Huawei has introduced its new flagship Pura 80 smartphone vary, full with digital camera upgrades and a few all-too-familiar caveats.
This 12 months’s vary is comprised of the Huawei Pura 80 Extremely and the Huawei Pura 80 Professional. The design of each builds on final 12 months’s Huawei Pura 70 sequence, with a cleaner tackle the distinctive triangular digital camera module across the again.
Or, to make use of Huawei’s terminology, a “dazzling Ahead Image design”. The Extremely mannequin dangers gilding the lily by surrounding the digital camera lenses with a gold ring.
Using second-generation ‘Crystal Armor Kunlun Glass’, in the meantime, guarantees a 16x enchancment to scratch resistance and a 25x enhance in drop safety.
One other huge digital camera improve
The Pura sequence has at all times put its finest pictures foot ahead, and the Pura 80 sequence continues that development.
The Professional mannequin options a big 1-inch ‘Extremely Lighting Digicam’ designed for wonderful low mild efficiency, whereas the Pura 80 Extremely is claimed to boast an ‘Extremely Chroma Digicam’ for exact color copy and correct night time pictures.
Maybe most fascinating of all, the Pura 80 Extremely introduces an modern new ‘Switchable Twin Telephoto Digicam’, which pairs a big sensor (apparently the business’s largest) with each 3.7x and 10x focal lengths, which you’ll freely change between. That is a few of the most optical zoom we’ve seen on any smartphone, at the very least on paper.
What else does the Pura 80 sequence convey to the desk?
Away from the digital camera, each Pura 80 telephones add a brand new {hardware} management, which Huawei is labelling the ‘AI Good Controls Button’. It’s one other customisable button, used for fast entry to the digital camera, flashlight, or AI lens, although this one seems to implement a fingerprint sensor for added safety as a substitute of constructing it into the show.
Each telephones pack a 5170mAh battery, which isn’t the most important we’ve seen of late, however nonetheless counts as above common. 100W SuperCharge wired charging help is unquestionably one of many speedier provisions on the market, as is 80W wi-fi charging.
Nevertheless, that’s it for agency particulars on the Huawei Pura 80 sequence at current. The corporate has been fairly selective with its shared specs, failing to say the processor used and never going into any element on the software program provision.
The Extremely mannequin dangers gilding the lily by surrounding the digital camera lenses with a gold ring
Based mostly on earlier fashions, it’ll proceed to make use of Huawei’s personal HarmonyOS software program as a substitute of Android. A number of the hottest apps in Europe and the US can be found, however not all of them, whereas the software program expertise could be complicated, particularly if some textual content is immediately translated from Chinese language to English.
The unfinished software program expertise stays the primary motive to not purchase a Huawei cellphone within the West – it’s fairly completely different to Android 16.
Huawei didn’t even share value and availability data forward of the launch. If you would like a information value, the Huawei Pura 70 Professional offered for €1,199 final 12 months, whereas the Pura 70 Extremely offered for €1,499.
We’re hoping at the very least one of many telephones makes it to the UK, however Huawei is banned from promoting its units within the US.
Will the Pura 80 Extremely be among the finest digital camera telephones you should purchase? Probably, however the software program points will virtually definitely forestall it from being among the finest telephones total.
Huawei
The persistent downside with Huawei telephones
This lack of readability speaks to a few of the lingering and obtrusive points with all Huawei telephones. Because of ongoing Western sanctions, they don’t have entry to the most recent ARM-based processors, and so they’re not allowed entry to the Google Play Retailer.
As such, regardless of how good the Pura 80 {hardware} seems to be – and we suspect it’s going to be high tier – we will already state with some confidence that you simply shouldn’t purchase one.
It stays to be seen how properly the Pura 80 Professional and Pura 80 Extremely carry out in comparison with the Snapdragon 8 Elite flagship crowd, however we all know for a truth that you simply received’t be capable to run your favorite apps on it with out leaping by means of a lot of unsavoury hoops.
We’ll reserve last judgement till we’ve gone hands-on with the {hardware}, in fact, but it surely’s laborious to see how our conclusion will likely be any completely different: good {hardware}, badly hamstrung software program – don’t purchase. We’d be delighted if we had been to be proved fallacious.
