Huawei Mate 8 hands-on

Huawei is growing in popularity, and that’s for good reason. The company just recently produced one of the best handsets on the market, the Nexus 6P, in partnership with Google. And following last year’s Mate 7 and the Mate S which launched a few months ago, Huawei has recently unveiled its high-end Mate 8 smartphone. We got the chance to take a quick hands-on with the device, so we’re here to give you our first impressions. Let’s dive right in!

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On the aesthetic front, the Mate 8 is a Huawei device through and through. It sports an all-metal build quality that’s incredibly similar to that of the Mate 7 and Mate S. It has a large 6.0-inch LCD display with an unexpectedly low resolution of 1920 x 1080. From what we can tell it’s not a bad display by any means, though a bump up to Quad HD resolution would be nice to see here.

The device is powered by the octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 950 processor. It comes in three storage variants – 32, 64 and 128GB – with the latter two sporting 4GB of RAM, and the 32GB model sporting 3GB. It also has two SIM card slots. If you have no need for the second SIM slot, it doubles as a microSD card slot capable of supporting up to 128GB of additional storage. Around back we see a 16MP rear camera (complete with OIS) with a rounded fingerprint scanner underneath.

One of the benefits of having a device with a lower resolution display is that it will be much easier on battery life. Not that we think the Mate 8 would struggle in that area at all, as it sports a massive 4000mAh cell.

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Specs

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We’ll of course bring you a full review in the weeks to come, so be sure to stay tuned. What are your thoughts? Do you think this could be your next smartphone? Let us know what you think in the comment section below!