Huawei Pura X hands-on

Huawei is challenging the common thinking when it comes to foldables. We already oohed and aahed at the triple-folding Mate XT Ultimate, now we take a closer look at what could turn into a new category of foldable.

The Huawei Pura X falls somewhere between flip foldables and book-style foldables and it gets there with a 90° twist. When closed, the X is close to the size of a typical flip foldable, not much bigger than the likes of a Pocket 2 or Galaxy Z Flip6.

(closed)	Huawei Pura X	Huawei Pocket 2	Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6
Width	91.7mm	87.8mm	85.1mm
Height	74.3mm	75.5mm	71.9mm
Thickness	15.1mm	15.3mm	14.9mm
Weight	196g	202g	187g
Cover display	3.5” 980x980px	1.15” 340x340px	3.4 720x748px

Okay, it is a little larger than the Galaxy. However, it’s still small enough that it doesn’t feel too chunky despite its 15.1mm of thickness. This sort of thickness is okay on a flip, not on a book foldable.

Huawei Pura X

Now for Pura X’s key advantage – the inner display has a pretty standard 16:10 aspect ratio. Its 6.3” diagonal is misleading – the Pura screen has 13% more surface area than the 6.7” Galaxy Z Flip6 display and it’s more usable too since the Samsung used a wide 22:9 screen.

16:10 is great for videos, YouTube and most TV shows will play with just a bit of letterboxing, so you get a much larger video frame than on your typical flip foldable. 16:10 in portrait orientation is also great for documents and web pages – tall and slender displays aren’t always the best for text.

How did Huawei pull this off? With the 90° twist we mentioned. If you hold the closed Pura X with the camera array above the cover screen (this is the portrait orientation when closed), the phone opens to the side like a book foldable.

But once you open it, you have to turn it 90° as the UI is intended to be used in portrait rather than landscape – the homescreen doesn’t even have a landscape mode. Yes, you can use the phone in landscape when watching videos, using the camera or gaming, but it’s mostly a portrait device similar to a flip foldable. That’s why it’s branded “Pura” instead of “Mate X”.

You could also hold the phone closed with the cameras to the side – this is a bit harder to grip but it makes using the camera UI easier. The Huawei Pura X is a great selfie and vlogging device.

Let’s do a quick overview of said cameras. The main is a 50MP module with OIS, there is also a 40MP ultra-wide (13mm) and an 8MP telephoto with 3.5x zoom (80mm). If you need a camera when the phone is opened, there is a 10.7MP punch-holed module on the inside.

We snapped a few camera samples with the Pura X – Huawei doesn’t disappoint, but we’ll save discussions of image quality for a more detailed article.

Huawei Pura X camera samples (main and telephoto)

Huawei Pura X camera samples (UW, main and telephoto)

Selfies with the Huawei Pura X

And check out this camera bump – it’s much smaller than most phones on the market. Keep in mind that the phone measures 7.2mm thick when opened, so the camera modules don’t have much more room than a typical phone despite the Pura X being thicker when closed.

We have to talk about the screens. Starting with the cover display, it is a 3.5” square with 980 x 980px resolution. This is a 120Hz LTPO panel with 10-bit colors, so it’s a great quality display. And it’s big enough for simple tasks – reading and responding to messages, navigation, controlling media players and even taking calls (there’s an extra speaker next to the cameras).

Using the 3.5” cover display on the Huawei Pura X

3.5” is pretty cramped for modern software, though, so while you can get a lot done, you will want to use the main display for serious tasks. It’s a 6.3” 120Hz LTPO panel with 1,320 x 2,120px resolution and 16:10 aspect ratio (well, 10:16 since it’s mostly a portrait device). It can boost to 2,500 nits too, so outdoor visibility isn’t an issue.

The 6.3” display is quite spacious and also usable when half folded

Though the crease hasn’t disappeared, it is quite small by current standards. The phone is rated IPX8, so it is water resistant (up to 2m for 30 minutes), but it has no protection against particles.

The battery is a decently big 4,720mAh and supports fast wired and wireless charging at 66W and 40W, respectively. This isn’t quite the biggest flip phone battery out there, but it is bigger than most.

Huawei was forced to do its own thing, so inside is a Kirin 9020 chipset, which is fast enough for daily use but no match for the flagship chips from Qualcomm and MediaTek. HarmonyOS would be a bigger issue for global audiences since it is decoupled from Android and Google Play services – this version of HarmonyOS more than usual because it blocks APK installs (global versions of the OS do support that). This means that we couldn’t run benchmarks. Instead, check out our Mate X6 review for a look at how this chipset performs.

That said, Huawei has not announced plans for a global rollout of the Pura X and HarmonyOS works smoothly with all the Chinese apps and services. We do wish that the Pura X would join the roster of globally available Huawei devices, though, it’s such an innovative design.

What’s interesting about the Pura X is that Huawei didn’t develop new technology or perfect existing ones like it had to for the Mate XT Ultimate – as far as we can tell, this is fairly standard foldable hardware.

However, Huawei’s outside-the-box thinking created a design that’s almost as small as a flip foldable while offering a larger, more usable inner display. It’s too early to tell whether the Huawei Pura X will be a success in the market, but we have to admire the company for creating something new (and not for the first time either).