Huawei Pura X

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.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.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. 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. 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).