Huawei Pura 80 Ultra hands-on review

Introduction

It’s debatable which frontier is the most contested at the moment – battery size, charging speed, or camera hardware. What undeniable, however, is that cameras were the focus for Huawei when making the Pura 80 Ultra. Just look at the beast of a camera island on this thing!

Huawei set out to obliterate the competition when it comes to imaging! The Pura 80 Ultra’s camera credentials read like a best-of-the-best and borders on sci-fi when you get to that zoom installation. So let’s talk about it.

Dubbed the industry’s first switchable dual telephoto camera, the system puts an 83mm f/2.4 (3.7x) equivalent lens and a 200mm f/3.6 (that’s 10x though the official lens specs are 9.4x) one in front of a 1/1.28-inch sensor – the largest behind a telephoto camera in a phone to date! The closest to it is the 200MP 1/1.4-inch imager in the vivo X200 Ultra and Xiaomi 15 Ultra, but that already impressive sensor is some 1.23-ish times smaller than this one!

The way Huawei has achieved the switchable design is impressive. There’s a built-in symmetrical light-blocking mechanism that’s driven by a micron-level motor. Essentially, this is a dual-prism, four-lens-group design, which manages to make the light inside the mechanism travel a much longer effective distance inside the phone – Huawei says it’s a 129% increase compared to periscope systems in other phones.

And, it saves space because there’s no need to have two separate periscope chambers and lens systems in the phone, like in the Oppo X8 Ultra. The micron-level motor isn’t only tiny but extremely precise! And, Huawei says it has passed 180 thousand reliability tests.

But it’s not all about that zoom camera! The rest of the imaging hardware is just as impressive, as is the overall package. The wide angle camera is a 1-inch type sensor with a variable aperture lens, and a special RYYB sensor with up to 16 stops of dynamic range (an industry record) through a technology called TCG-HDR – triple gain, essentially capturing three high-capacity light signals and merging them into a single image. The ultrawide has a 40MP sensor with a 13mm f/2.2 lens with autofocus.

Here are the rest of the specs.

Huawei Pura 80 Ultra 5G specs at a glance:

• Body: 163.0×76.1×8.3mm, 234g; Glass front, aluminum frame, glass back; IP68/IP69 dust tight and water resistant (high pressure water jets; immersible up to 2m for 30 min).
• Display: 6.80″ LTPO OLED, 1B colors, HDR, 120Hz, 1440Hz PWM, 3000 nits (peak), 1276x2848px resolution, 20.09:9 aspect ratio, 459ppi.
• Chipset: Kirin 9020 (7 nm): Octa-core (1×2.5 GHz Taishan Big & 3×2.15 GHz Taishan Mid & 4×1.6GHz Cortex-A510); Maleoon 920 GPU.
• Memory: 512GB 16GB RAM, 1TB 16GB RAM.
• OS/Software: EMUI 15 (Android 12).
• Rear camera: Wide (main): 50 MP, f/1.6-4.0, 23mm, 1.0″-type, dual pixel PDAF, OIS; Telephoto: 50 MP, f/2.4, 83mm, 1/1.28″, PDAF, sensor-shift OIS, 3.7x optical zoom; Telephoto: 12.5 MP, f/3.6, 212mm, PDAF, sensor-shift OIS, 9.4x optical zoom; Ultra wide angle: 40 MP, f/2.2, 13mm, AF;
• Front camera: 13 MP, f/2.0, (ultrawide), AF.
• Video capture: Rear camera: 4K, 1080p, 1080p@960fps (interpolated), HDR Vivid, gyro-EIS, OIS; Front camera: 4K, 1080p, 1080p@240fps, HDR Vivid, gyro-EIS.
• Battery: 5170mAh; 100W wired, 80W wireless, 20W reverse wireless, 18W reverse wired.
• Connectivity: 5G; Wi-Fi 7; BT 5.2, L2HC; NFC; Infrared port.
• Misc: Fingerprint reader (side-mounted); stereo speakers.

Today is the Pura 80 Ultra’s global launch and you’ll be able to see the phone in a store near you! Yes, Huawei phones lack proper Google services support and have been forced to to develop their own silicon in the wake of the US ban, but some people just might accept those limitations in favor of the potentially best-in-the-world camera hardware!

The Kirin 9020 SoC is only a 7nm unit, technically around five years behind the top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Elite, but you wouldn’t say the Pura 80 Ultra is anything near as behind when you have in your hand.

And then there’s the design – just look at this thing! It’s curvy, it’s premium, and it’s big. Let’s explore that on the next page!