HUAWEI P30 Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus: Shots fired

Samsung and HUAWEI may have their eyes set on a folding future with the Galaxy Fold and Mate X, but the Android giants aren’t done with traditional smartphones just yet.

Huawei’s first flagship offering for 2019 is the P30 Pro with a quad-lens Leica-branded camera, while the Galaxy S10 Plus is the de facto flagship of Samsung’s S10 quartet.

Read more: HUAWEI P30 and P30 Pro hands-on | Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus review

The industry’s largest players have once again stepped up their game, but which phone is the best? Find out in our HUAWEI P30 Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus face-off!

HUAWEI P30 Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus: Specs and features

Samsung didn’t mess around for its tenth anniversary Galaxy S phone, delivering a super-powered device jammed with cutting edge technology and top-tier hardware. The P30 Pro is no slouch either, but looking it raw numbers there are a few key areas where it lags behind the S10 Plus specs.

Here’s a look at the HUAWEI P30 Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus specs:

The obvious differentiator is the choice of SoC. Samsung’s flagship brings Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 to the masses (or the Exynos 9820 in selected regions), whereas the P30 Pro packs HUAWEI’s own Kirin 980 chipset first introduced with the Mate 20 series.

The Kirin 980 is an incredibly capable SoC, but our extensive tests have already shown that the Snapdragon 855 represents a significant improvement over the Snapdragon 845 and HUAWEI’s silicon, especially for gaming.

The P30 Pro and Galaxy S10 Plus are backed by 8GB of RAM as standard and offer storage options between 128GB up to 512GB. There’s also a 12GB RAM/1TB ROM S10 model, which feels a lot like overkill. Storage is also expandable on both phones, although HUAWEI’s decision to stick with its proprietary Nano Memory cards instead of regular MicroSD is a major negative.

Reverse wireless charging was a headline feature for the Mate 20 Pro and unsurprisingly makes its way to the P30 Pro. Samsung followed with its own take on the tech with Wireless Powershare.

Related: Samsung vs HUAWEI reverse wireless charging test

As well as being able to share around the juice from its 4,200mAh cell, the P30 Pro supports 40W fast charging and 15W wireless charging. The S10 Plus’ 4,100mAh battery matches the wireless charging of the P30 Pro, but only supports 15W fast charging.

The P30 Pro inherits an in-display fingerprint sensor from the Mate 20 Pro as well, though this is an optical sensor rather than the ultrasonic reader inside the Galaxy S10 Plus. Neither are perfect, but they’re leaps and bounds over the worst in-display sensors.

Headphone jacks are becoming more scarce every year, but Samsung stuck with the 3.5mm port yet again for the S10 Plus. For baffling reasons, HUAWEI revived the headphone jack for the regular P30, but not the P30 Pro.

On the software front, both phones run custom skins on top of Android Pie. Samsung’s One UI continues to improve despite its over-reliance on Bixby, while EMUI — now at version 9.1 for the Pro — is a mixed bag of clever tweaks, bloat, and divisive aesthetics.

Design and display

The Galaxy S10 Plus’ design further builds on the Infinity-style introduced with the Galaxy S8, and it’s never been quite so gorgeous. The curves are more subtle and there’s more display real estate to play than any Samsung phone before, comparative to body size.

The trade-off is a punch hole for the selfie camera embedded into the top right of that stunning 6.4-inch QHD+ Super AMOLED display. This Infinity-O design isn’t the perfect solution to the notch problem by any means, but it’s at least inspired some wonderfully creative wallpaper designs and clever widgets.

The P30 Pro, on the other hand, represents a design evolution of the P20 Pro. The latter’s all-glass design returns with even more gradient-styled models and curved display edges like the Mate 20 Pro.

The P30 Pro’s display is marginally larger than the S10 Plus at 6.47-inches, but has a much lower 2,340 x 1,080 resolution. The P30 Pro also features a notch like its predecessor, only this time it’s a waterdrop-style cutout which is far less invasive.

With the exception of the extra Bixby button (which you can thankfully remap), the only other notable design difference between the two phones is the camera orientation. Samsung opted for a horizontal placement for its camera module, while HUAWEI’s phone goes vertical.

However, that’s only scratching the surface of how much the cameras differ on the two devices.

Camera

HUAWEI has always put camera innovation at the forefront for its P-series and the P30 Pro is no different. The P30 Pro sports the company’s first Leica-branded quad-lens camera, but the fourth lens isn’t the only major change from previous HUAWEI cameras.

The main central sensor is a 40-megapixel shooter (f/1.6). This “SuperSpectrum” sensor uses an RYB (red, yellow, blue) color filter, which HUAWEI says absorbs far more light than a regular RGB setup resulting in better low-light photography. The top lens is a 20-megapixel (f/2.2) lens, which sees HUAWEI abandoning the monochrome sensors we saw on previous flagships in favor of an ultra-wide sensor.

Dive deeper: HUAWEI P30 cameras: All the new tech explained

The third and final sensor in the main module is the P30 Pro’s zoom lens. This is an 8-megapixel periscope camera (f/3.4) that utilizes magnification lenses and the prism design to deliver 5x optical zoom and 10x hybrid zoom.

The fourth camera is a little harder to spot, but underneath the flash sits a tiny Time-of-Flight (TOF) sensor that enhances bokeh-style shots and potentially enables more advanced augmented reality features.

Master AI for scene recognition, the combination of AIS and OIS, and a new feature called AI HDR+ that’s meant to limit overexposure all round out a photography suite that’s jam packed with top-end hardware powered by HUAWEI’s AI smarts.

While HUAWEI has been messing around with triple- and now quad-lens cameras with AI polish for a few years, the Galaxy S10 Plus marked Samsung’s first attempt at delivering a triple-lens camera with AI-led performance optimization.

The Galaxy S10 Plus packs a dual-pixel 12-megapixel camera (f/1.5 and f/2.4), a 16-megapixel ultra-wide sensor (f/2.2), and a 12-megapixel telephoto lens (f/2.4), with the Snapdragon 855’s image signal processor and NPU bringing scene recognition and other tweaks to the comprehensive camera package.

We’ll be sharing our early verdict on the P30 Pro’s camera soon ahead of a more in-depth review, but there’s no doubting that its zoom capabilities and overall versatility sound incredible on paper.

The Galaxy S10 Plus, meanwhile, is far from a poor camera phone. However, as Android Authority’s David Imel noted in his review, the results aren’t quite up to the standard you’d expect for a phone with a $999 price tag, with over-smoothing affecting regular photos and wide-angle shots regularly suffering from distortion.

As for the selfie cameras, the P30 Pro carries a 32-megapixel shooter, while the Galaxy S10 Plus has a dual-lens module inside that punch hole with a 10MP main sensor and an 8MP depth sensor.

Price and which should you buy?

The HUAWEI P30 Pro starts at 999 euros ($1,128) for the 128GB variant. The Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus matches that 999 euros price in Europe, with the base model with 8GB RAM/128GB ROM going for $999 in the U.S.

As for the question of which phone is right for you, for many the decision will already have been taken out of their hands. Unfortunately, the HUAWEI P30 Pro, like so many of its P-series predecessors, will not be available to buy in the U.S. If you’re in a region where both phones are available, however, there are clear pros and cons when comparing the two devices.

Smartphones have long been a quick and easy replacement for lugging around an actual camera for day-to-day photography. The one area where phones have failed to match proper cameras is zoom, but the P30 Pro is a significant move towards changing all that. Factor in the eye-catching design and solid specs and you’ve got yourself a fantastic phone.

However, the Galaxy S10 Plus wins out in almost every other category. The S10 Plus combines next-gen hardware, industry-leading display tech, and finely-tuned design in a feature-rich package that makes it one of the best Android phones money can buy.

That’s our HUAWEI P30 Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus showdown. Which phone do you think comes out on top? Let us know in the comments, and cast your vote in the poll!