The teardown of Huawei’s newest flagship reveals a rather interesting mainboard layout to accommodate the new quad-camera set-up.
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Our friends over at the Huawei Experience Store in Brussels recently teared down a P30 Pro as a training exercise, sharing some pictures with us to show the new quad camera setup. These pictures show a very interesting new layout for Huawei’s latest flagship, making big changes to accommodate the novelties in the same amount of space than the Mate 20 Pro. We’ve already done an article covering the P30 Pro and its lack of a headphone jack, with this one focussing on the camera.
To free up as much space as possible, Huawei has, this time, decided to move the SIM-tray to the bottom of the device, on the opposite side of the speaker, similar to what has been done on the Mate 20 Pro. Also similar to the Mate 20 Pro, the mainboard is now partially cut-out. With the Mate 20 Pro, the cut-out was at the centre, for the cameras, with the CPU and others arranged around said cut-out. On the P30 Pro, this has changed, with half the main-board missing, packing all the phone functions on the other half, thanks to the freed-up space by moving the SIM-tray to the bottom.
Now, moving on to the cameras, the P30 Pro comes with a quad-camera setup, sharing some similarities with the P20 Pro and Mate 20 Pro. Three of the cameras are found on a single block, exactly as with the P20 Pro and the Mate 20 Pro, with the periscope/telephoto camera being separate. The flash is integrated on the main-board.
P30 Pro camera 
Mate 20 Pro camera 
P20 Pro camera
The rest of the cameras correspond more or less to what we have already seen with the P20 Pro and Mate 20 Pro, being a main camera of 40 MP, a second one of 20 MP and finally a telephoto (now replaced by periscope) camera of 8 MP. On the P30 Pro, a ToF camera (Time of flight) is introduced. The new layout for the telephoto camera, allowing it to take more space, makes it possible to take better zoomed pictures.
The changes made to accommodate this new camera setup are rather interesting, although they do raise some concerns, especially for repair. The new design for the mainboard, having a very small frame around the cut-out for the cameras, make this part rather fragile. Should the technician not pay attention or not be aware of this, it could be easy to break this part.
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.
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