TechTheDay

Huawei may be blocked from the US market because of perceived security issues that the Feds and CIA are concerned with, but that won’t stop this Chinese tech giant to try and match it’s American and Korean rivals on the global market. So just like any tech company, it sees what’s it’s rival does and immediately copies it because that’s what they do best: take an original idea from a rival company and copy that idea somehow. They don’t directly copy the concept but alter it slightly just so people would think it’s an original idea. That is what happened when Samsung copied Apple’s “a more impressive camera system” idea or gimmick. Apple made a smartphone with a camera that can recognize you and has AI capabilities while Samsung made a smartphone with a camera system that can recognize you,  has AI capabilities, and slow-motion capture.

So logically, Huawei, wanting to compete with the Big Two, also copied the “improved camera system” idea and made their own interpretation of the idea. The result? The new Huawei flagship phone: the P20 Pro, which was presented in a recent demo by the company.

Three Cameras

So what did they do? What can Huawei offer that can be better than a camera that can detect faces or a camera that can take high-quality slow motion? Simple: make a smartphone that has three cameras installed at the back. This phone is the industry’s first when it comes to using three cameras for taking photographs. It isn’t the first to have a three camera set-up, the Asus ZenFone from 2017 has a three-camera array that’s used for Augmented Reality purposes.

One is a 40MP main camera, then a 20MP monochrome camera, and an 8MP telephoto camera. All three cameras are used to enable the phone to take different pictures using different modes: coloured images, black or white, in bright or dark environments, similar to the Apple’s iPhone X’s function. Huawei claims that the phone can capture images even in a completely dark environment. It can also make the foreground look sharper than the background, which Huawei claims, for the people who like to share photos on social media. The phone also had AI that can identify what the item is the camera is aimed at. This lets the camera take the best settings for the image.

Other Specs

Mind you, this is the PRO edition we are talking about that has three cameras. The standard edition, Huawei P20’s specs, aren’t too shabby: It uses the Huawei Kirin 970 CPU, it has 4 GB of RAM, with 128 GB of ROM. It runs on Android 8.1 OS out of the box. The phone is powered up by a 3400 mAh battery. It has one single-lens 24MP f/2.0 aperture camera in the front, two (a 12 MP f/1.8 aperture and a 20 MP f/1.6 aperture) at the back and is capable of catching slow-motion. The display is 5.8 inches LCD and has 1080 x 2244 resolution. The standard edition phone will be selling for € 649 in Europe. That’s $800 USD, $1050 AU and £570 in the UK.

The Pro edition has similar specs but with a few differences: apart from the three cameras at the back, the phone also has a wider size overall, has a 4000mAh battery, and uses a 6.1-inch OLED display, rather than an LED like the standard edition.The Pro edition phone will be selling for € 899 in Europe. That’s $1115 USD, $1450 AU and £790 in the UK.

Conclusion

The problem is that this three camera feature is limited only to the Pro edition. There’s also no real advantage over getting this phone except if you’re a person who needs to use the cameras often and even then people remarked that the photos taken in the dark aren’t as good as the iPhone X’s. Does the Pro’s $900 tag make it cheaper? Yes. Is it worth it? Hard to say. If I really need a phone with special camera settings for some reason and I’m not able to place an order for an iPhone X or a Galaxy S9 this phone is the next best thing.