Huawei Mate 8: Here's what it packs and what it lacks!

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Huawei has revealed the pricing of its recently announced flagship smartphone called Mate 8. The Chinese telecom company unveiled its Mate 8 smartphone in November, when it also gave timeline for the phone's launch in China and mentioned that the global variant of the phone would be showcased at CES 2016.

As promised, the Chinese telecom company has now launched the Mate 8 phone with its pricing details in China. Huawei Mate 8 is the company new flagship phone that boasts a premium design, high-end specs, and several variants. This smartphone will be competing with high ends flagship phones like Samsung Galaxy S6, LG G4 and Sony Xperia X3 Plus.

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Here we take a look at five of its best features and specs, and five other that fail to impress us.

Best 5 features and specs:

Best 5 features and specs:

The Huawei Mate 8 dons a metal-body design with 2.5D glass, which gives it a premium look. As per the company claims, the Mate 8's body has been made of ‘aerospace-grade' aluminum which makes it strong yet light. It has a 6-inch Full HD screen with IPS-NEO negative LCD display offering 368 PPI, and comes with a fingerprint scanner paced on the rear panel, just like the Huawei Nexus 6P. Going by its design as seen in the official images, we find it sleek and impressive, but will say more about how premium it feels on hand and its sturdiness once we get our hands on the device.

Quite powerful!

Quite powerful!

The smartphone is powered by Huawei's in-house Kirin 950 octa-core chipset with 2.3GHz quad-core Cortex-A72 and 1.8GHz quad-core Cortex-A53 CPU, paired with Mali-T880 GPU. It also features an i5 co-processor, which as per Huawei, takes care of speech recognition, low-power consumption MP3, sensor hub, fused location provider (FLP) navigation, and lower location-based power consumption.
Huawei has launched 3 variants of the Mate 8, which differentiate mainly on the basis of their storage space capacities. The base variant comes with 3GB of RAM and 32GB internal storage, and higher end modes include the 64GB and 128GB variants with 4GB of RAM each.

4000mAh battery in low :

4000mAh battery in low :

To ensure that the phone lasts longer, Huawei has powered it with a 4,000mAh battery that, it claims, will be good enough to run for up to 18 hours of talk time and 22 days on standby mode.

8MP Selfie Camera

8MP Selfie Camera

In the photography department, the Mate 8 sports a 16-megapixel rear camera with Sony IMX298 image sensor, f/2.0 aperture, 1.12um pixel size, Phase Detection Autofocus (PDAF), and optical image stabilization (OIS). For selfie enthusiast, it features an 8-megapixel front-facing camera with Sony IMX179 image sensor and f/2.4 aperture. The camera specs seem good on paper, as we wait to review the device.

Shipped with Marshmallow :

Shipped with Marshmallow :

The phone runs the latest Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS out of the box. We think this is nice considering that there are very few phones right now that run the newest Android version. Even though by the time this phone gets launched in India the Android 6.0 will be released for many other smartphones, we think it will remain an advantage.

5 features and specs that failed to impress us

5 features and specs that failed to impress us

Huawei's has used metal design to give a premium look and feel to the phone. However, as is the case with most metal phones, we are not really quite fond of the uni-body design. We wish this phone featured a removable back panel with a replaceable battery.

Lacks water and dust resistance:

Lacks water and dust resistance:

We wonder why Huawei has missed on the IP certification for the Mate 8. The water and dust resistant capabilities would have only made this phone a better competitor to its rivals.

QHD display :

QHD display :

The phone comes with a Full HD display instead of a QHD display or a 2K resolution display which offers sharper visuals and imaging. Considering that even Huawei made Google Nexus 6P comes with a QHD display, we wish this phone too had a higher resolution screen.

USB Type-C

USB Type-C

Though USB Type C is still not a standard connectivity port, we think that the company could have used it instead of the microUSB to make the phone future ready. The USB Type C is a reversible port and works faster and better.

High Price:

High Price:

We understand that the phone brings high-end specifications, but are not very impressed with its pricing. It is available in China for a price starting from CNY 2,999 (which is Approximately Rs. 31,140) for the 32GB Silver edition. The company has priced the 64GB gold edition variant for CNY 3,699 (approximately Rs 38,406), and the 128GB GB in champagne gold for CNY 4,399 (close to Rs. 45,675). There also are some other higher end editions, namely a Monarch edition with champagne gold colour priced at CNY 6,888 (approximately Rs 71,520). The company is yet to reveal its India pricing.

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