Bucket Tech: HUAWEI XMAGE Awards

The 2025 HUAWEI XMAGE Awards Ceremony and "The World, You and Me" Annual Imaging Exhibition was held this week at the Grand Palais in Paris. The event, jointly hosted with Paris Photo, one of the most world’s largest international art fairs dedicated to photography, drew attention from a host of accomplished creators, media, industry leaders, and photography enthusiasts.

Kevin Ho, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group, said of the event: " Through XMAGE, we can use the power of technology and images to better perceive the world, and more gently, to see one another."

Founded in 1997, the annual Paris Photo event regularly attracts over 100,000 attendees. This year's exhibition represents the third time (originally in 2018 and 2019) that Paris Photo and Huawei have collaborated to introduce mobile photography to the global art scene, and the first since the company unveiled its genre-defining XMAGE brand that signalled a meaningful shift from technical innovation to creative expression and storytelling.

This year's exhibition is based on the theme "The World, You and Me" and showcases the works of talented creators and how they are perceiving, recreating, and interpreting the world around them. It also plays host to three exhibition areas, titled "I Capture, Therefore I Am", " The Constructed, The Perceived", and "In Their Own Words." Each have been carefully curated to reflect the competition's emphasis on visual immersion.

All of the works on display delve into the idea of reimaging the relationship between individuals, their unique perspectives, and the visual worlds they inhabit. In addition to being one of the top photography exhibitions, the event is a major drawcard for leaders in global photography, providing the perfect backdrop for networking, relationship building, and idea sharing. This lends itself to the very ethos of Huawei XMAGE as it aims to serve as a global platform facilitating artistic exchange for all.

This year's competition attracted over 743,000 submissions from users in 78 countries/regions. The “XMAGE 100” showcases the competition’s most outstanding images, selected without traditional categories. From this group, three Grand Prize Winners of the Year were chosen. The works are shown below with the judging panel's comments (in no particular order).

According to Alex, CMO of Huawei Consumer Business Group: “Let’s continue to capture, share, and inspire the world through XMAGE.”

Ethereal Lines

Judges' comments: “Outstanding photographers are exploring uncharted territories of photography with high-end smartphones. The evolution of mobile technology is transforming the way we view the world. A premium smartphone has become a "spaceship" to infinite possibilities. This is a complex interplay of optics and algorithmic computation. Explorers move freely between the macro and micro worlds, transitioning from "seeing" to "insight." And thus, a fascinating unknown emerges in the most unexpected moments.”

New Life

Judges' comments: "This concise, straightforward photo shows the entire cycle of life, with the mother, the newborn calf, and the farmer who probably gave no thought to the uniqueness of this scene. It is the ordinary nature of this image that makes it so extraordinary. The photographer employs no special tricks, simply capturing an image of extraordinary depth and meaning as it occurs."

Origin of Skiing

Judges' comments:  "This picture captures the gaze present between two people who encounter each other. The child is standing on the snowy plain, but basking in the sun, dressed in traditional Altay clothing. The photographer shows remarkable restraint, not projecting their own feelings on to the image, but rather, letting the child's personality shine through."

Through these images and countless others, HUAWEI XMAGE is inspiring a paradigm shift in photography from "seeing" to "perceiving" our world, forging connection in unexpected places. Now that pictures are no longer images to be passively viewed, but rather, windows to what surrounds us, each touch of the shutter opens up a world of possibility.

Bucket Tech: HUAWEI New Device Launch

Launched this last week, in Dubai under the theme "Fashion Next," Huawei unveiled a range of new products including the HUAWEI Pura 80 Series and the HUAWEI MatePad 11.5. Further, it was officially announced that XMAGE will return to the Grand Palais in Paris this year, where it will host the "The World, You and Me" XMAGE Awards Ceremony and Annual Exhibition at Paris Photo 2025. The event was a true showcase of Huawei's technological expertise and a testament to its brand philosophy: enriching lives by seamlessly blending innovative technology with human-centric design.

HUAWEI Pura 80 Series is Defining the Future of Mobile Imaging

As the imaging flagship of the HUAWEI Pura Series, the HUAWEI Pura 80 lineup immediately captured the spotlight with its pioneering aesthetics and definitive imaging capabilities.

The HUAWEI Pura 80 Pro and Ultra versions are equipped with a 1-inch Ultra Lighting HDR camera. Paired with the pixel-level colour calibration of the Ultra Chroma Camera, it delivers exceptional clarity with remarkably accurate colour reproduction. Notably, the HUAWEI Pura 80 Ultra introduces the industry-first Switchable Dual Telephoto Camera, combining a large sensor with a dual telephoto lens for unprecedented versatility in capturing stunningly clear shots at any distance. Additionally, the HUAWEI Pura 80 Series harmonises eastern and western aesthetics, melding the elegant hues inspired by monochrome glaze with superior craftsmanship to form a signature glazed texture design.

HUAWEI MatePad 11.5

The HUAWEI MatePad 11.5 is designed for both ambitious learners and professionals stepping into the workforce. The new MatePad 11.5 delivers a generational step forward in user experience with its stunning and expansive 11.5-inch HUAWEI FullView Display, boasting 2.5K resolution and the acclaimed PaperMatte Display with natural light-like technology for eye comfort. The ultra-thin 6.1 mm frame houses a robust 10,100 mAh battery ensuring it blends portability with endurance. Additionally, the HUAWEI M-Pencil (3rd generation) introduces magnetic wireless charging. The tablet comes with the upgraded HUAWEI Notes and the GoPaint app, empowering users to excel in their work, study, creativity, and play - like never before.

XMAGE Awards 2025 Announced

At the event, Huawei formally announced the 2025 iteration of the widely acclaimed XMAGE Awards, for which global submissions opened on June 11. These annual awards, now in their 8th consecutive year, has become one of the world's largest and most influential photography competitions providing a platform for Huawei mobile users worldwide to showcase their talent. This year’s competition features eight categories: So Far So Close, Colour & Shade, Good Night, Faces, A Heartwarming World, Experimental Lab, Storyboard, and Action.

A new competition format, XMAGE 100, has also been introduced along with a more diverse and distinguished judging panel. Submissions will be evaluated across multiple categories, including photographic technique, emotional resonance, social relevance, and artistic merit, aiming to bring the creative visions of everyday users to a global audience.

In 2025, Huawei is returning to the Grand Palais to host the "The World, You and Me" XMAGE Awards 2025 Ceremony and Annual Exhibition at the 2025 Paris Photo fair. With the culmination of the awards ending at the the Grand Palais, Huawei will once again bring home its focus on art while celebrating the photography artform in what is widely known as the centre of the world’s art scene.

Bucket Tech: HUAWEI Pura 70 Series

The new HUAWEI Pura 70 Series smartphones featuring head-turning designs and advanced mobile photography capabilities have arrived in South Africa. These smartphones have generated significant buzz among enthusiasts since their announcement in early May 2024. The pop-out camera system on the HUAWEI Pura 70 Ultra, especially, has captured the attention of everyone, not just the photo-centric smartphone user. With the launch of the HUAWEI Pura 70 Series, HUAWEI is delivering a series of smartphones that guarantee a unique blend of style, innovative features and bumper performance.

Aesthetics take centre stage with the HUAWEI Pura 70 Series. The HUAWEI Pura 70 Ultra, inspired by the shimmering lights of the Seine River, boasts a vegan leather back with an embossed starry pattern and subtle plaid texture. It is available in green and black. The HUAWEI Pura 70 Pro takes a more minimalist approach with sleek black and pure snow white options. At the same time, the HUAWEI Pura 70 embraces vibrancy with its youthful colour palette, including the new striking cherry rose pink alongside classic colourways of black and white.

The HUAWEI Pura 70 Ultra revolutionises mobile photography with its Ultra Lighting Pop-out Camera. The camera automatically extends during shooting, allowing for a large sensor and wide aperture for exceptional low-light performance. The Ultra Speed Snapshot technology, powered by the Ultra Lighting system and the industry-first HUAWEI XD Motion Engine, captures fast-moving subjects with stunning clarity, even at speeds of up to 300km/h.

HUAWEI has also focused on improving the durability of smartphones with this new series. The HUAWEI Pura 70 and Pura 70 Pro now come with the Super Durable Kunlun Glass, which boosts drop resistance by 100% compared to the previous generation Kunlun Glass. Meanwhile, the HUAWEI Pura 70 Ultra comes with even stronger Crystal Armor Kunlun Glass, which combines enhanced scratch resistance with wear and drop resistance, thanks to its innovative amorphous diamond carbon material.

Beyond its striking good looks, the HUAWEI Pura 70 Series redefines battery performance. The HUAWEI Pura Ultra vaunts a 5200mAh battery and supports 100W wired and 80W wireless HUAWEI SuperCharge, while the HUAWEI Pura 70 Pro fits a 5050mAh battery into its sleek frame. Even the HUAWEI Pura 70 offers a substantial 4900mAh battery with 66W wired and 50W wireless charging.

Equipped with the new HUAWEI EMUI 14.2 operating system, the HUAWEI Pura 70 Series offers a suite of intelligent technology features, including AI Gesture Control for intuitive interactions and AI Privacy View to protect user information in shared environments.

The HUAWEI Pura 70 Series is a giant leap forward in smartphone design, photography and performance.

The HUAWEI Pura 70 Series is now available starting from R19 999.00 with promotional gifts valued at R7 796.00 on the HUAWEI online storeHUAWEI online store, (Ts & Cs apply) or at any HUAWEI Authorised Experience Stores. The Series is also available in Operator stores starting from R699 PM*36.

Bucket Tech: HUAWEI Kicks Off the Global XMAGE Awards 2023

 

Huawei has officially kicked off the HUAWEI XMAGE Awards 2023. As Huawei’s open platform for smartphone photographic excellence, the annual competition celebrates inspiration and creativity, through amazing photos and videos captured with Huawei devices around the world. Since 2017, users from more than 170 countries and regions have participated in the yearly competition, contributing nearly 4 million entries to date. This makes the HUAWEI XMAGE Awards a cultural heritage of its own, containing fragments of human history from worldwide perspectives.

Capture and Inspire: A New Direction for XMAGE Awards

This year’s XMAGE Awards hopes photographers everywhere – casual or professional – will seek inspiration in their photography. The award takes its name from Huawei’s proprietary Imaging Research & Development arm XMAGE. Like its namesake, XMAGE Awards aspires to help photographers find inspiration and be innovative in photography.

Launched in 2022, the XMAGE brand focuses on optical system, mechanical structure, imaging technology, and image processing in photography. All four pillars of XMAGE now form the tenets of Huawei’s new and upcoming smartphone camera technology, such as the latest HUAWEI Mate 50 Series’ Ultra Aperture Camera and HUAWEI P60 Pro's Ultra Lighting Telephoto Camera.

New Night Walk category to capture Wonders of the Dark

This year's competition has the following categories: Night Walk, Portrait, Art & Fashion, Outdoor, Hello Life, Storyboard, Action and Storytelling.

Night Walk is a new category, encouraging users to photograph the hidden wonders of night life, using Huawei’s unique night-photo settings.

 Attractive prizes and new judges

This year, the following prizes will be given out to outstanding submissions: 3 Grand Prize winners, 24 Best-in-Category winners, 27 Runner-up winners, and 5 Honourable Mentions. Winners can receive up to USD 10,000 in prize money.

New judges were invited, including Molife Kumona, GQ South Africa Editor-in-Chief. This also includes five leaders in photography: Chen Xiaobo, Vice President of China Photographers Association; Chinese fashion photographer Pei Tongtong; Portuguese landscape photographer José Ramos; Australian portrait photographer Jessica Hromas; and Li Changzhu, Vice President of the Consumer Strategy Marketing Dept at the HUAWEI Consumer Business Group.

The XMAGE Awards Submissions will close at 23H59 GMT+8 on August 15, 2023. We look forward to your participation and seeing your creativity come alive.

Users can visit the unified global submission channel via XMAGE Awards 2023 for their submission, as well as submit their entry via HUAWEI Community. Entries must be images or videos captured with a Huawei mobile phone, and there are no restrictions on when the work was captured or using which Huawei mobile phone.

For more information and competition terms and conditions, as well as submission, please refer to the competition website: https://gallery.consumer.huawei.com.

Bucket Tech: HUAWEI Mate50 Pro - Official Launch

The HUAWEI Consumer Business Group has announced the launch of the latest member of its flagship Mate series, the HUAWEI Mate50 Pro and celebrates the fourth anniversary of the HUAWEI AppGallery in South Africa. The HUAWEI Mate50 Pro comes equipped with a range of cutting-edge technologies, breaking new ground, and expanding the scope of what users can expect from a smartphone.

Amongst its industry-first features, the HUAWEI Mate50 Pro also packs an Ultra Aperture XMAGE Camera, which boasts the first-ever 10-scale adjustable physical aperture and the most versatile photography capabilities ever seen on a HUAWEI Mate smartphone. In terms of performance, the HUAWEI Mate50 Pro is armoured by the ultra-reliable “Kunlun Glass”, which boosts drop resistance by 10 times. The smartphone’s design represents a major step forward in smartphone aesthetics, thanks to the symmetrical Space Ring Design.

Future-facing features that elevate performance and user experience

The HUAWEI “Kunlun Glass” consists of 10 quadrillion-level nanocrystals, the result of composite ion strengthening, which make it more resilient and drop resistant as verified by the first-ever five-star glass drop resistance certification from Switzerland’s SGS. This makes the HUAWEI Mate50 Pro models the first smartphone to ever achieve this certification. The smartphone supports IP68-rated water resistance of up to 6 metres underwater, allowing it to easily handle wet and dusty environments.

The HUAWEI Mate50 Pro display provides a window into a crystal-clear world. Combined with the P3 wide colour gamut, fine-tuned colours are calibrated to ensure absolute authenticity. The smartphone comes with a 6.74-inch HUAWEI FullView Display, a screen resolution of 2616 x 1212 pixels and a high refresh rate of 120Hz and 1440Hz PWM dimming, to reduce flickering and relieve eye fatigue.

In addition, the HUAWEI Mate50 Pro packs a 4700 mAh battery within its slim body. It offers 66W HUAWEI SuperCharge wired and 50W HUAWEI SuperCharge wireless fast-charging solutions to strike an optimal balance between battery life, fast charging and portability. Moreover, with an innovative low-battery Emergency Mode that activates when the battery level falls to 1%, SuperEnergy Boosting enables the HUAWEI Mate50 Pro to extend standby time by three hours or 12 minutes of call time.

The SuperStorage feature removes duplicate files in an imperceptible way and compresses rarely used apps. This preserves up to 20GB of space (on a phone with 256GB of ROM), leaving more room for the abundance of photos and videos that today’s users capture.

The ground-breaking Ultra Aperture XMAGE camera

HUAWEI launched its very own mobile imaging brand “XMAGE” in 2022, with the goal of offering consumers a new shooting paradigm that fuses science with culture and aesthetics with technology, for an improved shooting experience. The HUAWEI Mate50 Pro features a cutting-edge Ultra Aperture XMAGE camera with a 10-size adjustable physical aperture, which incorporates key advances to the optical system, mechanical structure, imaging technology and image processing. The smart aperture adjusts to match the aperture size with the scene and shooting scenario identified in Auto mode. Switching to Professional mode allows you to manually adjust the depth of field and degree of blur.

What’s more, the HUAWEI Mate50 Pro has advanced hardware and algorithms that are deeply embedded to enhance static image shooting. The Ultra Aperture Camera comes equipped with an F1.4 large aperture, working with the XD Fusion Pro image engine and high light intake to set the image brightness, light and shadow details, as well as cold and warm comparisons to perfection.

Portrait mode applies natural background blurring to make the subject stand out from their surroundings. Night mode captures photos with highly distinct bright and dark regions, even in dimly lit environments. The periscope telephoto camera supports a zoom range of up to 200x, bringing scenes from the great beyond right in front of your eyes.

The wide-angle macro camera magnifies details from tiny worlds, presenting millimetre-level strands and dew droplets with outstanding clarity. The HUAWEI Mate50 Pro also supports macro video shooting and macro picture-in-picture (PiP) to accurately convey scenes in motion.

The first of its kind: A well-crafted classic design

In addition to the signature Mate Series design language of iconic symmetry and Space Ring Design, the HUAWEI Mate50 Pro makes use of the elegant Clous de Paris step-patterned embossing design for the first time ever, showcasing a new kind of ordered beauty that is crafted down to the last detail.

The HUAWEI Mate50 Pro has two different types of rear covers namely glass and vegan leather. The glass cover is available in two colours, Silver and Black, which gives the phone a distinct and elegant finish. The vegan leather version comes in Orange and is inspired by the radiant orange rays of the sun.

Being the first smartphone from HUAWEI to run on EMUI 13, which streamlines daily interactions with an effortless one-touch navigation, EMUI 13 introduces the Super Device SuperHub feature, which is an innovative file transfer capability. Users can simply press and hold on any text, pictures, videos and files, drag to the SuperHub’s floating window to store the files temporarily. Users can then switch to another application, select the files within the SuperHub for a seamless cut and paste. With the batch transfer capability, users can in addition use SuperHub for multi-files transfer between their smartphone, tablet and PC.

The HUAWEI Mate50 Pro comes pre-installed with HUAWEI AppGallery - the third-largest app marketplace in the world. Users can download a wide selection of global and Local apps. The HUAWEI AppGallery is  available in more than 170 countries and has over 580 million active monthly users.

Launching, alongside the HUAWEI Mate50 Pro, HUAWEI also introduced the new HUAWEI FreeBuds 5i and the HUAWEI MatePad SE 10.4-inch, which will be available for retail in South Africa in the coming months.

To pre-order the HUAWEI Mate50 Pro, visit the HUAWEI online store or go to selected network providers, including Vodacom, MTN, Telkom or Cell C. Pre order today in order to receive a free gift courtesy of HUAWEI.

Moreover, introduced in the latest version of HUAWEI’s backup power solution for homes, is the HUAWEI Power-M, backup power solution, along with the updated FusionSolar App.

You can light up your home with HUAWEI Power-M. The stackable modular design allows the system to be customised, providing a maximum of 15kW with 45kWh storage. Power-M also supports various power sources and uses the safest electrochemical cell material, lithium iron phosphate, and supports a very wide voltage range from 90V – 300V. This power makes it a safe and reliable choice as a residential power backup solution. Users can also use the FusionSolar mobile phone app to check the status of their system’s running and energy yield anytime, from anywhere