Lots of muscle in the Mate 8

CHINESE TECH FIRM Huawei recently unveiled the Mate 8, its new flagship smartphone, looking very slick indeed in Champagne Gold or Mocha Brown and packing a vivid six-inch Full HD display and good-quality cameras.

There are two models – the NXT-L29 has two SIM slots and the NXT-L09 has one. I got to try the L29 with a generous four gigabytes of working memory (RAM) and 64GB of internal storage. 

A Huawei Kirin 950 64-bit 8+1-core processor provides the power, running four A72 cores at 2.3GHz and four A53 cores at 1.8GHz. The plus-one core processor is the i5 co-processor, which makes power use more efficient. A high-performance Mali-T880 GPU handles the heavy graphics work like gaming.

The i5 processor matches the functions of a sensor hub and is responsible for speech recognition, MP3 playback and Fused Location Provider (FLP) navigation and reduces location-based power consumption by 70 per cent. The phone switches to the i5 for tasks that require little power so you save on battery life.

On one full charge the 4,000mAh rechargeable battery is good for a whole day of taking photos and thumbing through Facebook. Huawei says it will last 1.65 days in heavy use and 2.36 days in regular use. 

Charging it done with the latest 9V/2A technology – a full charge in just two and a half hours and recovery of almost 40 per cent of the battery within 30 minutes.

Also at work is Heart Beat smart power-saving technology, which continuously scans your apps to determine an optimum ratio between use and performance, reducing consumption of background apps by up to 50 per cent.

You have the Google Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system, the latest, with an Emotion UI 4.0 user interface that renders a beautiful look and feel and has lot of themes to choose among.

The six-inch display has high contrast ratio of 1500:1 and 1920x1080-pixel resolution at a depth of 368 pixels per inch. The large display is great for watching high-definition movies and framing snapshots.

All that memory makes multitasking smooth. I found the touch screen and menus quite responsive and scrolling fast. There were no problems with games, applications or playing video clips.

You can get LTE 4G connections. I hooked into TrueMove H’s in a snap and just as quickly posted pictures on Facebook and backed them up to the Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage. My Ookla app measured download speed at 50.32Mbps and uploads at 21.61Mbps.

Fast 802.11 AC Wi-Fi connections were rapid using Linksys WRT1200AC router. Wi-Fi+ technology automatically turned off my Wi-Fi connection once beyond range of the home router to save the battery and reconnected when I got back.

Interestingly, although Mate 8 has that big six-inch display, the body is almost as petite as phones with smaller displays. It’s actually more compact than previous models, sporting an 85-per-cent screen-to-body ratio. It’s 157.1x80.6x7.9mm – 0.4mm thinner than the Mate 7 – thanks to diamond-cutting technology used to sculpt the body.

Yet the aluminium uni-body feels quite sturdy, and Huawei credits “soft sandblasting” on the rear surface for the impressive finish. Protecting the display is 2.5D diamond-cut glass with no seams. 

The images this thing produces are impressive. The main camera has Sony’s new 1/2.8-inch IMX298 stacked-image sensor and a lens with a fast f/2.0 aperture, plus image-stabilisation. The rear-illuminated CMOS sensor and fast lens ensure good-quality photos even in low light. I got some great shots of a busy street at night in auto mode and my portraits turned out great using Beauty mode.

You can use separate the focus point from the light-measuring point by pressing and holding the screen and dragging the focus circle where you want the focus and the measuring circle elsewhere. This keeps your subject in focus while you’re moving the light meter around until you find the perfect brightness or shadow.

An Image Sensor Processor (ISP) produces vivid pictures by calculating the distance between the lens and the focal point for faster focusing, higher clarity and more accurate colour reproduction. And this really is fast focusing.

Slow Motion mode lets you view your high-definition videos at one-quarter speed. Continuous Capture shoots a burst of 100 shots at 12 frames per second, ideal for catching fast-moving objects. Super Night, All-focus and Light Painting are other fascinating modes.

In Super Night you need a tripod to prevent shake. Press the shutter (gently) and the camera will keep taking pictures until you press again and then combine all the shots into one. The tripod’s also needed for Light Painting, which has three sub-modes – Tail Light Trails, Light Graffiti (light trails in dark settings) and Silky Water (gorgeously creamy streams and waterfalls).

In All-focus mode you can change the focal point after taking your shot. The camera takes several images at different focal lengths and combines them into one, which you touch to change the focus point.

The front camera has eight-megapixel resolution, a f/2.4 lens and Perfect Selfie mode for group shots with facial enhancement.

The Mate 8’s circular fingerprint sensor works efficiently in unlocking the phone in half a second and can also be used to take photos. This is a feature to give you peace of mind. It will also lock certain apps, your SD card and “secret files”.

Then there are the Knuckle Gestures, where you draw the letter “C” with a knuckle to launch the camera, “M” to start the music app, and “W” for the weather app.

High-resolution audio in FLAC 24bit/192kHz format sounded terrific to me through Sony’s MDR-1ABT headphones, plenty of good details and powerful bass. DTS technology enhances the sound. 

The Huawei Mate 8 has a suggested retail price of Bt23,990.

 

Key Specs

- OS: Android Marshmallow 6.0

- Networks: 4G TDD LTE Band38/39/40; 4G FDD LTE Band1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/12/17/18/19/20/26; 3G UMTS: 850/900/1900/2100MHz; 2G GSM: 850/900/1800/1900MHz

- CPU: Huawei Kirin 950 |(64-bit,16mm FinFET+), Octa-core (4 x 2.3GHz A72+ 4 x 1.8GHz A53) + i5 co-processor 

- Memory: 4GB

- Storage: 64GB

- Display: Six-inch FHD IPS touch panel with 1920x1080 pixels, 368ppi

- SIM: Dual slots

- Connectivity: Wi-Fi 2.4G/5G, a/b/g/n/ac, BT4.2, MicroUSB (High Speed USB)

- Sensors: Fingerprint, G-Sensor, Gyroscope, Compass, Ambient Light, Proximity, Hall, Barometer 

- Cameras: Main 16MP Sony BSI CMOS sensor, f/2.0 OIS; front 8MP sensor f/2.4

- Battery: 4,000mAh

- Dimensions: 157.1x80.6x7.9mm

- Weight: 185g