The unlocked, SIM-free version of Huawei’s latest premium smartphone, the Mate S, can now be pre-ordered in Europe for a price of €649 in the Euro Zone and for £469 in the UK. The phone is currently listed on the website of e-commerce portal Vmall, and can be ordered in two different colors – Mystic Champagne and Titanium Grey. One thing that needs to be pointed out however, is the fact that only the base model is up for pre-order from the looks of things, and not the premium edition that features Force Touch. It isn’t immediately clear if or when the Force Touch laden version will be available for purchase in Europe. The Chinese electronics and telecom equipment major had announced its Mate S smartphone at the IFA in Berlin earlier this month in three different versions – one with 32 GB of built-in storage, one with 64 GB and the third, with as much as 128 GB of internal storage. Only the third version actually comes with Force Touch, whereas it’s the 32 GB version, which is now being put up for sale in Europe as per the listing on Vmall.
Coming to the hardware specs of the Huawei Mate S, the smartphone features a 5.5-inch AMOLED ONCELL display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080, giving it a pixel density of 401 dpi. The device is powered by a HiSilicon Kirin 935 SoC, which is designed and developed in-house by HiSilicon Semiconductor Company, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Huawei Technologies. The chipset comes with a 64-bit octa-core CPU, with eight Cortex-A53 cores laid out in ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture. Four of the cores are clocked at a frequency of 2.2 GHz, while four others are clocked at a maximum of 1.5 GHz. The SoC also comes with an integrated Mali-T628 MP4 GPU from ARM. The phone comes with 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage as mentioned already, and packs a number of sensors including an accelerometer, a compass, a gyroscope, ALS, proximity and a hall sensor.
As for the imaging options on the Huawei Mate S, the device comes with a 13-megapixel rear-facing primary camera with autofocus, back side illumination, f/2.0 aperture, optical image stabilization and a dual color-temperature LED flash. As for the front-facing selfie-cam, the Mate S features an 8-megapixel camera sensor, with FF, BSI and an f/2.4 aperture. The phone supports LTE connectivity and carries a 2,700 mAh Lithium Polymer battery. The device is 149.8 mm in length, 75.3 mm in width and 7.2 mm in thickness, and weighs 156 grams.