Huawei’s Pura X View Gives the Slab Phone a New Shape…Extra Wide

Huawei just showed the first non-folding phone built around a deliberately wide screen. Called the Pura X View, it debuted in China on August 20 as a straight slab with a 16:9.5 aspect ratio instead of the tall, narrow proportions that have defined almost every modern handset. Reservations opened the same day, with in-store experiences and full details set for August 28.

Most smartphones are measured diagonally, which always favors height, but Huawei has reversed this. The 6.39-inch OLED display has a resolution of 2232 x 1320 pixels and a screen-to-body ratio of 96.1 percent, which is quite outstanding, especially given that the sides are all the same thickness of 1.05mm. The phone’s peak brightness reaches 6500 nits, which is extremely bright, and it features 2160Hz PWM dimming to keep things looking beautiful in low light. The bigger size is just better suited to video frames, so it’s no surprise that movies and TV shows look and fill the screen without the bothersome black bars – and the same applies for reading, gaming, and everything else.

Packing that screen into something you can really carry in your pocket is no simple challenge, but they’ve managed to do it. The phone is a svelte 6.68mm thick (the camera hump doesn’t count) and weighs a respectable 201 grams. Powering it all is a 7000mAh battery, the type of capacity that usually drives manufacturers to go thick and hefty, but not here; evidently, Huawei leveraged the phone’s extra width rather than trying to stack height to fit everything in. They also promise ultra-fast 66W wired charging. The phone comes in four colors and starts with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, expanding up to 1TB.

Around the back is a camera module that resembles a pill, and according to reports, underneath that is a 50mp triple camera setup, wide, tele, and ultra wide, all with optical stabilization, as well as a color spectrum sensor and laser autofocus, and if that wasn’t enough, there’s a 10.7mp selfie camera on the front. Huawei’s Kirin 9030S CPU powers the phone, which runs the first stable version of Harmony OS 7, with a few software changes to make the most of the larger display. There are also promises of a more refined UI, all intended to make video watching, reading, gaming, and office work more enjoyable.

This concept is not new, since Huawei has already explored it with their Pura X series, but those phones had one major drawback: they were foldable. This one, the Pura X View, is a genuine slab phone, with no opening and closing necessary, and it appears to be a major deal, with the display area being larger than you’d expect on a 6.9 inch phone, but the diagonal size looking quite conventional.

So, for the time being, the price is unknown, but early estimates suggest that it will range between 6000 and 7500 yuan ($1,115) in China. Full information and availability for the rest of the world will have to wait until August 28th, but it’s apparent that Huawei is saying, “Hey, a larger screen doesn’t have to mean a folding phone.”