Huawei Mate 8 Review

Huawei, a China based company is growing into a large smartphone manufacturer and has grasped a hefty amount of market share worldwide. The company being the manufacturer of the Google Nexus 6P which has played a key role in its recognition to many in the world. The company announced the Mate 8 in January at CES 2016.

Mate 8

The Huawei Mate 8 is one of the greatest device released so far in 2016. Its all metal chassis gives it a very premium feel to the touch. Its made from aircraft grade aluminium which is now becoming a popular feature in the metal clad phones. 

Talking about the specs, we have monstrous 6 inch Full HD display covered with Gorilla Glass 4,which has very good viewing angles and proper color saturation. Although Quad HD is the new benchmark, Huawei stuck with a Full HD panel because of the main issue a smartphone faces, Battery Life. The device is a power packed beast with a Huawei's own SoC, the HiSilicon Kirin 950. The Chipset's has a big.Little construction. Every manufacturer nowadays uses the Cortex A57 and the A53 in their big.Little constructuon but Huawei went with the A72 instead of the A57. It is coupled with a Mali T-880 MP4 GPU. This makes the phone a great deal for its price point. The main camera is a 16 megapixel sensor with an f/2.0 aperture but can shoot only 1080p videos  which is a hands down for the phone. It has OIS(Optical Image Stabilization) for the people out there with shaky hands and can also shoot slow motion videos at 720p resoltuion and at 120fps. The camera is assisted by the a dual tone LED flash housing at left of the camera which helps the camera maintain the color saturation during low light condition. On the secondary camera unit we have a 8 megapixel sensor with an f/2.4 aperture and can shoot 1080p videos. It has 3 gigabytes of RAM in the 32 GB version and 4 gigabytes of RAM for the 64 GB version. It has expandable memory only on the dual sim version which has a hybrid construction i.e you can use either a micro SD card and a sim card or two sim cards with no SD card at a time. The phone weighs at 185 grams, which makes it a pretty heavy device but then again it has a large form factor which spreads the weight of the device giving a sturdy and premium device. All the top of the line hardware is powered by a beefed up power package. It has a 4000mAh battery which is appropriate for a smartphone of this size and specifications. Under the camera is a fingerprint scanner which is one of the fastest sensors out there in the market.

Comming to the software section, it runs on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow out of the box with EMUI 4.0 on top of it. The UI again doesnt provide an app drawer which is the key feature of all the Chinese UI's. The battery optimization done by the software is amazing. Its lasted me a day and a half with a moderate use and almost a day with high usage. It's screen on time is a paradise on earth. It pushed almost 7 hours of on screen time in a moderate use day and almost 5.5 hours on a heavy usage day. This is one of the main reasons why i would recommend this device to someone. 

All this aside, the price at which you can get this device is very promising. The 32 gigabyte version is priced at around $470 and $580 for the 64 gigabyte version.

Verdict
The Huawei Mate 8 is an outstanding device with great hardware, decent cameras, and a compelling price point. But the deal breaker here to some people is the display which is 1080p compared to its other competitors having Quad HD displays at this price point. Its rival is its own housed manufactured device, the Nexus 6P which has great specs and has a better display, camera and most important to me is that, it runs on stock android which is the main feature of a Nexus device. On the other hand the Mate 8 has a overhauled UI which has gimmicky features like the knocking on screen gestures which allow to fire up different apps or peripherals and the software is a very sluggish one with apps taking longer time to start, lags and stutters while browsing.

At last, my opinion would be goto because of all it delivers at this price point. What are your thoghts about the Huawei Mate 8? Are you intrested or not let me know in the comments below.


SPECIFICATIONS:
Display: 6.0 inch FULL HD IPS display with Corning Gorilla Glass 4
Display Resolution: 1920x1080 
Dimensions: 157.1 x 80.6 x 7.9 (mm)
Storage: 32GB with 3GB RAM 
               64GB with 4GB RAM
CPU: HiSilicon Kirin 950 clocked at 2.3Ghz + 1.8Ghz
GPU: Mali T880 MP4
Main Camera: 16 MP at f/2.0 aperture with OIS and dual tone LED flash 
Secondary Camera: 8 MP at f/2.4 aperture
Battery: 4000mAh
MISC: NFC,GPS(GLONASS,A-GPS and BDS),Bluetooth V4.2 with EDR,LE,A2DP
Colours: Moonlight Silver, Space Grey, Mocha Brown, Champagne Gold