For a company that surprised the entire industry less than a year ago by winning what many perceived was a two-horse mobile photography race between Samsung and Apple out of the blue, Huawei sure is looking amateurish right now. Not because it dropped the ball in the tech segment; by most accounts, its upcoming P30 lineup will be within a shout for the best smartphone range ever created once it launches next week.
But see, that’s precisely where the problem lies – save for some major and extremely unlikely surprise in the form of an unprecedented switcharoo, we already know everything there is to know about the incoming product family. It’s been leaking so frequently from so many places, revealing such a varied range of characteristics and features since the final quarter of 2018 that it’s extremely hard to assume at least some of those leaks weren’t intentional.
But which ones? The majority of what we’ve seen so far doesn’t really present the devices in a great light and most of the high-res depictions of the P30 range that did emerge this year came from one German source that almost certainly isn’t affiliated with Huawei in any shape or form. In fact, he’s more likely to be banned from Android OEM events than end up on one of their payrolls. So, what’s the catch? Not even the Pixel 3 XL range leaked so much and we’re talking about phones that literally got stolen from a factory, with at least one in-depth review of the larger device being published months ahead of its “unveiling.”
Just a few hours back, we even got treated to the old classic: a prematurely published promo website detailing possibly the final few details about the upcoming devices – some of their pre-order incentives. Sure, it got removed relatively quickly but the Internet doesn’t forget, so say “thank you” to the firm’s Dutch arm and take a look at the cached version of the page Huawei can’t do anything about.
Possibly the final piece to the P30 puzzle comes precisely from this sighting which can’t even be called a leak so much as either another planned promo or another display of incompetence on the part of your employees. As shown below, Huawei will be partnering with Sonos in order to promote its latest high-end Android phablets, at least in the Netherlands. A P3o pre-order will hence get you a Sonos One, priced at €220 ($200 in the U.S.), whereas a P30 Pro one also earns you an extra wireless charger from Huawei, regularly priced at €60 for a total pre-order incentive of €289, or just under $330.
That certainly totals to a sizeable pre-order bonus but it’s not particularly surprising given how Huawei is always trying to one-up Samsung who’s been gifting early Galaxy S10 adopters with around €250 worth of goods in recent weeks and the Chinese firm also has to come to terms with the fact the average consumer really needs to see a lot of value before shelling out around €1,000 for a smartphone – in advance.
Today’s supposedly unintentional leak that conveniently keeps the P30 in the tech media spotlight for over three full months now and allows some paranoid journos to continue propagating their irrelevant conspiracy theories also yielded another hint at which P30 colors out of the previously sighted ones can be expected in Europe. The answer is… well, see for yourself: