Alas, the much awaited flagship phone of Chinese
manufacturer Huawei is now official! The handset was just launched a few hours
ago, confirming all the rumors that have been circulating around about its
specs and performance.
The phone has actually lived up to previous reports and
packs a 6-inch IPS display with Full HD resolution, an in-house Kirin 950 chip
with a 2.3GHz Cortex A72 quad-core CPU and another Cortex-A53 processor that’s clocked at 1.8GHz. There’s
also a Mali T880MP4 graphics processor, a choice of 3GB or 4GB of RAM and
internal storage that goes up to 128GB.
Just like the iPhones, the Mate 8 has a coprocessor (i5)
which provides support for speech recognition, low-power consumption MP3,
functions of a sensor hub, fused location provider (FLP) navigation and reduces
location-based power consumption.
Huawei has used aerospace-grade aluminum and 2.5D curved
diamond cut glass in the construction of the device, which definitely spells
premium in today’s standards.
There’s a 16MP camera at the back provided by Sony, while an
8MP selfie snapper sits at the front. Other notable features of the Mate 8
include a 4000mAh battery, a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor and Android 6.0
Marshmallow with the company’s EMUI 4.0 OS with power-saving firewall, a
defragmenter and eRecovery.
The phone will be offered in a number of color options
including champagne gold, moonlight silver, space gray and mocha brown. The
3GB/32GB version will sell for $480 while the 4GB/64GB and 4GB/128GB variants
will cost $590 and $700 respectively.