We just reinvented Phablets: Huawei’s Wide-body Pura X View feels oddly nostalgic to the touch

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Seventy percent of Samsung’s record 1.44 million Galaxy Z8 series pre-orders went to the wide 4:3 model over the traditional tall one, a number that makes product planners cancel their afternoon meetings. Huawei saw it coming. The Pura X View, launched in China on August 20, is a slab phone with a 16:9.5 screen, no hinge, 6.68mm of thickness, and a 7,000mAh battery packed into 201 grams. Run the panel geometry and the body lands near 144 by 86mm, which is essentially the 2011 Galaxy Note’s 146.9 by 83mm with fifteen years of thinning applied on top. The first phablet just came back, and it skipped the hinge entirely.

Huawei shipped its first 16:10 phone in March 2025, roughly seventeen months before Samsung’s wide Fold 8 and eighteen before Apple’s expected iPhone Ultra. That head start counts for plenty editorially and almost nothing commercially, because the Pura X View runs HarmonyOS 7 without Google services and has no confirmed launch outside China. The width also brings a problem nobody involved has solved yet. Fold 8 reviewers keep flagging that one-handed typing on a wide cover screen demands a thumb stretch most people just do not have. Huawei is asking you to live inside that stretch full time, with no fold to escape into.

Designer: Huawei

I keep coming back to the battery number because it should not work the way it does. Cramming 7,000mAh into a 6.68mm body usually means a phone that feels like a coaster, but Huawei leaned on the extra width instead of stacking cells vertically, and the reported silicon-carbon anode chemistry lets the pack sit flatter than lithium-ion ever could. The screen-to-body math backs it up too, a claimed 96.1 percent with bezels measured at a uniform 1.05mm on all four sides, which is tighter framing than most flagships bother chasing. Around back, Huawei kept the pill-shaped camera bar and striped texture from the Pura X Max, so this reads as a family member rather than a one-off experiment.

The historical parallel only gets stranger the closer you look at it. Samsung built the Galaxy Note on a 16:10 panel in 2011 specifically because it read and wrote better than 16:9, and that logic held until the LG G6 and Galaxy S8 dragged the entire industry toward 18:9 in 2017. At the start of that year, over 95 percent of phones sold still ran 16:9. Within about eighteen months it had nearly vanished, replaced by taller and taller screens that eventually made “phablet” sound like a word from a dead language. At 1.68:1, the Pura X View is actually squatter than any of those old 16:9 phones, closer in spirit to the doomed Dell Streak than to the Note it resembles in the hand.

None of this makes the Pura X View an easy recommendation, and I would rather say that upfront than let the nostalgia do all the talking. Pricing remains unconfirmed, early Chinese estimates swing wildly between 4,499 and 7,500 yuan, and Huawei has a recent history of catching real backlash over Pura pricing. There is also no path to a Google-services version, which locks most of the world out regardless of cost. What the Pura X View does prove is that the tall screen was never physics, just a decade of consensus that Samsung and Apple are now both quietly abandoning. We covered the Pura X Max when it doubled down on this same wide logic inside a folding body, and the View feels like Huawei betting the shape works even better without the crease.

The post We just reinvented Phablets: Huawei’s Wide-body Pura X View feels oddly nostalgic to the touch first appeared on Yanko Design.

Dyson’s $499 Camera Toothbrush Is So Advanced, They Had To Redesign The Toothpaste For It

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Dyson’s new $499 CameraJet hides a 1mm camera under the brush head, reading 28 images a second, and within 100 milliseconds of spotting a gap between your teeth it fires a cone of mouthrinse straight into it. That single lens is why Dyson also had to formulate its own non-foaming toothpaste, because bubbles blind a camera. It is also why the 12.5ml tank runs a diaphragm pump and pressure chamber, so the jet still fires when you tilt the handle sideways to reach your back molars. One optical decision rewrote the rest of the product. That cascade is the actual story here, and it is a lovely bit of design logic.

James Dyson unveiled it in Paris this morning, capping six years of work, 661 engineers and 38 patents. The vision system is called Gap Optical Targeting, trained on 470,000 dental images and running 16 million lines of code, all so a toothbrush can find the spaces nine in ten of us never floss. It ships today at $499, or £419.99 in the UK, in Ceramic Ultra Blue and Ceramic Pink. You also get a dock that refills the tank in three seconds and RFID brush heads that count their own cleans. Every one of those parts exists because somebody decided the brush should be able to see.

Designer: Dyson

The jet took years of refinement on its own, because the shape of the water matters as much as the camera aiming it. Traditional water flossers use what Dyson calls a needle jet, a narrow, piercing stream that punches through a plaque deposit without actually lifting it away. Dyson’s engineers went hunting for a shape that would sweep plaque off the tooth instead of tunneling through it, and landed on a broad conical spray fired at lower pressure. To test that idea without running a clinical trial every time they tweaked the nozzle, Dyson spent five years building its own synthetic plaque with the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Dentistry. That is the unglamorous groundwork that never makes the keynote slide but decides whether the whole idea holds up.

None of that fluid engineering matters if the tank runs dry the moment you tilt your head back, which is the next problem the camera created. Conventional reservoirs use a straw-in-a-cup setup that draws air and loses pressure on an angle, fine for a kitchen gadget, useless inside a mouth that never sits still. Dyson’s fix is the anti-gravity tank, built around a pump that adjusts as you move so the jet fires whether the brush is upright, angled, or flat against a back molar. The brush head carries its own logic too, firmer bristles inside for stains, softer ones outside for the gumline, contoured to actually hug a tooth rather than sit flat against it. Even the sonic oscillation varies its angle mid-stroke so bristles do not stall in the tighter corners.

The camera does double duty as a diagnostic tool, streaming live through the MyDyson app so the brush briefly becomes a tiny endoscope. Dyson says nothing is recorded or stored, on the device or in the cloud, and a light on the handle shows when the lens is active. Cameras inside toothbrushes are not new. A Chicago dentist named Craig Kohler built one back in 2016 called the Prophix, a video-streaming brush that let people watch their own mouths on an iPhone in real time. It never went mainstream, and its own website still reads coming soon, a decade on. What Dyson brings that Prophix never had is the industrial muscle to turn that footage into an automated response, steering a jet instead of just showing a picture.

Dyson CameraJet in situ imagery, JPEG, PSD

Dyson has spent decades arguing that the dirt you cannot see is the dirt worth engineering around, first in carpets, then in bathroom air, now in the gap between your incisors. The CameraJet is that philosophy at its smallest scale yet, a lens standing in for the clear bin that made a bagless vacuum’s dust visible for the first time. What makes it worth writing about as design, rather than just as gadgetry, is how completely one sensor reorganized everything around it, the chemistry of the paste, the physics of the pump, the shape of the bristle. That is a rare thing to see fully worked through in an object that costs less than a laptop. Whether $499 buys cleaner teeth is a question for your dentist in six months. Whether it buys a masterclass in constraint driven design is not really a question at all.

The post Dyson’s $499 Camera Toothbrush Is So Advanced, They Had To Redesign The Toothpaste For It first appeared on Yanko Design.