Huawei Mate S is all about the power of touch

At IFA 2015, Huawei had just announced its new Mate S smart phone that aims to push the boundaries of smart phone interaction. Right on the heels of Apple’s new iPhone release, the Huawei Mate S boasts a smart pressure sensitive screen allowing you to “Force Touch” the display to do more things like zooming into a picture or to preview an object. The screen apparently is so sensitive that it could weigh objects by placing them onto the display. They even measured an orange’s weight during the announcement event.

The Mate S comes with a 5.5″ Full HD display and it sits right between the 5.2″ Huawei P8 and their 6 incher Mate 7. The design of the back looks like an honor 7 with its subtle curved metal back while the front gets a clean all-glass look that’s smoother around the edges with the use of 2.5D Gorilla Glass 4.

Under the hood, it uses their own in-house developed Kirin 935 Octa-Core processor with 3GB of RAM, that’s also powering the honor 7. You get 32GB of on-board storage on the standard version and there’s a larger 64GB premium version as well. A larger 128GB is said to be released at a later date.

For imaging, it gets the same 13MP f/2.0 4-colour RGBW camera sensor with Optical Image Stabilisation as the Huawei P8, and it is also assisted by dual-LED flash light. For greater controls, the camera interface now comes with professional mode, allowing you to make fine tweaks on ISO, Shutter speed, White Balance and more.

With its protruding camera lens, it is protected by sapphire crystal to keep it away from nasty scratches. The front also gets a larger 8MP f/2.4 shooter and it is illuminated with a front mounted soft LED light.

When the Huawei P8 was launched, they introduced its Knuckle sense interaction, allowing you to take a screenshot by tapping with your knuckle. In reality, that was quite gimmicky and it robbed the P8 of its double tap to wake feature. On the Mate S, they have upgraded its knuckle technology to 2.0 which allows you to perform gesture controls like drawing C for camera using your knuckle. On top of that, the fingerprint scanner at the back also doubles up as a touch pad where you can use it for scrolling vertically or horizontally.

The Mate S also gets 3 microphones which allows recording for multi way conferencing, similar to the Note 4. With a 2,700mAh capacity battery, this is slightly larger than the Huawei P8 and overall it weighs 156 grams with a thickness of 7.2mm. The Huawei Mate S is currently running on Android 5.1 with its own EMUI 3.1 skin on top.

For more details, you can check out the Huawei Mate S product page.

Huawei Mate S Product Videos

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