Using Huawei's Wide Bar Phone, Forgetting the BlackBerry of Memory | Huawei Pura X View Review

Ever since smartphones entered the era of elongated full screens, there has been a continuous desire among users to return to the typing experience of the classic BlackBerry full keyboards.

This demand first gave rise to some full-keyboard phone cases, and later led to full-keyboard smartphones like the Unihertz Titan 2 Elite and the Clicks Communicator:

Unihertz Titan 2 Elite | ZDNET

But the above examples are all small-scale, crowdfunded endeavors—on the track of paying homage to BlackBerry, no real major manufacturer other than BlackBerry itself has entered the game until now.

That is, until Huawei launched its Pura X View:

As a new member of the Pura family, the Pura X View chooses to return to a traditional aspect ratio in this era where elongated phones dominate, using a 16:9.5 screen to achieve a visual renaissance.

If the keyboard were changed to black, it wouldn't be out of place for the Pura X View to directly cosplay as the BlackBerry Classic, 9720, or even the Q10:

Of course, this renaissance is merely superficial. After deeply using the Pura X View, we feel this is the first phone in 2026 so far that can truly be called "interesting."

Wide First, Wide Later

Actually, purely in terms of form factor, the Pura X View only does one thing—it adopts the vertical wide screen of the unfolded Pura X, rather than opting for the horizontal wide screen like the Pura X Max.

And as it turns out, the Pura X View only needs to do this one thing well.

The diagonal size of the Pura X View is only 6.39 inches, making it seem numerically like a "small-screen phone."

However, at a 16:9.5 aspect ratio, its actual display area is 114.27 square centimeters, surpassing many Pro Max models:

Pura X View (left) and Pura 90 Pro (right)

After all, the habit of measuring area by diagonal was formed during the CRT era of the 1950s when aspect ratios were standardized, and it is no longer suitable for today's OLED era with vastly different length-to-width ratios.

Thus, when watching videos on the Pura X View, from streaming media to IMAX, as long as it isn't ultra-wide, you can get a quite immersive experience. The advantages are exactly the same as wide foldables.

Similarly, a screen that is wider than conventional bar phones offers unparalleled advantages for reading e-books and comics—delivering an immersion close to the format of a physical paper book:

More importantly, while the Pura X View's advantageous scenarios seem similar to those of wide foldables, it avoids the most fatal issue: software adaptation.

In other words—the apps we saw on wide foldables that suffered from brutal stretching, oversized or undersized DPI, and misaligned controls, even inside Zhuoyitong, can all display normally on the Pura X View.

Furthermore, the form factor of the Pura X View has a hidden advantage: portrait mode.

Since most apps nowadays use a feed-based UI, when we used the Pura X and Pura X Max, we frequently had to repeatedly rotate the phone to switch between landscape and portrait modes.

On the Pura X View, since it inherently lacks the landscape-portrait issue of foldables from the very beginning, I no longer need to constantly rotate the phone back and forth like I did with the Pura X—

Take the notorious problem child "Meituan" as an example. On the Pura X View, it completely avoids the issues seen during the initial launch of the Samsung Z Fold8 and the HarmonyOS version, where text was larger than images, and images were larger than faces.

Therefore, currently, since vertical information/video feeds remain the absolute mainstream UI, a "wide bar" phone like the Pura X View is undoubtedly much more worry-free and convenient to use compared to a "wide foldable."

Making Bar Phones Interesting Again

Regarding the advantages and shortcomings of screen form factors, we have actually discussed a lot of relevant content this year against the backdrop of the concentrated explosion of wide foldables.

The real advantage of the Pura X View lies in the fact that, beyond a sufficiently novel and user-friendly screen, its underlying hardware foundation is equally solid.

Take battery life, for example. The Pura X View packs a full 7000mAh silicon-carbon anode battery into its 201g body.

Paired with the excellent power management of HarmonyOS 7 and the Kirin 9030s, under my usage habits, it is a phone that needs charging only once every two days—

In an extreme scenario, starting from waking up at 7 AM to catch a flight, using 5G data the entire way, mixing Bluetooth and hotspot usage until 8:30 PM, after 6 hours and 22 minutes of screen-on time, the remaining battery was still at 60%:

Although there were no heavy-load applications like gaming, a phone that can browse Xiaohongshu for six and a half hours has a battery life longer than my own life.

In addition, the imaging quality of the Pura X View hasn't fallen behind. The 200-megapixel main camera can achieve excellent detail reproduction in well-lit conditions, and the minimum focusing distance of the 3.7x telephoto lens can also satisfy the vast majority of macro scenarios:

Coupled with XMAGE smart shooting, new color cards, AI pose recommendations, and assisted composition, it can be said that apart from being a bit hard to hold steady, the Pura X View's imaging capabilities are completely up to par:

However, after talking so much about the benefits brought by the Pura X View's special body ratio, we also have to face some of its existing problems.

For instance, while the wide body brings an excellent typing experience, it also makes prolonged gripping more tiring than a regular bar phone—

During the few days using the Pura X View, my hand...