Huawei announced the Mate 8 smartphone for the global market at the on-going Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The device carries the same form factor of the Nexus 6P, which is also built by Huawei but has a huge 6-inch display.
We had a chance to play with the device for a while and we thought you would love to hear what we think about Huawei’s flagship smartphone. Here goes our first impression –
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHdoqD6g1R4
The Huawei Mate 8 sports a huge 6-inch display, but the device measures exactly same as the 5.7-inch Nexus 6P or a 5.5-inch Apple iPhone 6s Plus. That’s mainly because the smartphone has almost no bezel to the sides of the screen and the top or bottom bezels are very slim as well.
Huawei has used metal for the construction of the Mate 8 and the device feels solid in hands. The rear of the device has brushed metal finish and it’s quite smooth.
Huawei’s latest flagship is powered by company’s own Kirin 950 chipset with four Cortex-A72 cores and four Cortex A-53 cores under the hood. The Mali-T880 GPU is in charge of the graphics. We didn’t have a chance to run any benchmarks on the Mate 8, but while we were using it, the device was quite fast and the overall performance was very smooth.
The Chinese manufacturer claims that the processor is about 70% better power efficient and according to the company the Mate 8 lasts for about 2 days in single charge. Huawei is bundling a 9V @ 2A charger, using which you can charge your smartphone fully in 30 minutes.
Huawei Mate 8 has a 16 megapixel camera with f/2.0 aperture and optical image stabilization. The device records videos at 1080 pixels at 60 frames per second.
The fingerprint reader is placed on the back and you can lock applications, photos or videos using it and make sure your data is secured. During our trail, the scanner was very accurate in recognizing our fingerprint.
The Huawei Mate 8 runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow with a layer of Emotion UI 4.0. All the Chinese elements are present in the OS and it’s fairly smooth. We were demoing the 64GB variant that comes with 4GB of RAM on board. The newest feature in the EUI is the knuckle tap, which is a set of gestures that can be performed when you tap the phone with your knuckles.
The dual-SIM smartphone supports nine 3G bands and eighteen 4G bands across the globe and according to Huawei it covers 217 countries and 1,334 carriers. One of the dual-SIM slots is hybrid and you can use it as a microSD card slot.
That’s it for our first impressions. We will be bringing you a detailed look of the Huawei Mate 8 the moment we get to spend some quality time with it.