The Huawei Pura X Max is now official, and it’s the wide foldable that both Apple and Samsung have been building toward in rumour cycles for most of the year. Huawei just got there first.
The form factor itself is worth explaining. Most foldables on the market right now open tall and narrow, like a small tablet in portrait. The Pura X Max opens wide instead, producing something closer to a landscape screen when unfolded. It’s a proportional shift that makes more sense for video, games, and side-by-side multitasking than the standard book fold. Google tried a version of this with the original Pixel Fold in 2023 and walked away from it quickly. The difference in 2026 is that the market has caught up to the idea. Samsung’s rumoured Galaxy Z Wide Fold and Apple’s anticipated iPhone Fold are expected to land later this year with near-identical internal dimensions to the Pura X Max. Huawei’s timing wasn’t accidental.
The device opens to a 7.7-inch LTPO 2.0 OLED with adaptive 1-120Hz refresh and a resolution of 2,584 x 1,828 pixels. The cover display is a full 5.4 inches, a substantial step up from the 3.5-inch outer screen on last year’s Pura X. Folded, it measures 11.2mm thin and weighs 229g. Unfolded, it drops to 5.2mm. Both numbers are competitive with anything currently on shelves.
The X Max also supports a stylus, the Huawei M-Pen 3 Mini, which has been scaled to fit the reduced height of the wide form factor. It pairs with a purpose-built case. Stylus support is not common in foldables and it’s one of the more practically interesting additions here, especially on a device where the open screen actually has enough width to make note-taking or annotation feel natural.
On the camera side, there’s a 50MP main with a variable f/1.4-4.0 aperture and OIS, a 50MP periscope telephoto at f/2.2 with OIS and 3.5x optical zoom, and a 12.5MP ultra-wide. All three use RYYB sensors. Two 8MP selfie cameras, one on each display, handle video calls from either screen. Huawei’s XMAGE processing is applied throughout, with a second-generation colour sensor in the mix.
The Kirin 9030 Pro chipset sits underneath, with Huawei claiming a 30% performance improvement over the Kirin 9020 in the original X. Battery capacity is 5,300mAh with 66W wired and 50W wireless charging. IP58 and IP59 ratings give it proper dust and water resistance, an upgrade on the original X’s IPX8 which offered submersion protection but no dust rating at all. The cover glass is second-generation Kunlun glass. HarmonyOS 6.1 includes an Immersion Layout feature that adjusts controls based on whether you’re holding it left- or right-handed.
Pricing starts at CNY 10,999 (approximately $1,615) for the 12GB/256GB configuration and goes to CNY 13,999 (approximately $2,055) for the 16GB/1TB Collector’s Edition. Pre-orders are open in China now.
That’s the catch. Global availability is unconfirmed, and based on Huawei’s recent pattern, the odds are not encouraging. The Pura X never left China. The Pura X Max currently has no committed international release date. For South African buyers, that means grey market import, no official warranty, and no Google services because this runs HarmonyOS, not Android. The last point is the practical dealbreaker for anyone who’s spent years living inside Google’s ecosystem, which in South Africa is most people.
The Pura X Max is a well-specced, genuinely interesting device that does something real with a form factor the rest of the industry is still working up the courage to commit to. Whether that matters much outside China depends entirely on whether Huawei eventually follows through on international distribution. Right now it doesn’t look like they will.