Vivid Lenscapes

Direct from its global launch in Paris, we take the new Huawei P30 Pro on the road—back to the birthplace of modern photography.

- Jamie Nonis

It’s a beautiful day and we’re standing on the 2,000-acre grounds of Le Château de Versailles, arguably one of Europe’s most lavish royal residences. All around us impeccably manicured lawns spread out before us, punctuated by beautifully clipped trees and immaculate flowerbeds, as well as amazing examples of classical statuary rearing out of fountains and pools. The grandeur and beauty of the UNESCO World Heritage site is breathtaking, making it unsurprising that this is the first stop of our Huawei P30 Series launch journey, which will end with a visit to Leica’s headquarters, an hour’s drive away from Frankfurt.

Standing among the horde of tourists, who, like me, are currently aiming their mobile phones at the former royal residence of Louis XVI, I ponder the evolution of the device. Once a means of communication while on the go, now a holistic life-enhancer that allows for everything—from easy payments with a single tap to personal assistance with the organisation of your appointments— mobile phones have almost rendered camera-toting tourists a firm relic of the past. Perhaps even more so now that the P30 has finally arrived on the scene.

Testing the much-hyped about zoom function that offers a 50 times digital zoom, I pull an image of a statue from the roof of the palace within focus, capturing the edges of the stone structure in extraordinary detail. The high fidelity magnification is impressive, while the phone’s 20-megapixel ultra-wide angle camera allows me to capture the expansiveness of the scene without need for the panorama mode. The photos that result from my short time with the phone are remarkable, and I’m eager to give the phone’s camera a full test run.

REWRITING PHONE PHOTOGRAPHY