With renders already out and about since yesterday, it was no surprise to us that Huawei decided to officially release their biggest and most powerful phablet. The Mate 8 will be another aluminium unibody device that has come from the Chinese manufacturer but it’ll carry the newly released processor from their subsidiary Kirin, promised to blow away any of the current SoCs out there.
Taking a close-up look at the 950 processor, it’s an Octa-core chipset that runs 4 cores at 2.3GHz and 4 other cores clocked to 1.8GHz. The manufacturer says that through the new “i5” coprocessor, the device will have a better power management system and allow speech recognition as well.
Underneath along with the processor, are a combination of either 3GB RAM/32 GB internal storage, 4GB/64GB or 4GB/128GB, depending which model that you fancy.
The 6-inch screen will run a native 1920 x 1080 resolution, and feature 2.5D curved glass from edge to edge all around the display. You won’t find much else on the front, aside from the 8-megapixel camera near the top.
Moving onto the rear, there will be a fingerprint sensor located a step below the Sony IMX298 16-megapixel rear lens module. Huawei is finally migrating to Android’s new OS, Marshmallow, in the form of a EMUI 4.0 skin and feature a huge 4,000 mAh battery.
Once it hits it’ll be available in 4 colours; Champagne Gold, Moonlight Silver, Space Grey and Mocha Brown. Retail price is set to 3,199 RMB (RM 2,118), 3,699 RMB (RM 2,449) and 4,399 RMB (RM 2,912) – based on the memory configurations we’ve listed out earlier.
You’ll have to wait till Q1 of next year before it arrives in stores for the international market, while it is readily available in China already. The prices seem daunting for something that would come from the smartphone manufacturer but it seems that they want to step up their quality and prices have to reflect that – compared to last year’s Ascend Mate 7, it gets a RM 1k price jump but will consumer bite? We’re not too sure, as of now.
Huawei says we should expect the Mate 8 to be announced for the international market during CES this coming January, so stay tuned once the New Year arrives.
