Huawei Mate 8, coming a year after the Mate 7, it was only expected that the Mate 8 will show maturity and beat up its predecessor’s shortcomings, most notably the poor graphics performance and the less than stellar camera output.
Huawei’s in-house-developed Kirin 950 chipset promises to deliver on the first count, and also brings heaps of CPU oomph. The camera is all-new as well – with a larger, higher-res sensor and phase detection autofocus and optical image stabilization.
The display is still 1080p, which was a bit of a stretch for a 2014 flagship and is even more so now when the competition has moved to QHD resolution on even smaller diagonals. Huawei insists that’s as many pixels as you need at this size, and the tradeoff in battery life and processing power required isn’t worth it. Oh, well.
Other than that, we’re glad that the large battery is still in place, the fingerprint reader placement and its always-on implementation are also as nice as ever. And there’s little to complain about having a 6-inch display in a body as compact as the Mate’s.
The Huawei Mate 8 measures 157.1 x 80.6 x 7.9 mm which is very compact for a 6-inch smartphone. It is, in fact, 4.2mm shorter than the 5.7-inch Huawei-made Nexus 6P, and a millimeter shorter than the iPhone 6s Plus, which only has a 5.5-inch display. The LG V10, depending on how you treat its two-piece display, could come the closest in terms of screen-to-body ratio, but it’s still behind the spectacular Mate 8.
Special Features
- Hybrid DualSIM/microSD card slot (up to 128GB)
- Aluminum unibody, diamond-cut beveled edges, sandblasted satin back finish
- 6″ 1080p IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 368ppi
- HiSilicon Kirin 950 chipset: octa-core CPU (4xCortex-A72 @ 2.3GHz plus 4xCortex-A53 @ 1.8GHz), Mali-T880 MP4 GPU
- 3GB of RAM/32GB of built-in storage, or 4GB/64GB;
- Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow, Huawei EMUI v4.0 overlay;
- 16MP camera with Sony IMX298 sensor, phase detection autofocus, OIS, f/2.0 aperture; 1080@60fps video recording
- 8MP front camera, f/2.0 aperture; 1080p video recording; wide selfie
- Cat. 6 LTE (300/50Mbps); dual-band Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Wi-Fi hotspot, Wi-Fi Direct; Bluetooth 4.2 LE; NFC; GPS/A-GPS/GLONASS/Beidou; microUSB
- 4,000mAh Li-Po battery, fast charging
- 3.5mm headphone jack, active noise cancelation with a dedicated mic
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