Huawei had announced the successor of Mate 7, the all new Mate 8 towards the end of November. The device was announced in China and we had a chance to visit the Huawei HQ in Shenzhen and take a look at this new flagship. The Huawei Mate 8 has a 6 inch Full HD display with a metallic unibody design with 185gms in weight. It is lighter than the 5.5 inch Apple iPhone 6S Plus.
The Mate 8 is a powerful device with high-end specs and a gorgeous design with excellent finishing. We spend some time testing the device and here are our first impressions of Huawei Mate 8.
Here is the quick hands-on video.
Huawei Mate 8 has an all metal body and the device we tested was a gold variant. The device is pretty huge in size with the 6 inch display. But the bezels are kept relatively low, so it is still manageable, but you might it difficult to use with one hand. The front panel has 6 inch Full HD display, 8MP front camera, and sensors. The Huawei logo sits at the bottom and the navigational buttons are on-screen.
The left side houses the SIM tray while the power and volume keys are on the right side. The top panel has 3.5mm audio jack, secondary microphone while the bottom section has micro USB charging slot and speaker unit. The rear panel houses the 16MP camera, dual tone LED flash and the fingerprint sensor. The rear panel has a slight curvature toward the edges. Overall, the build quality of the device is really good with a metallic unibody design.
The phone has a 6 inch Full HD display (1920 X 1080p) and the colors are pretty good with 368PPI. The IPS-NEO LCD panel also offers good viewing angles and the touch response was pretty smooth overall. The display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 4. Under the bright sunlight, the display visibility was slightly lower. The phone runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow with custom EMUI 4.0. While there aren’t any major changes with the UI, it does have some added features.
The phone is powered by homebrew Kirin 950 Octa core processor clocked at 2.3Ghz and coupled with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. The device also comes in another variant which is 3GB of RAM and 32GB storage. The UI was very response and we seldom noticed any lag or issues in our limited usage. The rear camera is 16 MP, OIS, phase detection autofocus, dual-LED (dual tone) flash and there is also an 8MP front camera.
The phone also features 4000mAh battery along with quick charging which is good capacity for a flagship device. The phone comes in 4 colors -Champagne Gold, Moonlight Silver, Space Gray, Mocha Brown. Huawei plans to expand to more markets with this flagship. We are not sure on when this device will make its way to India.
