About our “Huawei continuous being ridiculous: 512GB P30 Pro VOG-L29 (UK version) is single-SIM” article

Last month, we published an article slamming Huawei for what we thought was a poor choice, except it turned out the information we had back then was incomplete and wrong.

Artículo disponible en Español | Article disponible en Français

Last month, we published an article titled “Huawei continuous being ridiculous: 512GB P30 Pro VOG-L29 (UK version) is single-SIM”, in which we slammed the smartphone manufacturer for what we considered was a poor choice: releasing a 512GB smartphone without dual-SIM capability. This article was published after going through dozens of product listings and support pages, both from various UK-based retailers and Huawei’s UK pages, which all mentioned how the 128GB and 512GB versions of the P30 Pro sold in the UK where single-SIM, being labelled as “VOG-L09”.

Regardless, due to this lack of information, we attacked the manufacturer, and potentially mislead various buyers into not getting the 512GB variant, as they might have been interested, just like us, in this higher-end version. We left this article untouched for 16 days, until we received our P30 Pro (purchased by one of our employees, not supplied by Huawei), and realized the device was actually dual-SIM. The original article was corrected on the 26th of April, with us deciding to leave it up but with a message, pointing out the mistake and crossing out the article.

As it can be seen on this picture, the device model is “VOG-L29”, being dual-SIM. Single-SIM is “VOG-L09”.

Some of the criticism remains valid, such as the fact the P30 Pro 128GB is single-SIM, although with some exceptions. Indeed, depending on the seller/carrier, the device will either be single-SIM or dual-SIM, with half of the carriers selling one version and the other half selling the other version. Carriers might also sell carrier-specific variants, generally choosing to only allow one SIM card, disabling the second slot through software.

The fact Huawei decided to release the 512GB variant only in the UK and nowhere else in mainland/Western Europe is also fair criticism, being a rather curious move: why does the UK get the 128GB and 512GB variants, while the rest of us get the 128GB and 256GB variants? Whichever way we look at it, this makes absolutely no sense. In our original article, we also mentioned, once again, the pricing difference between the US MateBook X Pro and the European MateBook X Pro, with the variant sold in the US being 400 euros cheaper. On top of this, depending on the European version the customer chooses, some will be penalized for no reason, such as the variant with the Spanish QWERTY layout having only 8GB of RAM, instead of 16GB of RAM.

All of these weird decisions make us wonder why and how the company reaches these conclusions, with most of them making no sense at all, especially seeing the consumers across most European countries have the same needs. Who wouldn’t want 16GB of RAM in a high-end notebook marketed towards professionals, for example?

In any case, we would like to apologize once again for the mistake made in the original article. We’ll make sure to work even harder to avoid any other mistakes such as this one in future articles.

​More on this subject:​