Tech Review: New Android Phablet vs Samsung's Galaxy Note 5

(FORBES) Fresh from the critical success of the Nexus 6P, the manufacturer of Google’s reference phablet has announced its own Android-powered handset. Huawei’s Mate 8 will be the flagship device for the Chinese manufacturer.





The six-inch screen may give up some pixels to the competition (it’s only an HD 1080×1920 resolution) but that’s going to have a positive impact on the battery life. The Mate 8 also has some very stylish and small bezels which should give the illusion of a larger screen in the hand.

Inside is Huawei’s own octa-core processor, the Kirin 950. This is a 16nm based chip with four 2.3 GHz cores and four 1.8 GHz cores, along with the Mali-T880 graphics chip and the LTE 4G modem. Huawei has also popped in a co-processor for lower priority tasks stat don’t need ultimate computing power (such as playing MP3 files). Users can decide on the lower-end device with 32 GB of storage and 3GB of RAM, a 64 GB/4GB option, or the top-end 128 GB/4GB option.





It does come with the latest version of Android (v6.0 Marshmallow), although as is the case with almost every mainstream Android manufacturer Huawei has added its own software and UI layer on top of Google’s baseline. This is called EmotionUI, and it’s the fourth version of Huawei’s interface.