After months and months of leaks, Huawei has finally decided to unveil their new flagship phablet, the Mate 8. The company has officially announced the device today, and we’ve already covered the initial announcement of this handset. The Mate 8 is an all-metal (aerospace-grade aluminum) phablet which sports a really sleek design, and has premium hardware on the inside as well. The screen-to-body ratio on this device is 83%, and if you take a look at the provided images, you’ll get to see how thin its bezels are. That being said, let’s take a closer look at the device’s specifications, shall we.
The Huawei Mate 8 sports a 6-inch 1080p (1920 x 1080) IPS LCD display (2.5D curved diamond cut glass) along with 3 or 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM. The 3GB RAM variant of this device will ship with 32GB of internal storage on the inside, and the 4GB RAM model will come with either 64GB or 128GB of native storage. Keep in mind that you’ll be able to expand upon that store in both of these variants via a microSD card. The device is powered by the Kirin 950 16nm 64-bit octa-core SoC clocked at 2.3GHz along with a Mali-T880 MP4 GPU for graphics which runs at 900MHz. Huawei has also included an i5 co-processor which will handle a number of tasks (speech recognition, low-power consumption MP3, sensor hub, etc.)
The 16-megapixel OIS camera (Sony’s IMX 298 sensor, 1.12µm pixel size, f/2.0 aperture) is available on the back of this handset along with a dual-LED, dual tone flash. The 8-megapixel snapper (Sony’s IMX179 sensor, f/2.4 aperture) can be found up front, and a 4,000mAh battery is also a part of the package. This handset ships with two SIM card slots (2 x Nano SIM), and you can use one of those as your memory expansion slot (microSD slot). The fingerprint scanner can be found on the back of this handset, below the camera sensor.
The Mate 8 comes with 4G LTE connectivity (Cat. 6), and Android 6.0 Marshmallow comes pre-installed here with Huawei’s Emotion UI (EMUI) 4.0 on top of it. The Mate 8 will be available in China (initially) in Champagne Gold, Moonlight Silver, Space Gray and Mocha Brown color options. We still don’t know the price of this device, but you’ll be updated as soon as Huawei shares more details.
