The Huawei Pura 80 Ultra has gone global, and I’m blown away by its cameras
Is phenomenal photography hardware enough to overlook the usual caveats?
Mobile photographers with an eye for heroic hardware will be happy to hear the Huawei Pura 80 Ultra has just gone global. The uncompromising flagship smartphone was announced for China back in June, but it’s finally getting a wider release – and putting the rest of the phone world on blast with its ingenious zoom lens.
At 1/1.28in, the periscope telephoto sensor is about as big as it gets in the phone world – and it’s attached to not one but two lenses. A shifting lens element can swap from 3.7x to a whopping 9.4x, without any slide in visual clarity. That basically means this phone can cover a massive focal length range of 13-212mm, even before digital zoom and sensor cropping comes into play.
OK, so the distinctive camera island is more like a camera continent at this point, but that’s because it has to also make room for a 1in lead snapper, 40MP ultrawide, and a 1.5MP multi-spectral color sensor. Every rear camera has autofocus, and the lead lens can take in a class-leading 16 stops of dynamic range. It’s got a variable f/1.6 – f/4.0 aperture, and optical image stabilisation.
Huawei’s image processing has long been top-tier, even if limited availability has meant it’s rarely in the same conversation as Apple, Samsung and Google – or even Chinese brands that have an easier time selling overseas, like Xiaomi and Oppo. I’ll be very interested to see how this latest hero model stacks up, especially in low light – that huge main sensor should give it a real advantage over its Western rivals.
I now have a review unit in hand, and will be putting it to the test over the next few weeks to see if the images match the hardware’s potential.
There’s hints of luxury watch design in the textured camera bump, and the Prestige Gold colour scheme gives me Rolex vibes. The Golden Black model has contrasting gold rings around the lenses, in case you thought they didn’t stand out enough already. A metal frame and polished rear glass complete the look, while the whole thing is rated IP68/IP69 against dust and water.
Interestingly Huawei has gone for a side-mounted fingerprint sensor/power button combo, rather than bring back the under-display seen on the outgoing Pura 70 Ultra.
The rest of the Pura 80 Ultra’s spec is of course nothing to sniff at. There’s a quad-curved 6.8in OLED screen up front with LTPO 1-120Hz adaptive refresh rate, FHD+ resolution, and second-gen Crystal Armor Kunlun Glass. Huawei reckons it’s 16x more scratch resistant and 25x more resistant to drops than the previous version. Brightness tops out at 3000 nits.
Power comes from a home-grown Kirin 9020 chipset, paired with 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of on-board storage. There’s also a 5170mAh battery – smaller than the one seen in the Chinese version, but still good for 100W wired and 80W wired charging.
The global version of the handset runs EMUI 15, and has to make do without any kind of Google Play support. Huawei’s own App Gallery aims to fill the void, though the selection won’t be quite so well known here in the West. There are unofficial workarounds for the truly committed, of course.
As I’ve come to expect from Huawei, a ‘global’ launch means the Middle East, most notably Dubai. Local pricing is still TBC, but it’ll almost certainly be higher than the CNY9999 (roughly $1400/£1050) it goes for on home soil.
Tom Morgan-Freelander
Deputy Editor 
