| Pros | Cons |
| Brilliant triple-lens camera | Weak battery life |
| High-end design | Average power |
| Decent screen | No water resistance |
“The Huawei P30 Lite is a mostly great phone that has a slight longevity problem. Still, for camera fans this is impossible to beat at the price.”
At around £330 on Pay As You Go or from roughly £22 per month on contract the Huawei P30 Lite is comfortably in the mid-range, but it shares a name with a flagship.
In fact, that’s not all it shares with the Huawei P30 – it also has a number of similar features, despite the much lower price.
Of course, some things have been reduced or removed though, so does the P30 Lite get the balance right or have the wrong compromises been made?
The Huawei P30 Lite sure isn’t light when it comes to screen size, as it packs in a 6.15-inch 1080 x 2312 LCD one. That’s respectably sharp at 415 pixels per inch, but doesn’t really stand out from other mid-rangers in that sense.
Where it does stand out from some is in the near absence of bezels. Like many flagships this has just a tiny dewdrop notch at the top and a small bit of bezel below the display. As well as looking good, this means it’s easier to use with one hand than many phones with a screen of this size.
Notably, the screen is actually marginally bigger and roughly the same resolution as the display on the full fat Huawei P30, which is quite impressive – though the P30 uses OLED, which is superior to the LCD used here.
No expense has really been spared when it comes to the design, as the Huawei P30 Lite has a glass back and it’s slim at just 7.4mm thick. Coupled with the aforementioned all-screen front this could just about pass as a flagship at first glance.
The only real visual giveaway that it’s not is the fingerprint scanner on the back, since most recent flagships build the scanner into the screen.
Another thing that many flagships have but this doesn’t is water resistance, though that’s no surprise at the price.
What it does have is the option of getting it in a gradient colour scheme, which shifts from blue to purple and looks great in the process.
There’s an octa-core Kirin 710 chipset in the Huawei P30 Lite, with four cores clocked at a speedy 2.2GHz and four running at 1.7GHz. That’s a reasonable mid-range chipset, but this is one of the ways in which the Huawei P30 Lite is a significant step down from the P30 or Huawei P30 Pro, both of which use a high-end Kirin 980.
It’s not surprising that the Lite model would use a lesser chipset, but it’s slightly disappointing that it’s the same one as you’ll find in the far cheaper Honor 10 Lite and Huawei P Smart 2019.
In the case of the Huawei P30 Lite this chipset is paired with 4GB of RAM, which is about what we’d expect for a phone at this price. Overall, performance is very solid, but nothing exceptional.
The camera is perhaps the single best aspect of the Huawei P30 Lite, as it has a triple-lens one, headlined by a 48MP lens.
That’s the highest megapixel count you’ll find on a phone (though a handful of others match it), and it has an f/1.8 aperture. It’s a lens that allows for very detailed shots, and it also allows for zoomed photos that are comparable to a 2x optical zoom.
But that’s just one of the lenses. It’s joined by an 8MP ultra-wide-angle lens with a 120-degree field of view, and a 2MP f/2.4 depth sensor.
When you consider that there’s also a very capable 24MP f/2.0 front-facing camera, plus AI-powered scene recognition on both front and back, this is a camera that can really almost do it all. It’s not a rival for something like the quad-lens Huawei P30 Pro or even the triple-lens Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus, but for the price it’s superb.
There aren’t all that many extras here, but one feature you won’t find on most phones is video ringtones, letting you set a custom video as a ringtone for contacts.
The P30 Lite also runs the latest version of Android, that being Android 9 Pie, though it’s heavily customised with Huawei’s EMUI interface. This has never been one of our favourites, but you quickly get used to it.
The Huawei P30 Lite has a 3,340mAh battery, which is fairly small as smartphone batteries go and this is one of the more disappointing aspects of the phone, as with moderate to heavy use you’re likely to be reaching for a charger by mid-evening. It does however charge fast at least.
The Huawei P30 Lite has 128GB of storage, which should be more than most people will need, but there’s also a microSD card slot if you do need extra.
Connectivity options include Bluetooth 4.2 (rather than the newer 5.0 standard) and NFC – so contactless payments are a go, though note that not all models come with NFC, so double check this before buying.
The Huawei P30 Lite is a very strong mid-ranger overall, with a class-leading camera and a premium design being the main high points.
The screen is also decent, if no better than rivals, and there’s lots of storage. Where the phone falls down a bit is in battery life and power – neither are bad, but nor are they as good as we’d like for the money.
Still, if you’re not a heavy or demanding user or if you care mostly about photography, this is still a great choice.
