This Foldable Smartphone Offers the Best of Both Worlds

Once again, the foldable smartphone I want is unavailable in the U.S., and it’s a real shame. Huawei, a smartphone brand you’ve heard of, though maybe not in the most favorable light, no longer sells devices stateside, but the manufacturer is going hog wild overseas. Huawei is launching a folding smartphone that flips and folds out into a book-style foldable. It’s called the Pura X. The response to it is a bit polarizing, considering its weird aspect ratio, but I think it’s almost the perfect one-size-fits-all form for a foldable.

The Pura X’s front side features a 3.5-inch display. Like Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 6 and Motorola’s Razr series, you can tap on apps on the front screen, send messages, and do most of whatever else you need to do just from that front display. There’s also a 50-MP primary camera, a 40-MP ultrawide camera, and an 8-MP macro camera bundled into the camera bar you see on the front. All this starts at around $1,040 for 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

Open it up, and that’s where the Pura X gets slightly confusing. The Pura X’s 6.3-inch display splays open like a book instead of a flip phone. The aspect ratio is 16:10, which is much closer to a tablet than it is the insides of a foldable—the Galaxy Z Fold 6, for example, has a 7.3-inch display on the inside with a 20.9:18 aspect ratio, a bit more fullscreen than it is widescreen. The main concern seems to be how non-native apps and content will show up on the inside screen of the Huawei Pura X and the fact that you have to flip the phone on its side to get the same kind of use you would out of a traditional book-style foldable. It’s different! This device runs HarmonyOS, which is no longer a fork of Android and doesn’t even have access to the Google Play Store. So if Huawei wants apps to work seamlessly it will have to do what Google’s been doing and gently encouraging app makers to support it.

But enough about apps — what I like about the Huawei Pura X is that it is the best of both worlds in a foldable smartphone, even if it relies on software to perform the rotation magic just right. I would feel more amenable toward the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold, for instance, if it looked like this. I want it to be shorter and not so wide when it’s all closed up! But given the Huawei Pura X won’t be coming to the US I’ll have to look longingly at the Galaxy Z Fold, which fold smaller like the Pura X. I really hope the rumors ring true and it’s getting a little wider.