It’s pretty incredible how far smartphone cameras have come in just a few short years. To think, it wasn’t that long ago when iPhone users were outraged that then-independent photo editing and sharing app Instagram released a new version for Android. Why? Because the cameras on Android phones were so awful at the time that their Instagram timelines were filling up with blurry, low-resolution images. Fast forward to 2019, and now it’s Apple’s iPhones that have spent the past few years trying to catch up to the cameras on various Android phones. Features like Night Sight on Google’s latest Pixel phones put Apple’s low-light mobile photo capture capability to shame. And over all, there are now several phones over the past few years that have been regarded as better camera phones than comparable iPhone models.
Samsung and Google have often been named among the brands with camera phones that now out-shoot Apple, but there’s another top smartphone company that is consistently called the best in the business when it comes to mobile photography. And now, the company’s next camera-centric flagship smartphone has seemingly been revealed in a big leak.
For the past two smartphone generations, Huawei’s flagship phones have been widely regarded as the best camera phones on the planet. Reviewers have regularly ranked them higher than any other phones, including iPhones and Galaxy phones from the same years. Even the most hardcore smartphone fans out there seem to agree, once you move past brand allegiances.
Most recently, a popular YouTube vlogger pitted more than a dozen popular phone models against each other in a huge blind smartphone camera test. After more than 1 million votes, the clear winner was the Huawei Mate 20 Pro. Of course you can’t buy the phone from any US wireless carriers since the Trump administration has blacklisted the company, but you can still snag one on Amazon for even less than comparable iPhone and Galaxy phone models.
Like Samsung, Huawei releases two main flagship smartphone series each year. In the first half of the year, we get new models from Huawei’s P series. Then toward the end of the year, Huawei’s new Mate series phones are released. We always expect big camera upgrades on both new flagship phone series from Huawei, and it appears as though the same will be true of the upcoming new P series phone the company is currently readying for release.
A user on Chinese microblogging site Weibo who goes by “ichangezone” posted a render over the weekend that appears to reveal the unreleased Huawei P30 Pro. The user has since deleted the post, but not before the image was re-shared by gadget leak aggregator Slashleaks. Here’s the image in question:
The Huawei P20 Pro was the best camera phone on the planet last year until Huawei outdid itself with the Mate 20 Pro. Now, if the leaked render above is genuine — and this particular Weibo user does have a track record — then it suggests that Huawei is giving its upcoming new P30 Pro a big update with a redesigned camera. Last year’s P20 Pro was released in March and MWC 2019 is right around the corner, so we can likely expect the new P30 Pro to be unveiled in the coming weeks.
