Honor Play 30 Smartphone Review- Honor Play 30, an entry-level smartphone, unveil in mainland China in May 2022. It’s been a while that Honor has released in the budget tier. Usually, the smartphone makers are limiting their phone lineup to the mid-range and flagships. But it’s good to see that Honor has finally released something in the affordable range segment. Besides this, the company has also released an upgraded variant known as the Honor Play 30 Plus.
This smartphone has the same features, but with more interesting specs. Anyway, let’s not get diverted to our main review and talk about the Honor Play 30. It’s a fabulous phone that has a simple design, good enough performance, stable UI experience, and sufficient battery life. This was our first impression of this phone. But have run a few tests and found out some interesting things. To know more, let’s start the detailed review of the Honor Play 30 review.
Table of Contents
Honor Play 30 Smartphone Review
Highlights
- The smartphone has a 6.5-inches TFT LCD panel that surprisingly offers a 90Hz refresh rate.
- Unlike the recently released phones, the Play 30 stuck with the Android 11-based Magic UI 5.0 update.
- As for the hardware, the standard setup of the 8nm Qualcomm SM4350-AC Snapdragon 480+ chipset arrives with 5G connectivity and Adreno 619 GPU.
- A single 13MP camera module appears on the back panel, and a 5MP selfie lens is present on the front screen.
- Finally, the phone delivers power through a Li-Po 5000 mAh battery, while it doesn’t have fast charging support.
Design and Display
Appearance-wise, the Honor Play 30 arrives with a pretty plain design that doesn’t have much appealing first impression. Although, it’s a good thing that company is providing various shade choices from which you can pick the perfect options according to your wish. The smartphone makers include the Black, Blue, Gold, and Gradient shade option.
The squircle camera module appears simple, and you will notice the -Honor branding on the back panel. In terms of the dimension, the phone feels not that boring. The phone is around 8.7-mm thick, while the 194-gram body doesn’t feel that heavy. Although, the phone doesn’t have the security features of the fingerprint scanner. Still, you can utilize PIN and Pattern security options.
As for the front display, you are getting a 6.5-inches TFT LCD panel, while at the same time, the smartphone will provide a 90Hz refresh rate that will ensure you will receive fast touch responses. Besides this, the colors and contrast are slightly downgraded with the 720p resolution display. But still, it’s worth noting that the phone attains Aluminosilicate glass protection, which is good compared to having nothing.
Memory and Internal
In the entry-level smartphone, the main priority of the processor is to provide stable performance throughout the day. Hopefully, the Honor Play 30 smartphone equips an 8nm Qualcomm SM 4350-AC Snapdragon 480+ chipset. It will also provide 5G connectivity and support multitasking seamlessly, while you can play a handful of online games to gain a casual gaming experience. As far as the visual aspect is concerned, the phone will render Adreno 619 GPU.
The software layering of the Android 11 based on Magic UI 5.0 brings numerous custom features, which allow you to modify the interface layout according to your preferences. Besides this, you can download third-party apps for better personalization. Yet, as usual, the phone doesn’t have Google ecosystem library support. Moreover, the advanced refresh rate settings will improve the user experience, and will slightly increase the battery drain speed at the same time.
Moving to the storage options, the Honor Play 30 comes up with 128GB of internal space, which is more than sufficient to store your multimedia data. Besides this, you can choose between 4GB to 8GB RAM support according to your needs. Following this, the phone also equips a shared SIM slot, so that you can either use secondary storage or Dual-SIM features. It’s up to you.
Camera
The camera department of the Honor Play 30 is quite minimal and renders a basic lens with average image processing quality. The camera setup includes a 13MP primary lens, which is responsible for all of the photography and videography needs. Besides this, there’s also a 5MP selfie camera present at the front, which works great with the native camera app features.
Usually, the daylight photos come out average as they don’t have proper color blending and crisp contrast. But still, the AI software makes sure that you have to capture decent images. The dynamic range feels pretty underwhelming and grains are noticeable in the low-light photos. Despite this, the camera setup tries its best to deliver great value to the users.
Although, the phone miserably fails in the attempt to improve the portrait and close-up shots as the company doesn’t utilize proper camera tech. Aside from this, the 1080p video call experience with the Honor Play 30 is adequate, while the video recording results are underwhelming. The phone doesn’t have any stabilization software support.
Battery and Others
A standard charger will fuel the Li-Po 5000 mAh battery capacity of the Honor Play 30. Having a massive battery size does give the advantage of more screen time, and with this phone, you can effortlessly get more than 5+ hours of screen time for extreme usage. If you are not a heavy performance user, you can even get a day and a half worth of screen time.
Although, the screen time will be varied according to your usage. In the most common case, you can play advanced games like Call of Duty and Genshin Impact for continuously 3 hours, and even after that, roughly 28% battery will remain, which is quite good for an entry-level phone. Now, let’s talk about the price point. The Honor Play 30 costs $164 (Rs. 12,999 in India) approx.
Honor Play 30 Specifications Detail
Down below you can see the full specifications of the Honor Play 30 smartphone.
| Specifications | Honor Play 30 |
| Network | 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G |
| Announced | May 2022 |
| SIM | Hybrid Dual SIM |
| Dimensions | 6.44 x 2.96 x 0.34 inches |
| Weight | 194 g |
| Size | 6.5 inches |
| Display | TFT LCD 90Hz 20:9 ratio ~270 PPI density |
| Protection | Aluminosilicate glass |
| Resolution | 720 x 1600 pixels |
| OS | Android 11, Magic UI 5.0, no Google Play Services |
| Chipset | 8nm – Qualcomm SM4350-AC Snapdragon 480+ 5G |
| CPU | Octa-core 2×2.2 GHz Kryo 460 6×1.9 GHz Kryo 460 |
| GPU | Adreno 619 |
| Card slot | microSDXC (uses shared SIM slot) |
| RAM | 4GB, 8GB |
| Internal | 128GB |
| Camera | 13 MP (wide), AF LED flash, HDR, panorama Max – 1080p@30fps |
| Selfie | 5MP (wide) Max – 1080p@30fps |
| Loudspeaker | Yes |
| 3.5mm jack | Yes 24-bit/192kHz audio |
| WLAN | Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA, hotspot |
| Bluetooth | 5.1, A2DP, LE |
| GPS | Yes, with A-GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BDS |
| NFC | No |
| Infrared port | No |
| Radio | Yes |
| USB | USB Type-C 2.0 |
| Sensors | Accelerometer, proximity, compass |
| Battery | Li-Po 5000 mAh |
| Colors | Black, Blue, Gold, Gradient |
| Expected Price | $140 (Rs 11,599 in India) approx |
Conclusion
After reviewing all of the aspects of the Honor Play 30 smartphone, we conclude that this phone is an average deal in the entry-level segment. You will find several other options in the budget segment that will provide more value for money with the Google service ecosystem. But if we have to recommend this phone, we only do for 5G connectivity, performance, battery, and storage.
Apart from those factors, there’s no news of when the company will release this phone outside of China. Instead, you can check out alternative smartphone options such as the Tecno Spark 9T for better features and specs but you have to compromise the 5G connectivities.
