Huawei Pura 70 Ultra review

EMUI 14.2, another name for Harmony OS 4.2

EMUI 14.2 is what Harmony OS 4 is called outside China for now. It is the latest version of the Huawei OS. The version of smartphones includes new interactive and magazine themes, new and improved features for Celia assistant, better security, better Health app, and support for Ark Engine.

The global EMUI 14.2 includes an Android (12) core inside. The OS still supports APK installations via Huawei's AppGallery, APK Pure, or similar, and Gbox works just fine if you want to run Google apps. It's similar to the EMUI-labeled builds from the company too.

EMUI looks quite familiar as it has not changed drastically over the years. It includes neat little things like large folders and cards - another name for the widgets that you can add for in-house apps, indicated by a bar under the app icon.

Air gestures are supported on the Pura 70 Ultra - a familiar capability also found on previous Huawei and Honor models.

Smart sensing, meanwhile, keeps an eye out for... your eyes, and will keep the screen on while you're looking at it - also nothing new.

Huawei offers a lot of default apps to get you started. There is Huawei's Gallery, Music, Video, and Health apps. A File Manager is available, as well. And there is Smart Remote - you can turn your phone into a universal remote thanks to its IR blaster.

You also get Petal Maps, Petal Search and Huawei's own Browser.

Huawei's AppGallery handles the app installations by default, but we hate that it sometimes shows 3s ads when you open it. We don't find this solution user-friendly - but we guess the focus with this feature has been to help developers promote their apps.

You can install other app repositories and they work just fine.

The best solution for making most of the Google-dependant apps working on the Huawei Pura 70 Ultra is GBox. It's a small virtual machine based on the latest Android version, and it contains all Google services. You have a list of apps you can install right away, but you can also install other apps from the integrated Play Store if you'd like (just hit back on any of the suggested apps). Play Store update is also possible.

The GBox creates app shortcuts on your homescreen, so you don't have to worry about that. Notifications are supported, of course. And we have no issues running Google Maps, Google Drive, Chrome, and YouTube with 4K HDR streaming. Even better, the GBox Netflix app supports 1080p HDR10 streaming, while the native Netflix app streams 480p only. Other Google-reliant apps like Disney+ and HBO had no issues either. Well, of course, your mileage may vary as this functionality will depend on what sort of a device Gbox emulates.

Overall, the EMUI 14.2 is a powerful system that can be easily tweaked and tinkered with, but will surely not be everyone's cup of tea.

Performance and benchmarks

The Pura 70 Ultra features Huawei's new Kirin 9010 chipset. It packs an 8-core CPU - 1x 2.3 GHz Taishan Big + 3x 2.18 GHz Taishan Mid + 4x 1.55 GHz Cortex-A510 cores. It is manufactured on an SMIC 7nm node, known as N+2 locally in China, like the Kirin 9000s inside the Mate 60 series. It also contains the HiSilicon Maleoon 910 MP4 GPU.

Huawei Pura 70 Ultra comes with 16GB LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB of UFS storage. There are versions with 256GB and 1TB, but only in China.

It seems that the new Kirin 9010 is as powerful as the Dimensity 8200 chipset by MediaTek - both CPU and GPU wise - which is not bad at all considering all those restrictions they had to work around.

We also finished our usual stress tests. The Pura 70 Ultra passed the 3D Mark GPU stress test with flying colors. But the CPU throttle test was a mixed bag - the phones scored 57% stability, often experiencing sharp drops in the performance so it can cool down.

GPu test • GPU test • CPU test

The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra can become warm around its frame during long benchmarking, especially CPU ones, but never unbearably hot.

The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra has a good chipset, equal to one of the upper mid-range class. The performance is solid, and the hardware is enough even for a good gaming experience. The raw power is far from the last couple of Snapdragon 8 chipsets.

Finally, while the phone does come with a 5G modem and it can use 5G in China, it is still limited to 4G in Europe.