Huawei Mate 8 review: 4 awesome features for users

With the help of steady sales in the domestic as well as Western European markets, Huawei’s smartphone shipment crossed 100 million in 2015 . The company managed to strike a perfect balance between the budget-friendly and high-end devices and consistently expanded its reach in the international domain.

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2016, Huawei announced the global launch of the Mate 8. The 3GB/32GB variant of the Huawei Mate 8 costs 599 euros (US$678 or AU$966) whereas the 4GB/64GB model will come with a price tag of 699 euros (US$791 or AU$1,128).

Announced back in Nov. 2015, Huawei’s Mate 8 is said to be one of the most popular phablets of 2015. The smartphone competes with Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and Google Nexus 6P in the market.

Here are the four awesome features of the smartphone which makes it a front-runner in its category.

Stunning design

The Huawei Mate 8 features a huge 6-inch Full HD LCD display with a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 4. The ultra-slim sleek metallic unibody design makes the Mate 8 super stylish and pretty. The phone measures 157.1 x 80.6 x 7.9 mm and weighs 185g.

The Huawei mate 8 is shipped with four unique colour models including Champagne Gold, Moonlight Silver, Space Gray and Mocha Brown. According to a Huawei Mate 8 review by Pocket Lint, the fingerprint scanner of the smartphone is twice as fast as its predecessor, the Mate 7.

Super fast performance

The Mate 8 is powered by Huawei’s own octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 950 processor coupled with Mali-T880 MP4 for graphics. The eight-cores come in quad-core 2.3Ghz Cortex A72 and quad core 1.8GHz Cortex A53 form , which delivers immense power to the 6-inch phablet.

The phablet offers two memory and internal storage configurations. The Mate 8 comes packed with 3GB or 4GB of RAM coupled with 32GB or 64GB of in-built storage. The phablet runs on Google’s Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Huawei’s latest EMUI 4.0 skin on top.

The insanely powerful chipset topped the chart and scored above 6,000 points in multi-core test in Geekbench 3, as reported by GSM Arena.

The Kirin 950 performed better than the Samsung Exynos 7420 in both single core and multi-core tests. Most of the handsets in the Galaxy line-up have Exynos 7420 SoC under the hood.

Related: Honor 7 vs Honor 5X: A battle between two mid-range Huawei Honor siblings

Excellent battery life

The Mate 8 houses a gigantic 4,000 mAh battery as compared to 3,000 mAh of Note 5 and 3,450 mAh of Nexus 6P. In a Huawei Mate 8 review, Android Pit stated that the smartphone can run for two and a half days on a single charge. With AnTuTu tester app, the battery of Mate 8 scored a massive 12,065 points.

Commendable camera

The Mate comes with 16-megapixel IMX298 rear-facing camera sensor by Sony as compared to the 12.3 MP main camera of Nexus 6P. The rear camera sensor of Mate 8 also touts optical image stabilisation (OIS), LED flash, phase-detection auto-focus (PDAF) and has an aperture of f/2.0.

The front-facing camera has an 8-megapixel IMX179 sensor also from Sony, better than the Galaxy Note 5 which hosts a 5MP selfie shooter.

Related: Huawei Honor 5X vs LG Nexus 5X: Specs, features and price compared