The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra is the latest flagship smartphone from the Chinese tech giant. As someone who has been using this phone for the past week, I can say it is an impressive device that offers a fantastic overall experience. From its sleek design to its powerful performance and impressive camera system, the Pura 70 Ultra aims to compete with the best smartphones on the market. Let’s dive into my hands-on review of this new Huawei phone.
Design and Build Quality
Right out of the box, the Pura 70 Ultra makes a great first impression with its premium look and feel. The phone has a beautiful glass sandwich design with an aluminum frame sandwiched in the middle. The front is dominated by a large 6.8-inch curved display that seamlessly blends into the aluminum frame. The back panel has a ceramic-like finish that gives it a luxurious look and feel while also being very resistant to fingerprints and smudges.
Despite having such a large screen, the Pura 70 Ultra is surprisingly lightweight and comfortable to hold. The curved edges on the back make it easy to get a solid grip. The phone feels incredibly well-built with no creaks or flexing. Overall, Huawei has absolutely nailed the design and build quality with this flagship.
Big, Beautiful Display
The 6.8-inch OLED display on the Pura 70 Ultra is simply stunning. It is bright, vibrant, and offers excellent contrast with truly deep blacks. The display gets plenty bright for easy outdoor visibility even on sunny days. It also supports a high 120Hz refresh rate which makes animations and scrolling look incredibly smooth.
This display is fantastic for multimedia consumption like watching movies, shows or playing games. The stereo speakers also get plenty loud and provide a satisfying audio experience. Huawei has included a variety of useful display settings as well like the ability to adjust color temperature, enable always-on display for at-a-glance info, and toggle dark mode.
Powerful Performance
Under the hood, the Pura 70 Ultra is an absolute beast powered by Huawei’s latest Kirin 9100 processor. This chipset, combined with 12GB of RAM, ensures there is no shortage of raw processing power and performance. Even with multiple apps open and switching between them, I did not experience any lag or stuttering. Demanding games also run buttery smooth on this phone.
The phone comes with a large 256GB of fast UFS 4.0 storage out of the box which is more than enough for most users. You can also expand storage further using Huawei’s proprietary Nano Memory card if needed. Overall performance has been exemplary during my testing with no heating or throttling issues.
Impressive Camera System
Camera performance is one of the biggest strengths of the Pura 70 Ultra. It comes with a versatile quad camera system on the back:
– 50MP f/1.8 main camera
– 48MP f/2.2 ultra-wide camera
– 8MP f/3.4 periscope telephoto camera (5x optical zoom)
– 8MP f/2.4 telephoto camera (3x optical zoom)
In my testing, this camera array produced excellent, richly detailed photos in pretty much every shooting scenario. The main 50MP sensor captures a ton of detail and produces great dynamic range. Low light photography is a major strength thanks to Huawei’s impressive computational photography smarts. Night shots come out looking clean and noise-free.
The ultra-wide camera lets you capture vast landscapes and cityscapes with minimal distortion around the edges. And the two telephoto cameras, delivering up to 5x optical zoom, allow you to get incredibly close to your subjects while maintaining image clarity. Overall, the Pura 70 Ultra’s camera system is incredibly versatile and can meet the needs of any mobile photographer.
On the front, you get a massive 40MP selfie camera inside the hole-punch style notch cutout. This allows the front camera to capture an abundance of detail and data for pixel-binned selfies with great dynamic range and low noise. You can also record 4K video from both the front and rear cameras, which is great for vloggers. READ FULL STORY HERE>>>CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING>>>
Long Battery Life
The Pura 70 Ultra houses a large 5,500mAh battery inside that easily lasts over a day with medium to heavy usage. With lighter usage, you can likely stretch it to nearly two days between charges. When you do need to top it up, the included 66W SuperCharge adapter juices the battery rapidly back to 100% in about an hour.
I’ve been impressed with the battery life so far and can confidently say you won’t have any battery anxiety with this phone even if you are a power user. The phone also supports all the latest wireless charging standards and can even reverse wireless charge other devices.
Smooth Software Experience
On the software side, the Pura 70 Ultra runs Huawei’s HarmonyOS 2.0 interface on top of Android 11 out of the box. HarmonyOS looks clean and modern with lots of white space and does feel quite different from typical Android skins at first glance. That said, it is also quite easy to get the hang of and navigate after a few days of use.
The interface is silky smooth thanks to the powerful hardware and thoughtful software optimizations. You get all the modern comforts like an always-on display, haptic interactions, digital wellbeing features, and extensive customization options. While not as many third-party apps as the Google Play Store, Huawei’s AppGallery is growing and covers most everyday essentials like banking, social media, streaming, etc. Overall, HarmonyOS makes for a refined and smooth user experience with little to complain about.
Other Notable Features
– The in-display fingerprint scanner is fast, accurate and conveniently placed
– Face Unlock for secure 3D face scanning is incredibly quick and works well
– The haptic feedback motor provides satisfying vibrations for calls, alerts and haptic UI elements
– Decent water resistance with an IP68 rating for protection from water and dust
A Few Shortcomings
As impressive as the Pura 70 Ultra is on the whole, it is not without a few shortcomings worth mentioning:
– No access to Google services and apps which may be a deal-breaker for some
– Only a mono speaker setup, which seems like an odd omission on a flagship
– No headphone jack (there is USB-C to 3.5mm adapter in the box though)
– No microSD expansion, so you are limited to the internal storage
Verdict – A Fantastic Flagship
With its sleek design, exceptional display, top-tier performance, versatile cameras and all-day battery, the Huawei Pura 70 Ultra ticks all the right boxes to be considered a true flagship smartphone. It truly excels in core areas that make it an absolute delight to use on a daily basis.
While the lack of Google services may be a deal-breaker for some, those willing to try out Huawei’s ecosystem will be greeted with a powerful, refined and feature-packed device. Assuming pricing is competitive with rivals from Samsung and Apple, the Pura 70 Ultra shapes up as one of the best Android flagship options of the year.
Just be sure to weigh the pros and cons based on your particular needs and preferences before making a decision. But for those looking for a no-compromise smartphone experience, the Huawei Pura 70 Ultra deserves serious consideration.