Huawei introduced the Mate S at the IFA 2015 earlier this week. It comes in Standard, Premium and Luxury Editions. We got to check out the Luxury Edition of Mate S, which has a display with Force Touch technology. Here is the photo gallery.
The smartphone has a 5.5-inch 1080p AMOLED 2.5D curved glass display, Corning Gorilla Glass 4 protection. The new force touch in the premium version can detect different levels of pressure on the screen so that you can perform different actions such as zooming in to a photo or launching an app by applying pressure. It runs on Android 5.1 (Lollipop) with Emotion UI 3.1 on top.
You can use your knuckles to crop and edit images, record screen and open applications by drawing a letter on your screen with your knuckle. Huawei is calling it Knuckle 2.0. It is powered by a Octa-Core Huawei Kirin 935 processor with 3GB of RAM and comes with 32GB storage for standard variant, 64GB for premium and 128GB for this luxury edition with Force Touch. It also has a microSD expansion slot in the form of hybrid slot that lets you use the second SIM slot as expansion slot.
It has 8-megapixel front-facing camera with LED flash for capturing better selfies.
It has on-screen buttons, and there is a Huawei branding below the screen. It has a range of connectivity options such as 4G LTE, WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (2.4GHz/5GHz), Bluetooth 4.1 LE and GPS.
The power button and volume rockers are present on the right side. It has uni-body metal finish.
The hybyrid SIM/microSD slot is present on the left side.
The 3.5mm audio jack and the secondary microphone are present on the top.
The loudspeaker and the primary microphone are present on the bottom.
It has a 13-megapixel camera on the back with dual-tone LED flash and optical image stabilization (OIS). There is a fingerprint sensor below the camera. The Fingerprint 2.0 sensor has Smart Fingerprint Sliding that lets you use it for answer calls, take pictures, control brightness or browse pages without taking your finger off the sensor, says Huawei. You can press different spots and button options for Back, Home and Multitask interface on the screen.
It packs a 2,700mAh built-in battery under the metal back. Huawei did not say when it will roll out the 128GB Mate S Luxury Edition with force touch or how much it would cost, but it will release the the Huawei Mate S 32GB version in Titanium Grey and Mystic Champagne colors for 649 Euros and Premium 64GB version in Prestige Gold and Coral Pink for 699 Euros in more than 30 countries starting from this September.
Srivatsan contributed to this post