Huawei Pura 70 Ultra hands-on review

Design, build quality, handling

The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra is a typical cameraphone, one that comes with a captivating design, huge camera housing, and proper grip all-around. The phone is also IP68-rated for dust and water resistance.

The screen glass is advertised as Crystal Armor Kunlun Glass, 300% stronger than the Kunlun Glass on top of the Pura 70 Pro and Pura 70 displays. It is made of a highly transparent amorphous diamond carbon material and should have it all - incredible scratch resistance and impressive drop resistance. Huawei even suggested we do various torture tests so we can experience the toughness of the glass. While we were surely tempted, we think we would wait to wrap our review first.

This special Kunlun glass has 2.5D edge, which adds a touch of premium on top of everything.

The frame is slightly curved and made of polished aluminum and it is painted in silver with a hint of gold on our Green version.

Then we have the eco-leather back with a matching 2.5D curve to the front panel. Huawei calls the design here Forward Symbol Design because of its simple geometric lines .

The complicated camera island is the star of show, of course. It has metal housing around the triangular glass and the metal extends over the LED flash, too.

The three cameras here are the 40MP ultrawide, followed by the retractable 50MP primary, and finally comes the periscope lens for the 50MP zoom camera.

Huawei needed to come up with the retractable lens for the 1" primary sensor as otherwise the housing would have become way too big and would have compromised its safety. The maker claims the mechanism has been tested and it is going to endure over 300,000 retracting cycles.

The Pura 70 Ultra is also available in white, brown and black colorways.

The 6.8-inch LTPO OLED screen called X-True Display has impressively thin frame one nicely small perforation for the 13MP AF selfie camera. It has 1,260 x 2,844 pixels, 1B colors, HDR10, 120Hz refresh rate and 2,500nits of peak brightness.

We can confirm the display is of an excellent quality, smooth and colorful, with great contrast and brightness. More on its capabilities will be shared in our in-depth review.

Some other things you cannot see it first at the front - the under-display fingerprint scanner and the top speaker/earpiece.

The Pura 70 Ultra boasts a stereo speaker setup of the hybrid variety - the earpiece doubles as a speaker and there is also another bottom-firing gull-blown speaker. The setup is balanced, offers rich sound with bass, good vocals, and excellent high frequency range. We expect it to score well on our loudness test, too.

The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra is available in 256GB, 512GB and 1TB versions and there is no NV card here.

The Pura 70 Ultra measures 162.6 x 75.1 x 8.4 mm and weighs 226 grams, which is about the same as the iPhone 15 Pro Max.

The new Pura 70 Ultra is a flagship of exquisite design, excellent build and packs some impressive hardware. It also offers superb grip even with case, which is super important for a cameraphone and we do applaud Huawei for taking the extra steps here. Overall, even with the gigantic camera housing, we really liked this Pura 70 Ultra phone and we have nothing but positive impressions.