The teardown of Huawei’s P30 Pro reveals just how packed everything is inside the phone, leaving no room for the headphone jack.
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Huawei’s P30 Pro has already been teared-down by our friends over at the Huawei Experience Store in Brussels, sharing with us some pictures of the insides of this new flagship phone. The teardown reveals an extremely interesting new layout for the camera, but in this article, we’ll be focussing on the headphone jack.
Huawei claimed that the P30 Pro had no headphone jack because its engineers wanted to pack a larger battery. The phone does indeed come with a 4200mAh battery, packed in a body of 15.8 cm by 7.34 cm. The Mate 20 Pro also packs a 4200mAh battery, inside a body of 15.78 cm by 7.32 cm, roughly the same, although the camera positioning is slightly different. The P20 Pro came with a 4000mAh battery inside a body of 15.5 cm by 7.39 cm. There, curiously, Huawei could have squeezed a slightly bigger battery, the device still having some space left inside, as can be seen in the following picture.
Coming back to the P30 Pro, the following picture might not say much to most, but it shows exactly why a headphone jack could have never been fitted in.
Both the P20 Pro and the P30 Pro share the same design and layout, although with some changes. The battery takes most of the space inside the device, with a sub-board at the bottom and the mainboard at the top. On the P20 Pro, the SIM-tray is found on the mainboard, but this has been moved to the bottom of the device on the P30 Pro, similar to what was done with the Mate 20 Pro. The vibration motor on the P20 Pro is found on the sub-board, while on the P30 Pro it has been moved to the top of the display, right next to the speaker. Yes, on the P30 Pro, the speaker is below the display. We’ll cover this in a different article. Moving the vibration motor to the top allows to free-up space for the SIM-tray, while also including a proper bottom speaker, which was lacking on the Mate 20 Pro.
Finally, the mainboard for the P30 Pro is rather special, being half cut-out to accommodate the new quad (!) Leica camera setup, and further cut to fit the single selfie camera, the speaker and the vibration motor, leaving very little space for the CPU, memory, etc. We will cover this in another article, but even if the space used by the main components is smaller between these two flagships, the P30 Pro barely heated-up while benchmarking it or playing heavy games on it for close to an hour, which in itself is impressive, showing a very good cooling.
So, yes, a headphone jack, at least on this precise model, could not have been possible without making some sacrifices, such a relatively smaller battery (definitely less than 4000mAh). Obviously, the company could have made a bigger/wider device, which would have solved this issue, but creating others, such as having a bigger display than the current 6.47” it has. Other options would have been not having the new camera, which uses most of the space on the mainboard, or removing the SIM-Tray entirely, offering alternatives to the current system, although doing this would have doomed the device before launch.
As mentioned at the beginning of our article, this article wouldn’t have been possible without the pictures provided by our friends at the Huawei Experience Store, located here in Brussels, who went as far as lending us their P30 and P30 Pro for a day to run our tests and write our reviews, before eventually tearing them down for practice. The store sells most of the latest Huawei phones released in Belgium, such as the P30 and P30 Pro, Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro, Mate 20 Lite, P Smart 2019, etc, accessories for these devices, such as official cases, chargers, nano memory cards, and they have a machine to place film protectors on the devices. They are also currently the only store in Belgium doing in and out-of-warranty repairs for Huawei and Honor devices, with out-of-warranty repairs being priced fairly and only using official parts coming from Huawei themselves.
The store is located in the city-centre, on Rue Sainte-Catherine, 12, 1000 Brussels, near the metro station De Brouckère, and is open from 10:30 until 19:00 everyday except Sundays. The team is capable of serving customers in a wide range of languages, from French, English and Romanian to Chinese. Do not hesitate to pay them a visit if your Huawei/Honor device has an issue, or if you are interested in seeing the latest novelties of Huawei.
