The Mobile World Congress 2015 at Barcelona is rapidly approaching. This is one of the bigger shows of the year and where some manufacturers decide to announce their latest products, taking advantage of a captive audience. And this year, it is looking like Huawei are aiming to be one of the show’s darlings with rumors that they are to be releasing a smaller, or compact, version of the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 device. The device is set to feature a 5.5-inch screen of unknown resolution display, which sits it between the rumoured Ascent P8 (which is reckoned to be coming with a 5.0-inch display) and the existing Mate 7 (with it’s 6.0-inch display). We are not expecting the Ascent P8 to be revealed at the Mobile World Congress, but instead Huawei will be holding a special particular event for this device.
Unfortunately, we don’t have any more information about the rumored Ascend Mate 7 Compact. We don’t know what processor type, camera, screen resolution or battery the Compact will have. The full size Mate 7 uses a processor manufactured by Huawei, which features a high-performance quad-core processor with a high efficiency, lower performance quad core for the more mundane tasks. There’s 2 GB of RAM and that 6.0-inch display is of 1080p resolution. The rear camera is of 13 MP resolution and the front facing camera is 5 MP in resolution. Huawei have given the Mate 7 a 4,100 mAh battery as battery life remains something of a focus point for them.
It’ll be interesting to see if Huawei adopt the Sony Compact methodology and pack similar hardware into the smaller version of the Mate 7, or if they adopt the Samsung and HTC method, which is to give the device lesser internal specifications. However, whilst the Mate 7 Compact will be smaller than the original Mate 7, at 5.5-inch the screen is still in the phabet space. If Huawei were to offer the Mate 7 Compact with a 720p resolution display this could leave to better battery life (especially if the device were built around a slower processor), but it would not be such a great user experience. It’ll be interesting to see where they take the Mate 7 Compact; having recently picked up my old Samsung Galaxy Note II, I am still liking the large screen size!