This Huawei P30 Pro prototype reveals a very different device

The upcoming Huawei P30 series will be announced next month and based on the leaks we’ve seen so far, the new flagship is expected to come with up to four cameras at the rear. Ahead of its official reveal, someone had managed to get their hands on a P30 Pro prototype which is said to be “almost completely final”. Surprisingly, it looks different from the renders that we’ve seen.

The folks at Digital Trends, had the opportunity to get up close with the device in a closed-door session with Huawei and it comes with a triple-camera setup. It still retains the same vertically aligned arrangement as the current P20 Pro but this time it has all three cameras housed on a single camera bump. Below that, it has what appears to be its LED flash with laser autofocus module.

According to Digital Trends, there’s a label that says Summitor next to the camera which sounds similar to Leica’s Summitar. There’s no mention of its camera’s focal length but we expect Huawei to introduce a newer telephoto feature that offers greater clarity while zooming in.

During the hands-on session, they were not allowed to take pictures of the front but based on earlier speculation, the new P series flagship is likely to come with a tiny notch instead of a punch-hole display. From the side photo, we can tell that the P30 Pro will come with a dual-curved display like the Mate 20 Pro. The camera bump still protrudes slightly above its glass back and we noticed an additional thin frame around the sides of the bump.

What surprised us is the number of cameras on the P30 Pro. We’ve already seen several leaked cases including Spigen that indicated a quad-camera design as shown below. Even if there are three cameras in the final product, the placement of the LED flash does not match the cut-out-holes for the P30 Pro cases.

So, did the case makers get it wrong? We think it is quite unlikely since Spigen often gets it right when they reveal a new case ahead of the product’s launch. If Spigen is leaking the cases purely for hype, it would be incredibly risky for them to sell P30 Pro cases a month before the device is out and it is safer for them to offer pre-orders instead.

We could be wrong but we think the prototype device shown here is an early engineering sample. There’s no Huawei or Leica branding and it still carries the product’s internal name “Vogue” on the back.

There’s also a possibility that Huawei could be offering multiple versions of the P30 Pro. A quad-camera setup could be reserved for a more premium 5G model similar to Samsung’s Galaxy S10 5G edition. What do you think?

UPDATE: According to reliable leakster Roland Quandt, the purported device is definitely not the P30 Pro.

These purported Huawei P30 Pro pics that made the rounds recently? Yeah, that's not a P30 Pro. People who have seen the device at #MWC19 say the photos could be something elese, but they def. arent't the P30 Pro.

— Roland Quandt (@rquandt) February 26, 2019

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