung Gear Fit 2 review.

About this review

I (Andrew Martonik) am writing this review after six days with the Gear Fit 2, connected to a Galaxy S7. The Gear Fit 2's software version was R360XXU1APE4, and was not updated during the course of the review. The Fit 2 we used was a review unit provided to us by Samsung.

Fiitness tracker, with a little smartwatch thrown in

Samsung Gear Fit 2 Hardware

It's easy to see a lot of the design DNA from the Gear S2 in the Gear Fit 2, despite the end result being a different form factor than the thin-and-round smartwatch. It's sleek, understated (at least in the black color I have) and put together amazingly well — just as we've come to expect from Samsung in the past couple of years. You'll even find the same button layout, with a small home button and larger back button together on one side.

Samsung's expertise in display technology is clear to see here, with the rectangular 216x432 resolution, 1.5-inch curved SuperAMOLED display taking up a large portion of the front of the Gear Fit 2. The display is expectedly great, with colors that really pop off of the primarily black interface — it's even visible in sunlight, though you'll have to crank up the brightness to see it.

The display is covered in Gorilla Glass 3 that flows smoothly into a nice bit of anodized aluminum.

The main portion of the body around the sides and back are hard plastic. At roughly 12 mm thick, 25 mm wide and 52 mm long, the Gear Fit 2 lands near the top of size amongst fitness trackers — larger than something like an Under Armour Band, but notably smaller than a Fitbit Surge. But with its curved design and rectangular form the Fit 2 sits on my wrist nicely, and is quite a bit sleeker than a round smartwatch.

The Fit 2 looks rather gargantuan on smaller wrists, however. Samsung does offer both a "large" and "small" size ... but that's a bit of a misnomer, as the only difference is the length of the band.

It's like they took a Gear S2 and squeezed in the sides — in a good way.

The band is attached to the body using the same proprietary connector found on the Gear S2, meaning it can be swapped out (for another color or size) later on down the road, but only for those approved and designed specifically for the Fit 2. That's a smartwatch-like perk that you don't find on most other fitness trackers, even if most people aren't likely to swap bands. The included band is a very soft and comfortable elastomer material with a classy carbon fiber-like pattern on the outside and some bumps on the inside to hopefully keep it from sliding around too much.

You attach the band to your wrist by looping one end through a hole in the other, then securing a metal plug into one of 10 holes to fit just the right size. The loop helps the Fit 2 stay on your wrist even if you happen to snag it on something while you're working out and pull the plug out of the hole — safety first.

Gear S2 lite

Samsung Gear Fit 2 Software

The Gear Fit 2 is running Tizen, and not Android. That's been Samsung's Samsung's operating system of choice for wearables — and pretty much anything that isn't a phone or tablet. Just like the hardware, it's clear that the Gear S2's software evolved to the Gear Fit 2 — and that's not a bad thing at all.

Samsung quickly figured out with the launch of the original Gear Fit that a screen of this size and orientation actually lends itself better to a vertical screen rather than horizontal. It takes a little getting used to, but if you've spent time interacting with a smartwatch you'll feel right at home here — and once you use it for a bit, you realize it's much easier on the eyes.

The software will be familiar if you've seen a Gear S2, and easy enough to pick up if not.

Just like the Gear S2, the Gear Fit 2 has a set of horizontal-scrolling "home screens" of sorts, with each one corresponding to a built-in function (or app, if you will). Without the rotating bezel of the Gear S2 you simply swipe between the panels, with your only other interaction paradigm being the "back" and "home" buttons on the side of the body. You can also cover the screen with your palm to turn it off.

The main screen is your watch face, flanked by notifications on the left and then a set of user-defined screens on the right. You can swipe down from the top of the display to reveal a screen to see your battery and Bluetooth connection, as well as quickly toggle Do Not Disturb, change the brightness or launch the music player. As for the customizable screens, there are eight you can add and organize in any order — here's the quick breakdown:

• 24-hour log: Shows a linear progression of your activity for the past day — periods when you were inactive, active, sleeping or didn't have the Fit 2 on at all.
• Exercise: Lets you explicitly start an activity or workout — set your activity type, time goal and a few other parameters, then start tracking. You can also view a log of previous activity.
• Steps: Shows your step count, and how close it is to your daily goal.
• Floors: How many floors of elevation you went up/down today, with the ability to view historical data for the week.
• Heart rate: Displays your most recent heart rate reading and when it was taken, as well as your high and low heart rate for the day. Tap to view historical heart rate data for the week.
• Water: Record how many cups of water you've consumed today.
• Caffeine: Same as water, but for caffeine.
• Together: Set up step count challenges with friends, and see how you're doing compared to them today.

Beyond those screens, you can press the home button while on the clock to pull up Music Player, Find My Phone, Timer and Stopwatch apps, which are about as basic as you can get. Samsung has chosen to keep a rather kludgy amount of settings available to tap and scroll through on the tiny screen, which is where you have to go to find things like GPS, Wi-Fi, vibration and more.

The Fit 2 does everything you expect, and displays more than the competition.

Despite many similarities the Gear Fit 2 understandably does less than the Gear S2, but in this case that's a good thing — I was rather critical of the Gear S2 for trying to do too much, even though it did less than the Gear S and Galaxy Gear. When you're inside each of the pre-installed apps you aren't going to go more than two levels deep into the interface, and at the time of writing the only third-party apps available to install are three weird watch faces, and a Spotify app that can sync playlists over to your Gear Fit 2.

One thing that was roughly translated over from the Gear S2 is the notification experience. The Gear Manager app can monitor for notifications on your phone and pass them to the Gear Fit 2. You can choose which apps from your phone send notifications to the wearable, which is important because you can only act on a select few of them.

Apps like Gmail and Samsung's own text messaging app have options to archive email or reply to messages, but most apps simply will show you content to read and give you no options to act. Part of that is due to the small and narrow screen, but also because of the lack of a microphone for any sort of voice commands or dictation. Unfortunately the situation in the end is a lot of buzzes that aren't all that useful, so it's worth your time to be very selective with which apps can send notifications to your wrist. It's definitely useful to have the option (hey, you could turn off notifications altogether, too) but this isn't a full smartwatch-like notification system.

The Gear Manager app

 

The Gear Manager app is the conduit for connecting your Gear Fit 2 (or previous Gear wearable) to your phone, and it's available for pretty much every Android phone running Android 4.4 KitKat and higher. (Though because Samsung had yet to update its app in the Play Store to work with the Gear Fit 2 during my review period, I used it in conjunction with a Galaxy S7 instead.)

It may not be pretty, but Gear Manager does its job.

Gear Manager is a simple tool, and while it may not be as pretty as the Android Wear app from Google, it gets the job done. In Gear Manager you can hit all of the big tasks you wouldn't want to manage just on the Fit 2, and a few others that you can do on the Fit 2 but are easier on a big screen. You can manage which apps can send notifications to the Fit 2, change your quick message replies, switch and customize watch faces, change the layout of apps, and install more apps when they become available.

You can also use Gear Manager to pull local music files from your phone for local playback without your phone when you're working out, which is important when you consider the standalone fitness tracking (including GPS) on the Fit 2. If you happen to misplace your Gear Fit 2, you can also use Gear Manager to vibrate it so you can find it, or remotely lock it from being reactivated with another device until it's found.

 

What did I do today?

Samsung Gear Fit 2 Tracking and fitness

Even with some of its smartwatch-like features, the Gear Fit 2 is focused on tracking your activity, and doing it just as well as products from Fitbit, Jawbone, Under Armour or any other company out there — that means it's doing a whole heck of a lot more than your average smartwatch.

It's always tracking, and is ready for additional input from you as well.

At the base level, the Fit 2 is always paying attention to your movements, automatically tracking your steps, flights climbed and heart rate throughout the day to determine your calories burned. Because it is always tracking movements, it can automatically categorize your activity level throughout the day — so even if you don't explicitly start tracking a workout, the Fit 2 can categorize that movement as a "healthy" portion of your day.

Of course for the best tracking you'll want to explicitly start a workout, which can be accomplished with just a couple of swipes and taps. You can choose the usual workouts like walking, running, hiking and cycling, but you can also choose things like step machines, exercise bikes, rowing machines, ellipticals, lunges, crunches, squats, pilates and yoga — and if none of those categories fit your workout, you can always do the general "other workout," which would be best for something like a varied gym regimen. Unfortunately there's no defined workout choice for wearing the Fit 2 while playing team sports — or, more specifically for me, soccer — so I'm using "other workout" for that.

After you select a type of workout, you can select what you'd like your goal for that workout to be. The choices vary depending on which type you choose, but for example if you're going on a run, you can set your target to be a certain pace, duration, distance or calories; you can also choose to have no goal, if you're going to just be taking it easy. Once you start a workout, the Gear Fit 2 gives you a surprisingly high density of information — a heads-up display of sorts so you can track your progress. The Fit 2 can even read out status updates to your headphones at a pre-determined interval.

Speaking of headphones, the Gear Fit 2 has local storage (I had about 2.1GB free) available for storing music (or, maybe podcasts) to play directly to Bluetooth headphones. After transferring music over from Gear Manager, you can browse tracks or make playlists and listen locally without a phone. 

The Fit 2 connected quickly to my Bluetooth headphones, and worked flawlessly with play/pause and volume controls as well.

You can do everything independent of your phone, if you wish.

At just 30 grams the Gear Fit 2 weighs one-third less than the Gear S2, and less than a beefier tracker like a Fitbit Surge. It's also rated IP68 water- and dust-resistant, just like the Galaxy S7, meaning it's good for 30 minutes spent in up to five feet of water — in other words, get it as sweaty as you like, or take a shower with it, but it isn't advisable to go for a long swim with the Fit 2 on.

Being used to wearing a light and comfortable Under Armour Band it was a little bit of a step up to having the larger Gear Fit 2 on my wrist 24 hours a day, but I quickly got used to it. Even though the Fit 2 is rather thick, it's so light that it didn't bother me.

Getting into S Health

Though you wouldn't know it when first setting up a Gear Fit 2, setting up the S Health app on your connected phone is a huge part of the experience of this wearable.

Once connected, S Health can display everything that the Gear Fit 2 collects, and also open up even more possibilities for data input — like your weight and food intake — through the phone. The S Health app is quite good and displays information well, but this is perhaps the one area that will be a sticking point for some — if you've previously owned a fitness tracker and have a wealth of data stored elsewhere, you may not want to transition to S Health. There's no way to import.

S Health is good, but some people may not want to switch services.

The only thing that's somewhat confusing here is the separation of functions between the Gear Manager app and the S Health app. While you could use the Gear Manager to manage the connection of your Fit 2 to your phone and never touch S Health, there's very little chance you'd do so ... conversely, few people are going to use S Health without a connected wearable of some kind, so why not bake the device management into S Health?

Because the Gear Fit 2 is designed to work independently and not necessarily rely on S Health on a connected phone (despite the few people who would do so), it creates an odd disconnect between what you're doing on the wearable and how you check it in S Health. For example when I set up my Gear Fit 2, there was actually no mention of S Health in the setup process — I was only instructed to download Gear Manager.

Keeping charged

 

Samsung claims you'll get three to four days out of the 200 mAh battery in the Gear Fit 2. There are lots of factors here that can have huge impacts on battery life, though — how bright you set the screen, how often you're using it for workouts, if you turn on GPS, whether you use the always-on display mode and so on. With screen brightness set to 8/10 and leaving always-on display off, but turning on GPS, auto heart rate monitoring and notifications from 20 apps, I was averaging out to getting three days of battery life out of the Gear Fit 2.

Battery life isn't spectacular, but at least it charges quickly.

That's not quite as long as other dedicated fitness trackers that push closer to a full week, but then again most of those don't have a 1.5-inch display or give you notifications and lots of interactive experiences. If you want to take things extremely easy on the Gear Fit 2 (including the "Power saving" mode) you could probably get five days out of the battery, but then again there's no real reason to hamstring its capabilities just to do so.

The Gear Fit 2 comes with a somewhat-large USB charging dock that you rest the wearable on, aligning it horizontally with magnets to press onto two gold contacts on the back. A recharge takes just 90 minutes, which is yet another reason you shouldn't be too worried about its battery life. The charging dock is kind of cumbersome, meaning it isn't totally ideal to carry around if you travel a lot.

 Even though the charging dock presents the Gear Fit 2 nicely on the table, I'd prefer a smaller charger — and considering you may be using the Fit 2 for sleep tracking you aren't likely to leave it displayed on the charger all night, either.

 

A whole lot done right

Samsung Gear Fit 2 Bottom line

Though in some respects the Gear Fit 2 tries to masquerade as more of a general-purpose smartwatch replacement with its larger screen, it doesn't quite fit the bill — and that's right in the name; this is the Gear Fit 2. It can show more information on the larger-than-average screen, pull in notifications from your phone and in some cases let you interact with them, but the display size and shape don't lend themselves well to these sort of tasks. Further, the baked-in software doesn't reach beyond fitness applications.

For those who want a wrist-bound wearable focused on looking like a watch and providing you with more information and potential for interaction, the Gear S2 is available amongst a slew of other smartwatch options.

Instead, the Gear Fit 2 should be judged for how it handles all of the fitness and activity tracking functions you expect from a wearable nowadays. It can track every aspect of your movement throughout the day, including regularly checking your heart rate. If you want to go further, the Fit 2 is also equipped with a nice display, standalone GPS and constant heart rate tracking for runs and all sorts of other activities without the assistance of a phone. Together with a little bit of your own input, the Gear Fit 2 can give you a really solid picture of your fitness in S Health, so long as you're okay with building into that ecosystem.

Buy Here:
Check It Out On Amazon US$94.93

Review For Samsung Galaxy S10

10th anniversary Galaxy is as close as Android gets to the complete package 

by  Tom Morgan

 

You know the drill by now: the arrival of a new Galaxy smartphone is as big as it gets in the Android world. Think Chrismukkah, 4th of July and pancake day all at once. Big.

That's a lot to pressure to deliver the goods, and with rivals rapidly gaining ground, Samsung has never had a tougher job of staying the de facto choice for anyone not interested in an iPhone.
The S10 is just one part of a three-prong plan of attack, from mainstream to full-on flagship, and might just be the best of the bunch.

DESIGN & FEATURES: WHATEVER YOU WANT

 

 

Does the handset in front of you look familiar? It should: Samsung hasn't really messed with its Galaxy phone formula for four years now, improving and iterating but keeping the same basic design intact. And why wouldn't you - the S10 is gorgeous.

The polished metal frame sandwiched between two pieces of glass is undeniably classy. It's a little bit taller, a little bit wider than the outgoing S9 - but not so much you'll notice.
A 6.1in screen sounds big, but with a narrow aspect ratio, it's skinny enough to sit comfortably in one hand. The screen still subtly curves around the sides, and the bezels are even skinnier than last year's already impressive S9.

Samsung has achieved that with some camera cleverness, bypassing notches and just cutting a hole right through the display to make room for the single selfie cam. It sits in the top right corner, and is sure to be just as divisive as a notch would be, but spend a bit of time with the S10 and you quickly forget it's there.

Around back, a triple-lens camera array takes pride of place - but more on that below. What you won't find is a fingerprint sensor, because Samsung has buried it underneath the screen. It uses ultrasonic tech, rather than optical, which makes it a little more accurate but no faster.

Because it doesn't light up when you rest a digit on it, however, lining up perfectly can be a bit of a challenge. Focus on what's new and you might miss returning features that have become Samsung staples, like the microSD card slot for adding extra storage (should you fill the generous 128GB of on-board memory) and the 3.5mm headphone jack, which is something of a novelty in a world where other flagships are happy to follow Apple down the path of dongles and adaptors.

The controversial Bixby button also hangs around, but you can at least set it to open another app if you don't use Samsung's personal assistant.

DISPLAY & SOUND: HOLE IN ONE

 

Whether you're a fan of the hole punch camera or not, there's no denying the screen it peeks through is one of the best you'll find on a phone. Remember when "Samsung AMOLED" was a byword for overly vibrant, super-saturated colours? Those days feel like a long way off now.

The S10 delivers accurate, true-to-life hues that are easy on the eye without becoming unnatural. Contrast is unparalleled, with deep, inky blacks and an uncanny ability to avoid reflections and screen glare.

You have the choice of 'natural' and 'vivid' colour modes (no more granular customisation like the Galaxy S9) but you honestly don't need to bother with them - the S10 looks its best right out of the box.

This is an HDR-certified panel, which means compatible Netflix clips and YouTube videos look outstanding. Brightness gets boosted to retina-burning levels, which also helps when you step outside. Even in direct sunlight, we had no trouble seeing what was onscreen.

For such a skinny phone, the S10 also has pretty potent set of speakers, making it a rather superb little multimedia machine. The stereo setup is louder than the S9's, with a clearer mid-range real clarity, although the addition of Dolby Atmos doesn't really add much to the mix.

CAMERA: TRIPLE CROWN

 

Here's where the S10 takes the biggest leap forward from last year. Whereas the S9 had a single 12MP snapper, its successor gets three: one variable-aperture sensor for general shooting, a 12MP telephoto for 2x zoom, and a 16MP ultra-wide for when you absolutely have to get everything into a single shot.

The main and zoom cameras both have optical image stabilisation, making the wide-angle camera the weakest of the three - it has no OIS and a narrower aperture. Still, as long as you feed it enough light, the trade-off is worth it for the expanded view it provides.

Switching between each camera is seamless, and combined give the kind of flexibility you'd need a camera bag full of lenses to pull off with a proper camera.

The pixel count may not have changed, but Samsung's software and image processing algorithms have learned a few more tricks. Auto HDR is now better able to cope with bright skies, exposure is more natural and the balance of highlights and shadows is all rather impressive.

You'd need to put an S10 side-by-side with an S9 to spot the (admittedly small) upgrades, but they are definitely there. In daylight, the S10's photos look great, with plenty of detail, accurate colours and well-judged exposure. Small details can sometimes be lost in the noise reduction and sharpening process, but you've got to zoom in to notice.

An Apple iPhone XS might stay a little more true-to-life and retain more subtle detail, but the Samsung's photos are often easier on the eye. It's low light where the S10 falters. It can still capture decent images, but the scene recognition system's night mode just can't compete with the Huawei Mate 20, Google Pixel 3 ot the unbeatable P30 Pro.

Ultimately though, and considering every day use - do you want outright quality or the versatility of multiple lenses? For most people, the S10's photos will be more than good enough.

 

PERFORMANCE: EXYNOS IS ENOUGH

 

The silicon you'll find underneath the S10's glorious glass body depends on where you live. Much of the world gets Qualcomm's fastest mobile chip, the Snapdragon 855, but here in the UK we get one of Samsung's own Exynos 9820 CPUs.

This only really matters if you're into benchmark scores, as the Exynos loses out to the Snapdragon in popular tools like Geekbench. It even falls behind Huawei's Mate 20 Pro on paper, and lags behind the iPhone XS too.

But for everyone else, all you need to know is that the S10 is still crazy quick, with no lag, stutter or slowdown noticeable in any app or game we threw at it. 8GB of RAM certainly helps. A built-in device maintenance mode should keep that performance strong a year down the line, too.

Gaming is where the S10 catches up, besting the Mate 20 Pro and delivering frame rates on par with the top Snapdragon phones. If you're hankering for a bit of Fortnite on the go, know that this phone will play smoothly at the highest settings, even when the going gets tough.

BATTERY LIFE: IS THAT ALL YOU'VE GOT?

 

The S10 isn't lacking for performance, then, but it could perhaps use a bit more staying power. A 3400mAh battery isn't huge, and with a power-hungry Exynos chip to keep ticking over, you'll be lucky to last an entire day without dipping into the power saving modes.

Video and games are naturally the biggest energy sappers, eating as much as 20% battery for a single hour of HDR Netflix streaming. It's a similar story with 3D games, so claiming a PUBG Mobile win could drain a fifth of your total charge.

Stick to simpler stuff like social media, music and email, and you'll get to bedtime without running out completely, but you'll want to recharge overnight. It takes an hour and a half to go from empty to full using Samsung's bundled USB-C charger - not outstanding, but hardly slow either.

Wireless charging adds a bit of convenience, and you can even share power with other Qi-compatible gadgets if you like, although considering the S10 isn't the longest-lasting phone, you'll perhaps want to stick to giving your wireless earbuds a quick zap rather than offering to refuel a friend's dead phone.

It's not fast, and you've got to toggle it on whenever you want to give it a whirl.

OS & SOFTWARE: PIE MEETS ONE UI

With a new version of Android to show off on the S10, Samsung took full advantage and overhauled its interface completely.

The new One UI is much simpler than before, with apps optimised to make things easier to reach on taller, skinnier phones. That's great - if you use Samsung's apps. Most of us are quite happy with Google's web browser, email app, image gallery and the like, so it can feel a bit redundant.
The notification tray and Settings menu get the biggest visual shake-up, so while you might have to dig a menu or two deeper to find the exact setting you want, overall things are easier to navigate. A night mode switches system colours from white to black, which helps stop the screen from searing your eyeballs when scrolling at night.

Android 9.0 Pie has introduced digital wellbeing, to help you keep tabs on your phone habits and dial things back a bit if you're spending too much time on Facebook or Instagram. You have to set timers manually for each feature, so there's still a fair bit of willpower involved.

The home screen launcher feels familiar, with the app drawer revealed by an upwards swipe. It feels a little sparse out of the box, but it's easy enough to ramp up the density and fit more apps onscreen at once.

Samsung has stuck with the typical Home, Back and Recents navigation, albeit in a backwards order to the Android norm. You can quicky swap 'em round again, or go for gesture controls instead. Importantly, beyond the visual changes this still feels like a Samsung phone, so returning users will feel right at home.

SAMSUNG GALAXY S10 VERDICT

Is the S10 the most powerful smartphone around? Does it have the very best screen? Can it last the longest between charges? We're used to Samsung setting the gold standard for Android, so it's hard to believe the answer to all those questions is "no".

Keen photographers will get excellent results (especially in low light) from a Google Pixel 3, or the Huawei P30 Pro. Plus, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and P30 Pro have even greater stamina.

A OnePlus 6T is much better value. But the S10 is an incredibly well-rounded Android on every other front.

Handset prices have been creeping ever higher over the past few years, and £800 SIM-free is mighty pricey, but it does undercut the Apple iPhone XS by £200 and feels mo. That amount does mean it exists in a strange sort of middle ground, with the S10+ boasting a bigger screen and longer-lasting battery for only a little more cash, and the S10e being much more affordable with only a few minor concessions.

Still, if you've got to have the best Samsung and arguably the best Android, yet don't see the point in twin selfie cameras or ridiculous zooming capabilities, the S10 is pretty much all the phone you'd ever need.

 Tech Specs

Samsung Galaxy S10 review

The S10 is better than ever. The mainstream Galaxy might now play middle child to more powerful and more affordable variants, but there's nothing else running Android that's quite as well-rounded.

 

Good Stuff 

Truly versatile three-lens camera

Gorgeous display and top-notch performance

Feature-packed in ways few rivals can match

 

Bad Stuff 

In-display finger scanner not perfect

Not the best battery life

Price hike makes the S10e a tempting alternative

 

 

Review For Huawei P30 Pro

Huawei go again: Updated with image gallery and verdict 

by  Natalya Paul

 

It seems crazy to think that less than a decade ago, non-nerds didn’t know what Huawei was. Now it’s a company as ubiquitous as a Pret a Manger branch in the capital and was second, after Samsung, for selling the most smartphones in 2018.

There’s no denying that the Chinese company is terrifyingly capable at making phones. The Huawei Mate 20 Pro was awarded king smartphone by this very publication, and it’s not the sort of company to rest on its laurels either; its latest project, the Mate X literally folds in half.

And since the roaring success of the photographic-focused P20 Pro, excitement for the P30 Pro hasn’t dwindled. We’ve been following the leaks like a ravenous fox hunting out a particularly succulent rabbit.

And it just so happens that we were in Paris for the launch, where rabbits are commonplace on the dinner table.
Now, after spending a week with it, we get the skinny on Huawei’s latest quad-camera, seriously shiny superstar.

Design and display: Second nature 

Before we get to the important things, can we just talk about the colours. Because they are quite sublime and Huawei has been waxing lyrical about the pearlessence and the iridescence and using many other adjectives which sound like they were conjured by a 90s Disney Princess.

The designs are ‘Inspired from nature’ and are quite stunning, regardless of their pretentious names. There’s Pearl White, Breathing Crystal (yep, you read that correctly), Amber Sunrise and Aurora – oh and if you’re really boring and basic like us, it’s available in black.

It’s all glass which curves around the edges, with the most miniscule of bezels possible, plus - a small dew drop at the top.

It’s got a waterproof rating of IP68, a tiny notch above the P20 Pro and enough for you to feel it’s safe should it take a dip.

Rocking the largest screen in this series, it’s a 6.47in OLED FHD+ display with a 2340x1080 resolution. From our time with the phone, while is might not look as sharp as the Mate 20 Pro, it’s still plenty screen with popping colours.

Huawei was able to reduce the size of the notch from the P20 Pro to give users a fuller view display by replacing the speaker with an electro magnetic levitation mechanism which sends vibrations to the entire screen enabling sound. This will also change the way you hear sound.

For instance, if someone sat next to you on the train is on the phone, you can sometimes hear the person chirping on the other end. With the P30 Pro – that won’t be possible.

At 192g, it feels substantial in the hand. Leave it on the very edge of a surface though and its slippery all glass body will go sliding off the end like it's got a death wish. 

And back to the iridescent colours – after handling the Aurora colour (pictured) this thing will pick up smudges at the first opportunity. Interestingly, we've been using the Amber Sunrise this week which is slightly less shiny and less susceptible to finger marks - yet no less beautiful. 

Software and performance: Kirin to a screen near you 

 

The P30 Pro munches on Huawei's latest processor - the Kirin 980, which is powerful, fast and intelligent, just like Huawei’s flagship – the Mate 20 Pro. The new processor (the Kirin 985) is not likely to reveal itself until the Mate 30 Pro comes to the fore.

Huawei employs EMUI 9.0, a version of the latest Android 9 operating system. This means more ‘AI’, where the way you use your phone will be stored and used to predict your next move –in theory this should mean you can zip though the phone with total fluency. Although we didn’t have long enough with it to get a real sense of this, we can definitely confirm that it’s fast.

There are some cool features (well depending on what you consider cool) – such as AI video editor which creates little video highlights for each person who you video or photograph regularly, not that dissimilar to what Google Photos does.

There’s also a downtime option whereby you can set some off-screen time which, although nothing new, is still a nice touch. The phone display will turn grey to reduce the desire to pick it up for just one more scroll.

The gestures also come to the P30 Pro, where you can swipe up to return home, or swipe up and hold to open up the task manager.

There’s lots of other new software tricks too including Digital Car Key, where Huawei is working with Audi to use the phone as a key to lock and unlock the car and even start the engine. There was no car to test this with at the briefing but while that feels pretty cool, it’s a bit of a shame that it's a feature reserved for Audi drivers.

One Hop also comes to the P30 Pro which we’ve seen on the MateBook X - which is a dream for professionals allowing the user to scan, copy and paste and transfer files with just one touch.
And the new in-screen finger-print scanner has been improved both on security and speed. We experienced no delay and it was always effortless to get into the phhone. 

It should have all the stamina you need - with the same 4,200 mAh battery as the Mate 20 Pro, and will go from 0-70% in a mere 30 minutes charge with fast charging. And, should you find yourself running out of steam and near another (consenting) Huawei phone, back-to-back wireless charging is available. 

Camera: Get lossless

 

 

Now above all, this is a photographic phone, which will no doubt become famed for its camera just as its predecessor was. The P30 Pro should set the bar even higher.

Firstly looking at the camera array on back, you get: a 40MP 27mm f/1.6 wide-angle main sensor, a 20MP ultra wide-angle 16mm f/2.2 and an 8MP 5x optical periscope zoom lens, plus a ToF lens which we first saw on an Oppo prototype at MWC this year.

On paper, the zoom lens gets the nod of approval - it’s really impressive. Especially the image stabilisation as we zoomed to over 10x, I could feel the camera working hard to counteract my wobbling. There are colouring issues as expected as you zoom in closer, but that would be expected on any camera. 

The company promises 10x lossless zoom. How? In short, thanks to a combination of the P30 Pro’s focal length (equivalent of 135mm for an optical zoom of 7.8x), and data from the main camera sensor which pushes it to that 10x figure. It's almost addictive to go zoom-crazy when you've got this phone in your hand. The detail is incredible at both 5x and 10x, things start to look a little bit undefined when you start going over 15x, but it'll still manage more than the likes of my iPhone XS max or a Pixel 3. 

The front facing camera has upped to 32MP – which is arguably more detail than anyone could possibly want. Maybe that’s just us though. Portrait mode works well on selfies and even in dim lighting – the photos are bright. There’s ‘beauty’ mode again which, thankfully, can be switched off.
Huawei, with Leica, have manufactured a new SuperSpectrum Sensor, so instead of RBG it uses RYYB. What this means to us simple folk is that more light can be absorbed. From swapping the green to yellow – as yellow can take in both green and red, there is more light information to work with, therefore, crisper photos.

The only tiny niggle we had with the camera was the rendering of green, taking the phone with me on a woodland walk, some of the foliage looked a little too vibrant and saturated, which, might just be a preference as I prefer more natural tones. 

Light Sensitivity ISO up to 400,000 from 102400 on the P20 Pro which means this should work wonders for night shooting – there's exposure time for 6 seconds whereby you must keep the phone really steady. When this was done successfully, night mode is unbelievable. Far more than what the human eye can decipher that's for sure. Night Mode takes multiple frames at varying exposures and then combines them into a single HDR image.

The new ToF camera sits above a light – they work in sync so that the sensor can accurately record how long it takes for the light to be reflected back off an object. This is handy for accurate reading of objects and also great for increasing depth and bokeh. In theory, the camera array should have a better understanding of the content. Portraits, in good light were mostly excellent, but in low light we did have some slight focusing issues. 

If video is more your bag, there’s a new dual view video which uses two cameras at the same time. So you can basically be filming two things at once – which sounds all kinds of crazy and actually quite mind boggling. We could really do with an extra brain to keep tabs on one of the frames.
Imagine if you’re shooting a football match, have one camera on the entire pitch and another closing in on the action. Yet it’s all recorded as a single video.

Huawei also promise excellent low light performance in video mode – we'd need to spend a lot more time shooting some, er, B-roll to really see if Spielberg would be impressed.

Huawei P30 Pro initial verdict

With the same processor and battery as the Mate 20 Pro and after spending a week with it, we've got no reservations about the P30 Pro's performance.

What this smartphone is really about is the camera. There's a complex setup involved and the periscopic zoom, plus the ToF sensor is exciting for a number of reasons. But for us, it's the accuracy. All too often smartphone bokeh isn't quite on the money, because a small chuck of hair gets chopped off, or the fraying threads on a knitted jumper, or the software just does something kooky. 

The P30 Pro sets a stratospheric benchmark of zooming capabilities on smartphones at no compromise to battery life or performance. The cleverly designed periscopic lens means you can zoom crystal clear at 5x, seriously good at 10x and then at 50x it'd be posssible to see the craters on the moon on a clear night. 

That's not to say it's perfect, focusing could be imporved as well as over-saturation, particularly on shades of green. But no smartphone will be able to match the P30 pro on a number of photography scenarios.

The beauty of the P30 Pro and its incrediblly zoom credentials is that it's not just all software gumph with time, there's been an impressive update to the hardware - and that marks the spot where partnering with Leica proves that pooling talent is where real advancement lies. 

Huawei P30 Pro review

The P30 Pro sports a camera array that’ll have its competitors calling for emergency meetings. It’s not just all software, there’s been an impressive update to the hardware, resulting in what is an unbeatable zoom on a smartphone camera.

 

Good Stuff 

Unbeatable zoom

Stunning images

Speedy performance

Bad Stuff 

no headphone jack

screen could be better