Huawei Pura 90s Pro Max hands-on review

Software

This remains a bit of a sore point for Huawei phones. For anybody that needs a refresher, due to US restrictions, Huawei's global smartphone software, called EMUI, lacks Google Play Services. EMUI is still based on AOSP and is fundamentally an Android OS, but unless you take extra steps to set up some form of GMS or compatible replacement yourself, you will be stuck with Huawei's own Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) and the Huawei AppGallery store, instead of the Google Play Store.

In contrast, Chinese Huawei phones run HarmonyOS, which is currently not based on Android, but instead is built from the ground up as a native microkernel. It even lacks direct Android app support and needs an emulation layer to potentially get even some apps working.

Now, our particular Pura 90s Pro Max review unit, as we have mentioned, is a bit "unique" in that it seems to have some mismatches here and there, one of which is that instead of running a European EMUI build, like we would have expected, it is running one meant for the APAC region. Huawei still maintains an EMUI version specifically for devices in that region, and as we mentioned already, this software branch gives us access to AI De-Glare, AI Move, Celia, and Advanced Translation Toolkit - all absent from the European software. The latter only has Data Transfer between iOS and Huawei phones and AI Composition 3.0 as new features Huawei wants to focus on. We are yet to test any of these.

We do still have one interesting observation to make regarding software. While we haven't gotten any formal confirmation that this will be the case for all international retail units, it seems that the Pura 90s Pro Max is essentially debuting a brand new version of EMUI - version 16, which various system information apps claim is based on Android 16. We aren't sure what potential implications this has since Huawei tends to do a lot of custom work and cherry-picking when building on top of AOSP, but for what it's worth, EMUI 13, 14 and 15 have all been based on Android 12, so this is potentially a nice step forward.

Performance

Huawei's chip development has been in a pretty awkward spot for a while now, in no small part due to ongoing US sanctions. It is pretty hard to decipher and properly navigate the different chips sometimes, and the Pura 90s family is no different. As far as we know, both the Pura 90s Pro and Pura 90s Pro Max run on a chip called the Kirin 9030S. While not fundamentally different from the Kirin 9030 Pro as found in some Mate 80 Pro and Mate X7, the Kirin 9030S is technically a bit different - worse in some ways, while better in others.

The Kirin 9030S is based on SMIC's 5nm-class FinFET node known as the N+3 process. In the CPU department, it is technically a bit downclocked compared to the 9030 and 9030 Pro. It is rocking a single Taishan V124 Big core, clocked at up to 2.7 GHz, three Taishan V124 Mid cores, working at up to 2.15 GHz and four Taishan V124 Little cores, limited to 1.62 GHz. The GPU situation is perhaps even more baffling, with an onboard HiSilicon Maleoon 935F, which, as far as we managed to tell, is rated for around 1433 GFLOPS of performance, compared to 2388 GFLOPS on the regular Kirin 9030's GPU and 2866 GFLOPS on the Pro model. So, we expect notably worse GPU performance here.

Other than that, compared to the Pura 80 series, Huawei officially advertises a 21% improved app launch speed, 21% improved page loading speed, 31% improved content loading, 43% more efficient task switching, and a 30% improvement in frame rate stability for some games. The onboard NPU promises 200% improved image understanding capability and 43% improved image processing overall. In addition, the processor is responsible for increasing telephoto video clarity by 110% and enhancing telephoto anti-shake accuracy by 30%.

We only managed to run some preliminary benchmarks on our unit. The GeekBench scores look decent enough, with the Pura 90s Pro Max scoring higher in the single-core than the Mate X7 with its Kirin 930 Pro and the Huawei Mate 80 Pro, rocking the same chipset. The 9030 Pro does pull ahead in multi-core CPU testing, as expected.