Huawei Mate 8 Hands-on, First Impressions

Announced last November 2015, the latest Huawei flagship is officially coming to Philippine shores next month and here’s our initial impression with the Huawei Mate 8.

The Mate 8 is currently Huawei’s top of the line Android smartphone running a homebaked Kirin 950 octa-core processor with a 6-inch display. Like most its siblings, the Mate S and the Nexus 6P, the Mate 8 is pleasant to hold thanks to its aluminum body. Its construction definitely has a premium quality and sturdy build.

A quick tour with the device: We have the 6-inch display up front together with the earpiece, front camera, and proximity sensor. On its right are the volume rocker and the power/lock button while the left houses the SIM tray slot. On top, we have the 3.5mm jack and the secondary microphone. At its bottom is are the speaker with a hidden microphone. Flip it on its back and we’re going to see the 16-megapixel rear camera, that is slightly raised, along with its dual-tone LED flash and just beneath is the fingerprint scanner.

Despite having a large screen, its resolution is maxed at 1920 x 1080 pixels, resulting to a casual 368ppi. It’s not the densest in the market, but anything with 300ppi and above is already pleasing to look at. Nevertheless, the display seems to be properly calibrated with good saturation and deep contrast. Complementing the display a powerful speaker located at its bottom. It may just be mono, but the sound quality is on par with HTC’s BoomSound.

As mentioned, there’s a 16-megapixel primary shooter with OIS and f/2.0 aperture. Immediate snapshots show impressive detail from the sensor. Here are a few samples:

Performance-wise, UI navigation and multi-tasking won’t be a problem with its 2.3GHz Kirin 950 octa-core processor and 4GB of RAM. A quick AnTuTu benchmark test gives the Mate 8 an impressive 90,889 score. We already have Android 6.0 Marshmallow with EMUI 4.0. Huawei’s customization with Android is quite thorough but familiar and straightforward.

Huawei Mate 8 specs:
6.0-inch Full HD IPS-NEO display, 368ppi
Corning Gorilla Glass 4
2.3GHz HiSilicon Kirin 950 octa-core CPU
4GB RAM
64GB internal storage
up to 128GB via microSD (uses SIM 2 slot)
16MP PDAF rear camera w/ OIS and dual-tone flash
8MP front camera
Dual-SIM (nano)
Dual-4G LTE, 3G HSPA+
WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
Bluetooth 4.2, A2DP, EDR, LE
GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS
FM Radio
NFC
USB OTG
Fingerprint scanner
4,000mAh battery (non-removable)
Android 6.0 Marshmallow w/ Emotion UI 4.1
157.1 x 80.6 x 7.9 mm
185 g

That’s our quick hands-on and initial impressions for the Huawei Mate 8. This beauty will go through our review process to see how it fares against the competition. The Mate 8 will be available starting on March 6 for Php32,990USD 562INR 47,657EUR 535CNY 4,094 with two color options, Champagne Gold and Mocha Brown, but the latter will hit the stores sometime in April.