A phone that can take clear photos of the moon—P30 in-depth disassembly

The internal structure of Huawei P30 Pro is more compact, especially the bonding between core components, PCB customization, and a large amount of glue fixation, which greatly improves the internal and external integrity of the entire phone...

The Huawei P30 series has been worshipped by many since its launch, and its main photography technology is exciting enough. It has become easy and common to use a mobile phone to "take pictures of stars" and "take pictures of the moon", and even "take pictures of the Milky Way" is no problem.

According to data released by Huawei, on the first day of public sale, Huawei P30 series mobile phones achieved sales of over 200 million in 10 seconds in Huawei Mall alone, which shows how popular it is. Among them, Huawei P30 Pro, as a "telescope" mobile phone, has captured the hearts of many consumers.

Without further ado, International Electronics Business brings you a detailed "Huawei P30 Pro disassembly report".

This is a disassembly from IFixit, a well-known foreign repair team, which gave it a repairability score of 4 out of 10 (the higher the score, the easier it is to repair). Before disassembling, let's review the configuration parameters of Huawei P30 Pro:

• The body size is 158mm long, 73.4mm wide and 8.41mm thick;

•  

• 6.47-inch OLED display with FHD+ (2340*1080) resolution;

•  

• Octa-core Huawei Kirin 980 processor with dual neural network processors and Mali-G76 MP10 GPU;

•  

• 8GB RAM + 128GB ROM storage (up to 512GB);

•  

• Rear Leica quad-camera, 40-megapixel ultra-sensitive camera (wide-angle, f/1.6 aperture, OIS) + 20-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera (f/2.2 aperture) + 8-megapixel super zoom camera (f/3.4 aperture, OIS) + Huawei Time-of-Flight (ToF) camera;

•  

• a new earpiece speaker technology called "Acoustic Display Technology," and an in-display fingerprint sensor;

•  

• USB-C charging port (but no headphone jack);

•  

• IP68 waterproof/dustproof rating…

•  

Higher appearance integrity

Compared to the previous P series flagship Huawei P20 Pro, the P30 Pro is 3 mm taller, 0.61 mm thicker, and 0.5 mm wider, but weighs less than 15 grams more.

From the appearance, the P30 Pro has a larger screen display because it removes the physical home button; at the same time, the left and right sides of the body adopt a curved design, making it feel slimmer and thinner. The back of the body is the P30 series's signature Leica quad-camera, and the rear fingerprint recognition has also been replaced with under-screen fingerprint recognition technology, making the whole machine more integrated.

Along the bottom edge of the phone, we see that the USB-C port is still there, while the two originally symmetrical speakers have been cut in half, leaving four microphone holes, mainly to make room for the SIM card slot.

The fuselage is fixed with a lot of glue

iFixit said that the entire disassembly process of the P30 Pro is relatively difficult because the gap between the body frame and the rear glass is very tight, and a large amount of glue is used inside to fix it, and the gap is almost invisible to the naked eye.

However, these glues provide the Huawei P30 Pro with IP68 level waterproof and dustproof standards. The back cover of the body is made of glass, making wireless charging possible.

After opening the body, you can see that the internal space layout of the P30 Pro is very compact and reasonable, and it can be disassembled with just a cross screwdriver.

Wireless charging coil

The first thing you'll notice is the wireless charging coil. It's attached to the motherboard, along with some antennas and an orange flex cable connecting the two contacts.

This charging coil not only supports wireless charging of mobile phones, but can also reverse charge a mouse, electric shaver or toothbrush.

It seems that reverse charging is becoming one of the standard features of 2019 flagship phones.

Beautiful optics

With the P30 Pro fully unwrapped, we head straight to the cameras. First up is the new periscope-style camera module, which is said to be capable of 50x zoom.

Interestingly, the module doesn’t protrude like other cameras, but is rotated 90° from the aperture and lies flat in the phone, with a prism refracting light onto the sensor.

In general, the P30 Pro has five cameras. The rear cameras are the four on the left, from top to bottom: 16MP ultra-wide-angle lens (f/2.2 aperture), 40MP wide-angle lens (f/1.8 aperture), next to it is an 8MP telephoto lens (f/2.4 aperture, OIS), and the bottom is a periscope camera module. The front camera is the 32 MP, f/2.0 aperture single lens on the right.

PCB

After removing the camera module, we saw the most critical PCB motherboard.

In terms of shape, the P30 Pro's circuit board is very irregular. The largest hollow in the middle is the location of the camera module, which occupies nearly one-third of the board space.

The circuits on the entire PCB are very compact, showing multiple stacked circuits. iFixit speculates that this motherboard is most likely a high-layer PCB, or it may be a stacked design, that is, two PCBs stacked together.

In order to further understand the information of the motherboard, let's look at the core components on the PCB one by one.

First, the front of the motherboard. The orange one is Micron JZ064 MTFC128GAOANAM-WT 128 GB flash memory; the red one is SKhynix H9HKNNNFBMAU LPDDR4X memory, which is stacked on top of the Huawei Kirin 980 processor through the POP process; the yellow one is HiSilicon HI6405.

Next is the back of the motherboard. The green one is the HiSilicon HI6363 GFCV100 RF transceiver; the sky blue one is the Skyworks 78191-11 front-end module for WCDMA/LTE; and the dark blue one is the Qorvo 77031 front-end module.

Screen speakers

From the notch screen to the water drop screen and pearl screen, the key is how to deal with the traditional front earpiece. The P30 series uses the "screen sound technology" to bury the vibration speaker module in the phone to reduce the space of the "notch" on the screen.

It’s almost like a “normal” speaker, but instead of creating sound waves with a diaphragm, it produces sound by vibrating a rigid surface (the glass screen), essentially turning the screen into a speaker.

The driving part of the module includes a coil with a magnet in the middle, which is connected to the part that vibrates the screen, which is glued to the back of the monitor.

Bottom of the fuselage

Next is the Type C port and the cable that connects it. If you choose to use wireless charging, I believe the wear and tear of the Type C port should be greatly reduced.

It is separate from the daughterboard and SIM card reader.

The traditional speaker module at the bottom is also extracted.

Under-screen fingerprint sensor

Finally, we have the under-screen fingerprint sensor that makes the Chinese proud. It is installed near the bottom edge of the phone and is the Goodix GM185 from Goodix Technology.

Goodix GM185 has been used in OnePlus 6T, Xiaomi 9, and Vivo Nex S. It can be seen that the under-screen fingerprint recognition function has also become one of the standard features of domestic high-end flagship phones.

Battery

As for the battery, there is a convenient pull ring next to it, which continues the design of the Mate 20 Pro.

The battery has a capacity of 16.04Wh (4200mAh, 3.82V), which is comparable to the Mate 20 Pro while beating the Galaxy S10+'s 15.79 Wh, not to mention the iPhone XS Max's 12.08 Wh.

Screen

After separating the screen, we can see that the other part of the screen sound module is tightly bonded to the back of the screen.

Similar to the back cover, the gap between the frame and the display is almost invisible to the naked eye, and iFixit is quite sure that this display was done after heating, cutting, and prying.

"The strong adhesive lines between the frame and the display fight us like Spider-Man trying to reassemble a ship," iFixit said humorously.

At the same time, they are very worried that when the screen is cracked or damaged, the "screen sound technology" speakers bonded to the screen will have problems such as sound distortion or malfunction.

To sum up, the internal structure of Huawei P30 Pro is more compact, especially the bonding between core components, PCB customization, and a large amount of glue fixation, which greatly improves the internal and external integrity of the entire phone.

As a high-end flagship phone that focuses on "future photography" technology, the P30 Pro's four camera modules are distributed in an orderly manner, and the design is not disordered due to the increase in the number of modules.