PARIS -- Huawei launched its P30 series smartphone series here Tuesday, seeking to lure an increasingly saturated market away from Samsung and Apple with rear cameras that can shoot the moon better than its rivals.
The top-end P30 Pro has four Leica-engineered rear cameras with up to 50 times digital zoom, allowing users to capture more detailed images of stars and heavenly bodies. The regular P30 can zoom digitally up to 30 times.
"The Galaxy phone cannot see a Galaxy," Huawei Consumer Business Group CEO Richard Yu said in a jab at Samsung's Galaxy phones, while showing the audience a photo of a star cluster.
The P30 series was unveiled in the French capital just hours after Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled news and TV services and a credit card that will tie consumers deeper into the iOS ecosystem.
Shenzhen-based Huawei's newest flagships also came a month after Samsung launched the S10, S10+ and S10e, which saw the South Korean giant equip the S line for the first time with triple rear cameras (except for the S10e, which has two) and hole-shaped cutouts on the screen for the front-facing camera.
Huawei and Samsung, the world's number two and number one smartphone vendor in terms of sales, respectively, both unveiled handsets with folding displays and 5G capabilities last February, selling new features to a growing number of customers who are holding on to their phones longer than a year or two.
The quad cameras on the P30 Pro matches the four lenses on the Galaxy S10 5G and improves upon the triple lenses on Huawei's own P20 Pro and Mate 20 Pro from 2018. Apple stuck with dual lenses on the iPhone Xs and Xs Max while Google kept it at just one lens for the Pixel 3 and 3XL.
Huawei consumer business group CEO Richard Yu posted a photo of the moon on his Weibo account weeks before Tuesday's launch, with the blurred watermark hinting at the P30 series.
It's the fourth year of Huawei’s partnership with German camera-maker Leica that started with 2016's P9 series. For 2018's Mate 20 series, Huawei swapped the monochrome lens for a wide angle sensor.
Samsung also included a wide angle lens for the S10 and S10+ on top of the telephoto and standard lens.
Huawei, also the world biggest supplier of telecommunications equipment, is also unveiling new consumer products as it fights allegations of cyber espionage from the US.
Its founder, Ren Zhengfei, has denied that its equipment serve as a backdoor for Beijing. He also described the arrest of his daughter, Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou as politically motivated.
Meng was arrested in Canada on the request of Washington, who accused of violating sanctions against Iran.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
