Earlier this year, we attended both the international pre-briefing and the launch of the Huawei Pura 70 Ultra smartphone. There was a lot of hype around this device amongst our colleagues at these events, and it’s easy to see why. Even without official Google Mobile Services, this phone is giving its competitors a run for their money… and yes you can run Google apps on this phone.
At the launch of the Pura 70 series, Huawei said that it is rebranding the P-Series to Pura to align this range with Huawei’s current naming conventions across its phone ranges.
With its latest flagship, Huawei has opted for more aesthetic appeal, a bolder look that amplifies the Pura series’ fashionability and performance.
The Pura 70 Ultra is stunning to look at, even when it’s off. We were given the green-backed version, which I think is the better of the two options—black is the alternative colour. Although a brown version is available in other markets, it has not been earmarked for launch in South Africa.
This smartphone has a rounded-edge design, similar to some of the older Samsung Galaxy phones, but features an eco-leather backing with a textured finish. It’s pretty comfortable to hold, even for a large device, and it never feels like it will just slip out of my hand. It comes bundled with a matching cover that protects the corners of your phone should it accidentally fall to the ground. The cover also features the same paper-like texture as the phone itself. While I do not usually like a cover on my phone, this one looked really good.
The Huawei Pura 70 boasts a screen 6.8 inches from corner to corner, with a 2844 × 1260 resolution, or 460PPI, similar to the iPhone 15 Pro Max. It is an LTPO screen with all the pros of OLED but features a lower power draw and a variable refresh rate. You can let the phone decide which refresh rate to use, from 1Hz to 120Hz, or you can force it to run at a constant 120Hz. There is also a 60Hz option available.
The screen is nice and bright, even in full sunlight, but I feel like it just doesn’t get dim enough for me to scroll through social media without waking up my wife in bed.
Speaking of being in bed, the Huawei Pura 70 Ultra has quite the battery, meaning I wasn’t tethered to the wall all night long. I was lucky enough to have the Pura 70 Ultra with me during Computex, where it was used for everything: social media posts, video recording, photo shooting, and even editing. With a full charge of the 5,200mAh battery in the morning, I could really put the phone to work throughout the day and still come out with 30% when the show doors closed at 17h30, giving me just enough to squeeze in a little bit of game time in the press room, if needed.
One of the Pura 70’s main selling features is its unique camera setup; this cluster also gives the Huawei Pura 70 its signature look. What makes its main camera so unique is that the lens pops out as soon as you switch to camera mode. The ability to increase the focal distance between the lens and the sensor means that Huawei is able to squeeze every pixel out of that large 1-inch sensor.
Besides the actuating primary lens, which has the tech nerd in me giggle whenever I hear that mechanical sound, the overall camera system was quite impressive.
There are four cameras on the device in total. On the back, we have a 50MP primary lens with an aperture of f/1.6-40, featuring a one-inch sensor, a 50MP telephoto lens with an aperture of f/2.1, and a 40MP ultra-wide angle lens with an aperture of f/2.2. On the front, we have a 13MP lens with an aperture of f/2.4, also capable of an ultra-wide angle.
The combined lenses are capable of a 3.5 optical zoom and up to 10x digital zoom, which I found pretty good relative to other zoomed photos I’ve taken in the past.
The primary camera really shines in both well-lit and dark conditions. The colours felt true and weren’t overcompensated with high saturation or that fluffy beauty mode that so many other phone cameras have. All the pictures featured a great level of detail, although lost a bit of their sharpness when you zoomed in on the image. This is where the 3.5x zoom on the telephoto lens kicks in. This zoom had the best quality overall if you were looking to take shots from afar and still maintained great, true-to-life colour. While the 10x zoom does have its function when used to take pictures of very far away things, you start to get a slight fuzziness or softness to the edges of some of the objects.
The primary camera on the Huawei Pura 70 Ultra really takes some of the best photos and video we’ve seen from a smartphone camera yet. The portrait mode is especially great for capturing beautiful people shots with blurred backdrops and impressive colour saturation.
The Super Macro mode is also quite satisfying for those who love to zoom right into whatever they’re shooting. I was able to capture some tiny bubbles in my ramen broth or even get up close and personal with a few stamens.
Where the Huawei Pura 70 really shines, though, is in high-speed photography; this camera uses some software (dare we say AI) magic to create a sharp image of even the fastest-moving subjects. It’s really impressive. We tested this out at the phone’s launch using a spinning photo disc as a subject. As you’ll see in the video below, it captures and sharpens the image perfectly.
When it comes to video, the Huawei Pura 70 Ultra captures footage in 4K at 60FPS and works quite well in sunlit, well-lit and nighttime scenarios. The only thing I struggled a bit with was transitioning from a dim room to a well-lit one, where the camera took a bit of time to adjust to the lighting change.
Truthfully, these are minor issues. In fact, I’ve shifted most of my work shooting to the Huawei Pura 70 Ultra and its made a big difference in the quality of my production workflow. If that is not enough to convince you, then have a look at DXOMark’s technical and in-depth camera test, the Huawei Pura 70 Ultra is currently their number one ranked smartphone camera.
When it comes to gaming, the Huawei Pura 70 holds its own, but considering it runs a Kirin 9010 processor, it does not perform as well as smartphones that use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 or later chipset platform.
3DMark’s Wild Life benchmark showed that the Huawei Pura 70 Ultra performs well below the rest of the flagship devices on the market today. This phone scored 5,130 in Wild Life and 1,374 in Wild Life Extreme, which is about a third of the performance of the iPhone 15 Pro or the Galaxy S24 in gaming. This will only affect you with processor-intensive games running at high frame rates of 60fps or 120fps
In terms of day-to-day performance, the Huawei Pura 70 is a workhorse. I never experienced a delayed app startup or buggy scroll while using this smartphone. Call of Duty Mobile held up quite well, and I was still able to PWN a couple of n00bs while tucked away, nice and warm on the couch. For those who like to monitor frame rates, the game hovered around the 120fps mark during every game played. The phone never got too hot to handle, and after a couple of hours of gameplay, the phone just felt warm, not hot. The slight warmth is quite lovely during these cold winter nights.
Of course, you’re all sitting there wondering if the phone is even usable without Google Mobile Services. Well, the fact of the matter is that the phone doesn’t have Google services, and if you want to use them, you’ll have to utilise a workaround or two.
For the technologically inclined, sideloading apps (downloading the install files from a website instead of an app store) works just fine. Once you enable the feature in the settings, it’s smooth sailing from there. To run Google apps though, you can us GBox, an app that is easily available from the Huawei App Gallery, this app allows you to run any Google app on your phone in a virtual environment. While it’s not perfect, it works well enough to give you access to most of the apps that are not officially supported on Huawei smartphones.
Once you’ve installed Gbox, you can run the Google Play Store from within the GBox app and sign in to your Google account. From here, you’ll have full access to all the apps that you know and love, from Google Maps to Gmail to WhatsApp. GBox even allows you to create shortcuts to each app on the main Huawei display, making it feel just like any regular app on your phone. The kicker is that you need to manage the updates yourself. I set a weekly reminder to log in to the Google Play Store and check for updates on all my installed apps, and it worked pretty well. You could just use the app until it says it requires an update, but that just sounds like bad things waiting to happen.
Some of you may not trust your data with other developers, and for those people, I say, take a risk for a change. Although I would probably stick to downloading my banking app from the official Huawei App Gallery, the rest of my Google life felt completely safe in Gbox’s anonymous hands.
And then there’s the price. You’re looking at the higher-end flagship devices at R34,999 for the Ultra version of the Huawei Pura 70. The iPhone 15 Pro with the same 512GB of space will set you back around R34,000, and the Samsung Galaxy S24 hovers around the same price. It’s a great phone, but when competing with the other front-runners in the market for a similar price but the lack of Google Mobile Services might discourage a few buyers who aren’t already in the Huawei ecosystem.