Huawei Mate 8 Review

 

Call Quality and Connectivity

Making calls with the Mate 8 has been pleasant and is fit for conference calls thanks to the three microphones onboard that can be used all at the same time with the Omnidirectional recording feature. The recorder app also has the said feature which is suitable for meetings and group conversations.Overall, call quality is crystal clear with a loud earpiece.

It’s a Dual SIM device with support for 18 4G bands along with dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.2, NFC and GPS w/ A-GPS plus GLONASS, so connectivity is very well covered which is good for travelers and business users alike.

Battery Life

With a 4000mAh battery, the device can be a road warrior companion. With medium usage composed of calling, texting, browsing, and some media consumption, it was able to last for 2 days before asking for a charge. As with our routine battery test with looped 1080p video in Airplane mode at 50% brightness and volume with headset plugged in, the battery lasted for 12 hours and 30 minutes. Using the PCMark battery test will give it10 hours and 4 minutes.

The large battery can be filled up instantly thanks to the quick charging feature using the included high-powered charger. With our usage, it was able to reach 10% in 5 minutes while a full charge will take an hour and 20 minutes.

Conclusion

With its 6-inch display, the Mate 8 is definitely sitting on the phablet category which is not for everyone. Still, the enormous display is justified by a small footprint making it smaller than most handset in this size. The home-baked powerful Kirin 950 paired with 4GB of RAM is already a good selling point but the 1080p display is a letdown compared to QHD rivals especially when we have an SRP of Php32,990.

Only the champagne gold and mocha brown color option is available in the Philippines. Our review unit comes with a free flip cover window case out of the box.

Huawei Mate 8 specifications:

6.0-inch Full HD IPS-NEO display, 368ppi
Corning Gorilla Glass 4
HiSilicon Kirin 950 octa-core processor (4 x 2.3GHz, 4 x 1.8GHz) w/ i5 coprocessor
4GB RAM
64GB internal storage
up to 128GB via microSD (uses SIM 2 slot)
16MP PDAF rear camera w/ OIS and dual-tone flash
8MP front camera
Dual-SIM (nano)
Dual-4G LTE, 3G HSPA+
WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
Bluetooth 4.2, A2DP, EDR, LE
GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS
FM Radio
NFC
USB OTG
Fingerprint scanner
4,000mAh battery (non-removable)
Android 6.0 Marshmallow w/ Emotion UI 4.1
157.1 x 80.6 x 7.9 mm
185 g

Pros:

• 83% screen-to-body ratio
• Fast processor
• Long battery life
• Loud speakers
• Quick charging

Cons:

• No 4K display given its asking price