Huawei Pura 90s Pro Max hands-on review
Design
The Pura 90s Pro Max is nothing if not distinctive, with its oddly shaped large camera island. To be fair, Huawei has been doing a similar design on its Pura line for some time now, so it has become sort of a signature thing as well. It's certainly different, and we like it.
The Pura 90s comes in a total of four color options: Blush Gold, Orange Ocean, Graphite Black and Blaze Purple. Of course, our unit had to be the objectively boring black one. We joke, of course, it still looks perfectly stylish, but we can't help but wonder what could have been since Orange Ocean and Blaze Purple both feature what Huawei claims is an industry-first: Dual-Tone Gradient Mid-Frame.
It's exactly what it sounds like: the color gradient effect that we have seen time and time again on phone back panels also extends to the Pura 90s Pro Max's aluminum frame. It's certainly a very rare approach.
Huawei Pura 90s Pro
As for the color choices themselves, Huawei says that the Pura 90s Pro Max "draws its aesthetic palette from holiday tranquility" and that the device "exudes effortless vacation ease" and also "embodies travel romance through a vivid spectrum of captivating hues". Honestly, as lame as these descriptions sound, we can definitely see what Huawei means, and they are certainly not wrong.
On to some less-exclusive, but arguably more practically-relevant design aspects. The Pura 90s Pro Max both looks and feels like a 2026 flagship, from the pretty wide and mostly flat metal sides, to the flat glass panels on both the front and the back and all the way through the aggressively-curved corners that also eat into the display's shape.
Huawei Pura 90s Pro Max
It is all very familiar design language and all very well-tested at this point, so we have no doubt that users will find it attractive. It feels quite iPhone-ish in the hand, which is not necessarily the most exciting thing, but is certainly not a bad thing either.
Huawei Pura 90s Pro
The Pura 90s Pro Max boasts excellent durability, at least on paper. It has an IP68/IP69 ingress protection rating, which should allow it to survive a dip in up to two meters of fresh water for at least 30 minutes.
As we said, the middle frame is aluminum, and the phone has practically no flex to the chassis. Both the front and back sides are covered with glass. The front gets Huawei's Kunlun Glass with "next-Level Armor Hardness". The back side has some other kind of hardened glass.
Display
The Pura 90s Pro Max offers a spacious 6.9-inch OLED display with a high resolution of 1308 x 2880 pixels. It can refresh at up to 120Hz and has a 10-bit color depth.
We can only comment on brightness and reflections subjectively for now, before we get the phone into our lab, but our first impressions are very positive. The display certainly has enough brightness to be perfectly usable outdoors. Plus, reflections are pretty minimal, probably thanks to the special Anti-Reflection coating of the Kunlun Glass, which Huawei claims reduces reflections by up to 70%.
The Pura 90s Pro Max uses LTPO tech, so we expect pretty dynamic refresh rate switching behavior from it when we eventually test it properly.
Battery and charging
Battery capacity is one area where the international Pura 90s Pro Max differs from its Chinese counterpart. Actually, this kind of divergence in battery capacity has been fairly common between Chinese and non-Chinese versions for some time now due to stricter air transport regulations, and Huawei is far from the only one affected.
Instead of the 6,000 mAh capacity, the European Pura 90s Pro Max gets a 5,500 mAh capacity (typical). Some sources claim 5,270 mAh capacity for the EU version but we can only assume that's the rated power capacity as our unit self-reports 5,500 mAh.
The Pura 90s Pro Max supports up to 100W fast charging through the company's SuperCharge technology. On markets where the charger is included in the box, Huawei seems to ship one of its Type-C single-port 100W SuperCharge bricks, but you can just as well get the weird Huawei combo Type-C plus Type-A charger instead if you plan on using the Type-A port. We only call it "weird" since, despite having two ports, it is only meant to charge one device at a time, which is why the two ports are very awkwardly smushed together.
Anyway, since we haven't tested charging speeds for ourselves yet, all we can do is list off the charging capabilities. These are exactly the same as on the Chinese Pura 90 Pro Max and include 80W wireless charging support, 18W reverse wired charging and reverse wireless charging. Again, there will be differences in charging behavior between the Chinese model and the international one purely due to battery capacity, but we still think that if you are really interested in some data today - this excellent deep-dive by ChargerLab is worth a glance.
Speakers
The Pura 90 Pro Max has a stereo speaker system - a proper one with two speakers - one on the bottom and one on the top.
Again, without proper testing, we can't tell you anything objective for now, but subjectively, from our cursory experience, the phone sounds really good. It definitely has the volume, and the mids sound pretty clean to our ears.
