T3 Awards 2019: Huawei P30 Pro wins the Tech Innovation Award

published 7 June 2019

What product do you think of when you think tech innovation? We had a fantastic selection of 10 in our shortlist for the T3 Awards 2019, and after much debate, the judges decided that the Tech Innovation Award would go to the Huawei P30 Pro.

What really stunned us with the P30 Pro is its camera system. It offers a staggering 5x optical and 10x hybrid zoom, which lets you capture images that you simply could not get with another smartphone, while the dedicated Night Mode is equally as impressive.

The camera system on the P30 Pro is the result of both hardware and software innovations. The phone features a periscope lens that is positioned sideways inside the phone, allowing Huawei to offer greater zoom without having to resort to a massive camera bump.

To improve the camera’s low light capabilities, Huawei moved from a traditional Red-Green-Blue colour filter on the main 40MP sensor to a brand new Red-Yellow-Blue filter. Because the yellow photosite captures red light as well as green, the result is that it captures more light overall, meaning better low light performance.

Making this new set-up work also required new processor-intensive algorithms to crunch through the data – something that’s handled by the powerful Kirin 980 processor which Huawei developed. The same processor takes care of the P30 Pro camera’s AI tasks, tweaking settings according to what you are shooting. While we don’t know exactly how many automatic settings the Master AI feature offers, Huawei did say that last year’s Mate 20 Pro can now recognise 1,500 scenarios across 25 categories, so we’d imagine it’s at least that many.

Huawei really has set the bar high for phone cameras and now everyone else is playing catch-up, so it’s a very worthy winner of the Tech Innovation Award for its P30 Pro.

Full shortlist: Apple Watch 4, B&W Formation Duo, Cambridge Audio Alva TT, Dyson Lightcycle, Google Stadia, Huawei P30 Pro, Land Rover Evoque, LG Signature R rollable TV, Mavic 2 Pro, Samsung Q950 8K TV

Check out more of this year's award winners on our main T3 Awards 2019 page.

Paul Douglas is Global Digital Editorial Strategy Director at Future and has worked in publishing for over 25 years. He worked in print for over 10 years on various computing titles including .net magazine and the Official Windows Magazine before moving to TechRadar.com in 2008, eventually becoming Global Editor-in-Chief for the brand, overseeing teams in the US, UK and Australia. Following that, Paul has been Global Editor-in-Chief of BikeRadar and T3 (not at the same time) and later Content Director working on T3, TechRadar and Tom's Guide. In 2021, Paul also worked on the launches of FitandWell.com and PetsRadar.