The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra is one of Huawei’s high-end phones as part of the new Pura series, formerly called the Pa series. It’s a powerful phone with a great camera, but it also has some drawbacks. This review covers the box contents, design, display, performance, camera, memory, connectivity, and battery, and provides a final verdict.
Box Contents
The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra comes with a 100W charger head with a USB Type-C port and a USB Type-A port. The box also contains a protective cover, a SIM tool, and a USB-C cable.
Design
The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra is available in green, brown, and black. The back of the green model is made of grained faux leather, which provides a good grip. The aluminum frame is glossy and surrounds the display, which is protected by Kunlun Glass.
Huawei says the phone is 8.4mm thick, but measurements revealed it to be 8.9mm. The inclusion of the camera module increases this to 14.65mm, and with the lens extended, it reaches 15.9mm. The phone is well balanced and doesn’t feel overly heavy on top. The build quality is good, with narrow gaps and the SIM slot cover sitting flush with the frame. The Pura 70 Ultra is bend-resistant and makes minimal creaking noises. The phone comes with a screen protector, but bubbles appeared in the corners of our reviewer’s phone after a short time. The phone is IP68 water and dust resistant.
Display
The display is a 6.8-inch OLED with a resolution of 2844 x 1260 pixels. It uses X-True Display technology and is covered with Kunlun glass. The screen has a 1-120 Hz refresh rate, 1440 Hz PWM dimming frequency, and a 300 Hz touch sampling rate. The screen can reach a brightness of 1121 cd/m². It covers 99.8% of the sRGB color space and has a gamma value of 2.28.
Performance
The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra uses Huawei’s Kirin 9010 system-on-a-chip (SoC). It features a HiSilicon Maleoon 910 GPU with a base clock of 750MHz. This phone has 16GB of RAM. Although the phone performs smoothly during daily use, benchmark results revealed lower scores than competing phones, especially for multi-core performance. In the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited test, the phone scored lower than the Honor Magic6 Pro, Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, Xiaomi 14 Ultra, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and Google Pixel 8 Pro.
Gaming Performance
The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra is not a good phone for gamers. The Maleoon 910 GPU scores lower than competing GPUs. When playing Genshin Impact on the phone, the default setting was 30 frames per second with medium graphics. When the reviewer increased the graphics settings to high, the phone experienced noticeable lag.
Operating System
Buyers should be aware that the phone runs EMUI, which is based on Android 12 and receives only two version updates and three years of security patches. Those looking for a phone in this price range may want to consider the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra or Magic6 Pro.
Camera
The Huawei phone has a powerful camera setup based on a 1-inch main sensor with a retractable lens.
This sensor produces good images in both high dynamic range (HDR) and low-light environments.
Low-light performance is impressive, with a high level of detail captured. The phone also has a 40MP ultra-wide lens and a 50MP telephoto lens.
However, there are some drawbacks to the camera system. Details in images are somewhat soft, and colors are slightly oversaturated, with a noticeable shift toward a more saturated display. The ultra-wide lens is considered low-efficiency for a phone in this price range. Images captured with this lens suffer from distortion, and edges suffer from blurriness and distortion.
Advantages and disadvantages of the camera
Camera features
The large main sensor takes excellent photos in low-light conditions.
XMAGE technology produces high levels of detail and HDR as good as any other phone on the market.
The phone rarely produces underexposed images, handles detail blending for “ultra macro” shots well, and includes several software options for customizing portraits.
Camera disadvantages
The colors are over-saturated and unrealistic, especially for skin tones.
The ultrawide lens produces distorted images that lack detail.
The selfie camera’s edge detection is subpar.
Memory
The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra has 1TB of UFS 3.1 storage.
Connectivity
The phone can accommodate two nano-SIM cards, but it does not support eSIM. The phone supports VoLTE calling and Wi-Fi. The USB 3.2 (Gen. 1) port can transfer data at speeds up to 269.98 MB/s. The USB port also supports OTG. The phone includes an infrared transmitter, NFC, and Bluetooth 5.2. In the Wi-Fi test, the Huawei Pura 70 Ultra had lower iperf3 transmission and reception speeds for the AXE11000 than many competing phones. However, the phone offers accurate location services and performed well compared to a professional navigation device.
Battery
The phone’s 5,200 mAh battery provides very long runtimes. In our battery test, it lasted 19 hours and 12 minutes while browsing the web over Wi-Fi and 27 hours and 28 minutes while playing video. When the battery is low, the phone switches to a special power-saving mode that allows users to make calls and send texts for four hours before the phone runs out of power. The phone supports 100W wired charging and 80W wireless charging. Despite supporting 90W charging, some users found that charging was limited to 18W when the phone reached 40°C, making charging times unpredictable.
Conclusion
The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra is a solid phone with an excellent camera system, a bright and accurate display, long runtimes, accurate location services, an IP68 rating, and fast charging capabilities. However, it also lacks sub-6GHz Wi-Fi, 5G, eSIM support, a slow graphics processor, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision support, and a short update window. The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra is a good phone, but it has some serious flaws. The lack of 5G and a relatively slow processor make it difficult to recommend.
Device Price
Dollar The price of the Huawei Pura 70 Ultra is approximately $1,070.
In Egypt: 55,500 Egyptian pounds
In Saudi Arabia: 3,700 riyals
In the UAE: 3,250 dirhams
In Algeria: 160,000 dinars
In Iraq: 1,650,000 dinars
In Morocco: 12,500 dirhams
In Jordan: 999 dinars
In Tunisia: 4,300 dinars
In Libya: 5,800 dinars
In Oman: 445 riyals
In Kuwait: 355 dinars
In Qatar: 4,100 riyals
In Bahrain: 445 dinars
In Sudan: 699,000 Egyptian pounds
Note:
The price is for the 512+16 GB version. Prices are approximate and may vary based on currency conversion.
