Huawei Mate 8 Review: A 6-inch phablet in a 5.5-inch form factor

Overview

Huawei jumped onto a lot of people's radars last year with the Nexus 6P, its first collaborative device made with Google, and one of the best smartphones of 2015. Eager to maintain that momentum, Huawei is now back with a new flagship phablet of its own, the Huawei Mate 8, a 6-inch full-metal phablet with a Full HD display, powered by Huawei's own flagship HiSilicon Kirin 950 processor and 4GB RAM.

Design

Huawei has been making really nice looking hardware for the past two years or so, and the Mate 8 is no exception. Easily matching the level of craftsmanship you expect from Apple, the Mate 8 has a sleek all-metal body and is available in Moonlight Silver, Space Gray, Champagne Gold and Mocha Brown. Having said that, in Singapore, only the Champagne Gold version will be available (it's the nicest color anyway).

The sides of the phone have chamfered edges, and there's a very slight curve to the rear that makes the phone more comfortable in hand than other large phablets.

Despite its massive display, the Mate 8 doesn't feel much bigger than other phablets in the more standard 5.5 to 5.7-inch range, thanks to its incredibly thin 1.7mm bezels. This gives the phone a nearly 80 percent screen-to-body ratio. In fact, it's only about 3mm wider than the 5.5-inch iPhone 6s Plus, and amazingly, it's actually 1mm shorter too. The phone is also remarkably light, coming in at just 185g, making it 7g lighter than the iPhone 6s Plus.

On the back of the device, two strips of plastic at the top and bottom house the antenna, but the color blends in perfectly with the rest of the phone, unlike the unsightly antenna lines on the iPhone.  

There's a round fingerprint scanner on the back of the Mate 8. Like the fingerprint sensor on the Nexus 6P, the Mate 8’s is slightly recessed and perfectly round, unlike earlier Huawei phones that had a square sensor. It’s not a button, so you don't have to press down on it to unlock the phone. The sensor appears to be the same one used in the Nexus 6P, and it's lightning fast - in fact, it's as good as anything else out there right now. The fingerprint sensor does more than just unlock the phone too. Additional functions can be found in the settings for triggering the camera, handling calls, or stopping the alarm.

Above the fingerprint scanner there's a circular camera module with a ring of chamfered metal around it. The camera lens does protrude a little bit, but it's not too bad overall.

The bottom edge houses the micro-USB port as well as two speaker grilles. A dual SIM card tray, with the second slot doubling up as a microSD card slot that accepts up to 128GB cards can be found on the left side. Both the power button and the volume rocker can be found on the right-hand side. The power button has a circular pattern etched into it so it's easier to locate.

Display and Audio

While many of its competitors have moved on to Quad HD resolution displays, Huawei has stuck to Full HD, and honestly we're fine with that. QHD displays may look slightly better under scrutiny, but even at 6 inches, the Mate 8's 1,920 x 1,080 pixels resolution (368 ppi) is sharp enough that you won't be able to see any pixels unless you pull out a magnifying glass. Having said that, we do wish that Huawei had opted for an AMOLED display, as it did with the Nexus 6P, instead of the IPS-NEO LCD found on the Mate 8. Blacks aren't quite as deep as they are on the Nexus 6P, and colors look slightly off too - whites are slightly warm and reds are a bit oversaturated. You can correct this in the display menu setting's White Balance option, but it's something to take note of.

Audio on the Mate 8 is provided by a single speaker found on the bottom of the device. The speaker is a little underpowered, and doesn't produce enough volume, but what sound it does produce is balanced and accurate. Conversely, with a good pair of headphones plugged in, the integrated DTS audio suite delivers a rich sound and an enjoyable listening experience.

Features

Thanks to Huawei's partnership with Google, the Mate 8 is one of the first phones to launch with Android 6.0 Marshmallow pre-installed. Having said that, if I didn't tell you, you might not know, because Huawei has installed its own EMUI 4.0 interface over the top of it, which drastically changes the entire UI. As with many China smartphones, the new UI takes a lot of cues from iOS, completely removing the app drawer and making big changes to the look of the notification panel, lock-screen quick panel and even the icons. 

On the plus side, EMUI 4.0 comes with its own unique features that you won't find on any other Android phone. The most prominent is Huawei's unique Knuckle Sense 2.0, which allows you to perform various actions - take a screenshot, start recording a video, open an app - using different knuckle gestures. In actual use Knuckle Sense is a bit of a hit-or-miss affair, and it's honestly not the most intuitive feature to use, but if you can train yourself to use it, it does actually work quite well. In our time with the phone, the only knuckle sense feature we commonly used was double knuckle tap to take a screenshot.

To better make use of the Mate 8's huge display, Huawei has also included a split-screen mode, something stock Android could certainly use. You can enter split-screen mode by long-pressing the square button on the navigation bar, or if you have Knuckle Sense turned on, by drawing a line across the screen with your knuckle. This lets you launch two apps side-by-side. Awesome in theory, but unfortunately, you'll frequently receive an error message saying "this app is not supported by dual windows", this includes most Google apps like YouTube, Chrome, and Gmail, so the actual functionality of split-screen mode is a bit limited.

Benchmark Performance

The Mate 8 is the first smartphone to use Huawei's 16nm HiSilicon Kirin 950 octa-core chipset, which uses a quad-core 2.3GHz Cortex A72 and a quad-core 1.8GHz Cortex A53. The GPU is a 900MHz Mali-T880MP4m, which is the same GPU found in Samsung's new Exynos 8890-equipped Galaxy S7. There's also a mysterious 'i5' co-processor, but Huawei hasn't revealed any details on what this does exactly. There are actually two variants of the Mate 8, a standard model with 3GB RAM and 32GB storage, and a premium edition with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage. Our review unit, and the only version that will be available in Singapore, is the 4GB version.

Sunspider Javascript

SunSpider JavaScript measures the browsing performance of a device when processing JavaScript. It not only takes into consideration the underlying hardware performance, but also assesses how optimized a particular platform is at delivering a high-speed web browsing experience. The Mate 8 performed quite well here, with performance on par with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 found in the Nexus 6P.

Quadrant

Quadrant is an Android benchmark that evaluates a device's CPU, memory, I/O and 3D graphics performances. As this is an Android benchmark, the Apple iPhone 6s Plus is not included here. The Mate 8 did really well here, outperforming all of our Snapdragon-equipped phones, and lagging behind only Samsung's Exynos 7420. It's worth remembering though that the 810 is a year old now, and it remains to be seen how the new Snapdragon 820, which is what the Mate 8 will be competing with, fares.

3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited

3DMark Ice Storm is designed to test the gaming capabilities of a device, putting its GPU through a rigorous OpenGL ES 2.0 benchmark test that uses fixed off-screen rendering with high quality textures and post-processing effects. The Unlimited version of the benchmark disables v-sync, display scaling and other OS factors, making it ideal for chipset comparison. Surprisingly, the Mate 8 didn't do so well on this gaming benchmark, and trailed behind everything except for the Snapdragon 808-equipped LG V10. The Mate 8's Mali-T880MP4 GPU is ARM's newest and highest-end GPU, so it shouldn't be the weak link. It's possible that the Kirin 950 doesn't handle the processor-heavy physics section of the 3DMark benchmark well. 

Having said that, we played a few games on the Mate 8 and didn't notice any sluggishness, so it could just be this one benchmark that's tripping it up.

Imaging

The rear camera on the Mate 8 is a 16-megapixel, f/2.0 aperture, 27mm lens, using Sony's new IMX 298 sensor with 4,608 x 3,456 1.12-micron pixels. The camera has tri-axis optical image stabilization, dual LED flash and phase detection autofocus.

The camera software includes a number of useful features, such as independent focusing and brightness metering via two draggable circles that appear on-screen when you tap and hold in Photo mode. The default automatic camera mode, comes with options for regular photo and video shooting, as well as time-lapse photography, and light painting (long-exposure photography), which itself has four settings ('Car light trails', 'Light graffiti', 'Silky water' and 'Star track'). There's also a beauty mode, which is best used for selfies with the 8-megapixel front-facing camera.

For even more options, the menu includes modes for Panorama, HDR, automatic watermarking, document adjust, which automatically straightens text images captured at an angle for easier reading, Super Night, which is also for long exposure photography, and Professional mode, which lets you manually adjust ISO, exposure, focus and white balance.

The camera software isn't the most intuitive to use (when do you use 'Star Track' and when do you use 'Super Night'?) but there are settings and options for almost any conditions - you just have to figure out which is the right one to use.

One thing missing from the camera software is the option to record in 4K video, something that most other flagship smartphones have had for a while now - the best you can do is 1080p at 60fps, or slow-motion 720p at 120fps.

Image performance was reasonably good, but not quite class-leading. Color reproduction was generally accurate but photos weren't as sharp as they could have been, especially in less favorable lighting conditions. While graininess is kept under control, there's some noticeable processing which causes softness (see the closeups below).

Battery Life

Our standard battery test for mobile phones includes the following parameters:

• Looping a 800 x 480-pixel video with screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
• Constant data streaming through email and Twitter

The Mate 8 boasts fantastic battery life, thanks to its huge 4,000mAh capacity battery, lasting a massive 13 hours and 36 minutes on our video looping benchmark. The only phone that currently has longer battery life is Samsung's Galaxy Note 5. Interestingly enough, you can actually 'reverse charge' with the Mate 8. That means you can plug in another device via the USB port and use the Mate 8 as a power bank.

Unfortunately, there's no wireless charging support on the Mate 8, but it does support fast charging, with up to 40 percent battery life possible with just 30 minutes of charging. Additionally, there are a ton of options for tweaking the handset's power consumption in the Settings menu.

Conclusion

The Mate 8's huge 6-inch display but relatively compact dimensions should appeal to anyone who wants a larger than average screen without trading off one-handed usability. Its Full HD display and 4,000 mAh battery give it outstanding battery life, and there's a host of interesting software features to play with too.

What remains to be seen is if the Mate 8's Kirin 950 SoC can compete with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 820 processor, as well as Samsung's new Exynos 8890 chip. We already know it fares well against last year's chipsets, but its the 2016 models that it will be in competition with. Additionally, while we think everyone will like the design and build of the Mate 8, we imagine some people will wish it shipped with stock Android, just like the Nexus 6P. 

The Mate 8 will be available in Singapore on 10th March for S$888, which makes it quite a bit cheaper than most flagship smartphones. At that price you're getting a flagship handset with a premium build and design that rivals anything else out there, with an exceptional battery life and a pretty decent camera. Additionally, Huawei Singapore will be running a limited time promotion for the Mate 8's launch where buyers will also receive a free Huawei B0 smartwatch (worth S$129). 

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