Huawei nova 11 Pro review

Design, build quality, handling

There aren't many changes in the nova 11 Pro compared to the previous generation, but one of the most obvious ones is the new design of the back. There are two aspects to that, and one is the panel itself, while the other is the camera island styling.

Our review unit is the Black colorway, and together with the Green one, it gets a faux leather back panel. It's not your regular plain faux leather, though. The 11 Pro spices things up with a cross-hatch pattern of debossed (word of the day, the opposite of embossed) 'nova' logos. That's in addition to the shiny Huawei and 'nova' logos in the bottom third of the phone, of course.

As with all pretend-leather materials like these, the panel is quite grippy and doesn't pick up fingerprints.

The other new design change is the camera bump. Gone is the thick, shiny surround around the whole island that was a bit much all by itself, but it also had the main camera specs printed twice in what was also an objectively much too large font size. We get the appeal of gold and some extra flashiness, but that was bordering on tacky.

No such thing here - only the main camera gets a golden ring, it's a lot less obtrusive, and the text that's printed inside has such fine letters that it's barely even recognizable as text unless you specifically look at it from up close.

Huawei may have swapped out the hard back for faux leather, but they did maintain the panel's curvature towards the sides, making the handset feel nice and compact in the hand.

In the interest of clarity, we should mention that there do exist two more colorways - White and Gold - which have glass backs as opposed to faux leather. These appear to be exclusive to the nova 11 Pro's home market, and the global variants are only the black and green leatherette ones.

The frame remains plastic regardless of rear material, and it's pretty thin along the sides - we mentioned the nova 10 Pro's resemblance to a Galaxy Edge smartphone of some years past, and the nova 11 Pro follows along in those footsteps.

Indeed, the front of the handset has a very upmarket look, the OLED display curving towards the sides with minimal black borders before it meets the frame. The top and bottom bezels are similarly svelte and contribute to the overall poshness.

We can't say the same about the pre-applied plastic film protecting the display - it doesn't glide quite as well as glass. It's easily removable, of course, exposing the Kunlun glass - Huawei's in-house-developed alternative to Gorilla Glass.

The top left corner has a pill-shaped cutout to accommodate the dual selfie camera. It's not often we get such large cutouts anymore, but it's not like they're that big of a deal either, plus we do like unusual selfie cameras.

At the near end of the display, Huawei has fitted an optical under-display fingerprint reader. We had no issues with its speed or reliability, but we could spare a word of complaint about its placement, which is too low for our liking.

We have no other quibbles about the location of this or that on the nova 11 Pro, and things are where you'd expect to find them. The power button and volume rocker are on the right side, in a slightly widened section of the frame and click decently well.

Up top, you'll see a trio of holes which are collectively one of the outlets for the top speaker (the other is the earpiece towards the front). There's a mic pinhole here, too.

On the bottom, the USB-C port is joined by the main loudspeaker, another mic pinhole and the SIM card slot.

Buttons on the right • Speaker and mic up top • Speaker and mic on the bottom

We'll show you a picture of the card tray to give ourselves ample space to point out the nova 11 Pro's lack of rated ingress protection. The tray does have a gasket to keep the elements out (a nice, contrasting blue one), but that doesn't mean it's got an IP rating. A lot of competitors in this price range and even cheaper models carry IP67 ratings (Galaxy A54, Pixel 7a), and the Motorola Edge 40 even boasts an IP68. Not the nova, though.

That aside, the nova 11 Pro is a well-put-together midranger with standout looks that aren't quite as polarizing as its predecessor's. It's grippy, it feels relatively light and compact for its size and handles well (once you get used to the fingerprint reader position, that is).