Huawei has announced the Mate S smartphone during IFA in Berlin in September. At that moment pretty much everyone wondered when will the Mate 8 phablet going to be announced. Well, the company’s CEO has recently confirmed that the Mate 8 is on the way, and not long after that the company pretty much confirmed that it will be announced on November 26th. Well, today is the day, and Huawei has unveiled their newest flagship, the Mate 8 phablet, let’s see what it has to offer, shall we.
The Mate 8 is a new premium offering by Huawei, this phablet is actually made out of metal, and it actually sports a metal unibody design. To be more specific, the Mate 8 is made out of aerospace-grade aluminum and unique 2.5D curved diamond cut glass according to the company. As you can see in the images down below, the bezel on the sides is absolutely minimal, it’s almost non-existent, which definitely helps the handset look even sleeker (83% screen-to-body ratio).
The Huawei Mate 8 sports a 6-inch 1080p (1920 x 1080) display, and is powered by the all-new Kirin 950 64-bit octa-core processor. Now, in the press release, Huawei has also mentioned that there’s an i5 co-processor included in this package, which supports speech recognition, low-power consumption MP3, sensor hub functions, fused location provider (FLP) navigation, and also reduces location-based power consumption. Huawei Mate 8 comes equipped with new features as well, and some of them are: voice controls, power-saving firewall, a defragmenter and eRecovery. Payment capabilities are also built-in here, in case you were wondering.
This phablet will ship with 3 or 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM (depending on the variant), and these two variants of the device will sport 32 or 64GB of internal storage, respectively, and a 4GB of RAM variant with 128GB of internal storage will also going to be available. Keep in mind that you’ll be able to expand upon that with a microSD card slot, which is always a good option to have. The 16-megapixel OIS camera (Sony’s IMX298 sensor) is available on the back of this phablet, and an 8-megapixel snapper (Sony’s IMX179 sensor) is located on the front side of the Mate 8. The 4,000mAh battery will be available on the inside of this phablet, and you’ll also get 4G TLE connectivity here (Cat. 6). The Mate 8 is also a dual-SIM handset, you get two nano SIM card slots here and you can use one of those in order to insert your microSD card. The fingerprint scanner is also included here, and it’s located below the camera sensor on the back of the device.
The Huawei Mate 8 will ship with Andriod 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box, which means that the leaks were spot on as far as this is concerned. Huawei’s EMUI (Emotion UI) 4.0 Android-based skin will come pre-installed on Google’s operating system, which was to be expected. The Huawei Mate 8 will be available in Champagne Gold, Moonlight Silver, Space Gray and Mocha Brown color options. The device will be available in China initially, and we’ll need to get back to you as far as pricing goes considering Huawei still didn’t share that piece of info.
