Huawei has announced Mate 8, the company’s latest smartphone in the Mate series at an event in China, as it promised. It packs a 6-inch 1080p display with 2.7mm ultra narrow frame, 83% screen-to-body ratio and 2.5D glass, is powered by a Octa-Core HiSilicon Kirin 950 SoC with IntelliSense i5 sensor hub and runs on Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) with Emotion UI 4.0 on top. It has a 16-megapixel rear camera with Sony IMX298 sensor, dual-tone LED flash, phase-detection auto-focus (PDAF), optical image stabilization (OIS) and uses Huawei’s own ISP. It also has an 8-megapixel front-facing camera.
The body is made from aerospace-grade aluminum and unique 2.5D curved diamond cut glass, says Huawei. It has a circular fingerprint sensor that increases the area by 10% compared to square sensor and the identification speed has also been improved. It has chip-level encryption technology and SD card lock to protect the information in the phone. It has 4G LTE connectivity with support for voLTE and has hybrid dual SIM slot that lets you use the secondary SIM as a microSD slot when required.
Huawei Mate 8 specifications
- 6-inch (1920 x 1080 pixels) Full HD display with 2.5D glass, 95% wide color gamut
- Octa-Core (2.3GHz 4 x ARM Cortex A72 + 1.8GHz 4 x ARM Cortex A53) Huawei Kirin 950 processor with Mali T880 GPU
- 3GB RAM with 32GB storage / 4GB RAM with 64GB / 128GB storage, expandable memory with microSD
- Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) with Emotion UI 4.0
- Hybird Dual SIM (nano SIM + nano SIM / microSD)
- 16MP rear camera with Sony IMX298 sensor, PDAF, OIS, f/2.0 aperture, dual-tone LED flash
- 8MP front-facing camera, f/2.4 aperture
- Fingerprint sensor
- Dimensions: 157.1× 80.6×7.9mm; Weight: 185g
- 4G LTE, WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (2.4GHz/5GHz), Bluetooth 4.2 LE, GPS, NFC
- 4000mAh battery
The Huawei Mate 8 comes in Champagne Gold, Moonlight Silver, Space Gray and Mocha Brown colors and is priced at 2999 yuan (US$ 469 / Rs. 31,240 approx.) for the 3GB RAM + 32GB storage China Unicom version. Standard 4G version costs 3199 Yuan ( US$ 500 / Rs. 33,326 approx.) for the 3GB RAM + 32GB storage version, 3699 Yuan (US$ 579 / Rs. 38,533 approx.) for the 4GB RAM + 64GB storage version and 4399 yuan (US$ 688 / Rs. 45828 approx.) for the 4GB RAM + 128GB storage version. It is now available for order through vmall in China and will go on sale starting from December 9th. It will be introduced for the global markets at CES 2016, and will be available in other markets starting from Q1 2016.