Huawei Malaysia officially launched the Mate 8 smartphone today, over at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center. Make no mistake about its series and name; the Huawei Mate 8 is a flagship smartphone that — while having a 6-inch display — is still comparable in size to other smartphones with a smaller screen. Huawei has begun selling the device today (March 8th 2016) at its own Vmall.my and through Huawei’s online partner Lazada. Vmall has two pages — Standard with 3GB RAM + 32GB storage (Moonlight Silver and Space Gray) and Premium with 4GB RAM + 64GB storage (Champagne Gold and Mocha Brown) — while Lazada splits them into four pages for the color options — Moonlight Silver, Space Gray, Champagne Gold, and Mocha Brown. Later on March 11th 2016, Huawei will open its sales of the Mate 8 at Huawei’s flagship stores as well as other participating outlets, plus offering it through carrier partners like Celcom, Digi, Maxis, and RedONE. The Standard and Premium variants are priced at RM2,099 and RM2,399 respectively.
Lazada will begin to the Mate 8 on March 11th. Buying from Lazada will give you a free headset, protective cover, and screen protector, but who’s to say buying from Vmall won’t score you these freebies as well? I believe it’s still better to get it directly from Vmall. Starting March 8th, the first 8 buyers of the Mate 8 through Vmall receives a free Huawei TalkBand B2 (Elite version in Gold color), that’s still worth RM668. Vmall will do a (presumably) free engraving service, for the first 100 buyers. Not only that, Vmall also offers a one-year screen protection warranty for an additional RM150. Last but not least, Vmall starts its delivery from March 10th, a day earlier than everyone else. But if buying online is not your thing, you can also try to visit Huawei’s KLCC store on March 11th, where the first 88 buyers of the Mate 8 will also get the TalkBand B2 for free.
Huawei began the launch event today by proudly stating that its smartphone shipment has jumped from 75 million units in 2014 to 108 million units in 2015, a 44% increase, making it the third largest smartphone maker in the world with a 9.9% market share (according to GFK in November 2015). To celebrate this, Huawei Malaysia is bringing in the Mate 8 for us, claiming we are “one of the first in the region” to get this device.
As highlighted earlier, the Huawei Mate 8 is a flagship through and through. You must be thinking, “Isn’t the Huawei Mate S launched less than five months ago, the current flagship?” You’d be right, except that it’s still priced at RM2,698, plus the Mate S has a 5.5-inch 1080p display, 3GB RAM, 64GB storage, and octa-core Kirin 935 processor, while the Mate 8 has a larger 6-inch 1080p display, a larger 4GB RAM option with 64GB storage, and the “world’s first commercial” Cortex-A72 CPU on the octa-core Kirin 950 system on chip (SoC), that is HiSilicon’s fastest yet. Oh, all of that for RM2,399 which is cheaper than Mate S, and Mate 8 also has a 3GB RAM variant with 32GB storage for an even lower price of RM2,099.
However, you will miss out on certain fingerprint sensor gestures like the ability to slide the fingerprint down to drop the notifications tray, slide up to collapse it, or scroll between photos. Bear in mind that this was told to us by one of the Huawei Malaysia reps earlier today and we have yet to confirm this due to the limited times we’ve spent on both Mate S and Mate 8. That said, Mate 8 uses Huawei’s new generation fingerprint sensing technology that lets you unlock access to your phone, files, apps, plus the ability to turn off alarms, take photos, and answer calls by tapping the sensor. Mate 8 is said to be able to protect all data from theft should the phone be stolen, thanks to Android 6.0 Marshmallow’s mandatory storage encryption.
You can expect the Mate 8 to be made with the same premium aluminum body as the Mate S or the Nexus 6P, but Mate 8 manages to squeeze its 6-inch display into a compact enclosure, making its overall dimensions just a hair larger than the iPhone 6s Plus that only has a 5.5-inch display. Speaking of which, Mate 8 uses an IPS-NEO display with 1080 x 1920 pixels, and at 6 inches, it’ll still give us around 368 pixels per inch. The display is topped by a 2.5D glass that curves around the edges. Its touch sensors are sensitive enough to detect knocks with your knuckles, and with that, Huawei is introducing version two of its Knuckle Sense on the Mate 8. Think of Knuckle Sense 2.0 as a secondary input method; you could double-knock with a single knuckle to capture a screenshot (it’ll scroll too if you’re on a webpage), or double-knock with two knuckles to fire up screen recording (was built into Android API since 5.0 Lollipop). With a display this huge, Mate 8’s Emotion UI (EMUI) 4.0 also does split-screen multitasking to make use of the screen real estate.
Every phone manufacturer wants to tout how good their phone cameras are, but few can deliver. Huawei doesn’t want to disappoint, hence it packed a 16-megapixel Sony IMX298 image sensor into the back, that has an f/2.0 aperture and an 1/2.8” sensor size. The camera has Phase Detection Autofocus (PDAF), which is to be expected on a flagship, but it has optical image stabilization (OIS) too, which many don’t. The main camera could capture 720p videos at 120fps, or take 100 burst shots at 12fps. Not only that, the software side of things could correct images (with text) taken from an angle, and also does optical character recognition (OCR), so the camera could be a great tool to snap name cards and notes written on whiteboards.
All of these features are useless if you can’t even use it for more than half a day. Being a plus-size phone does have its advantages, as it has a lot of space to store the battery. In Mate 8’s case, it is 4000mAh’s worth of lithium-ion polymer goodness. Huawei claims it could last up to 2.36 days of normal use, or 1.65 days of heavy use, way higher than most of the competition. Following the footsteps of previous Ascend Mate phablets, Mate 8 can also be used to charge other phones, via a USB OTG dongle. But wait, there’s more. Mate 8 also does fast charging, with the ability to juice it up by 37% in just 30 minutes.
We have previously covered more on the Huawei Mate 8’s features which you can read more about here: http://www.techattack.my/huawei-mate-8-coming-malaysia-march-8th/. For now, I’ll leave you now with the specifications of this device:
- Dimensions and weight: 157.1 x 80.6 x 7.9 mm and 185 grams
- Color options: Moonlight Silver, Space Gray, Champagne Gold, and Mocha Brown
- Display: 6” 1080 x 1920 IPS-NEO LCD, ~368ppi, Gorilla Glass 4
- Processor: HiSilicon Kirin 950
- CPU: 2.3GHz quad-core Cortex-A72 + 1.8GHz quad-core Cortex-A53
- GPU: Mali-T880 MP4
- Memory and storage: Standard — 3GB + 32GB, Premium — 4GB + 64GB
- Card slot(s): Dual nano-SIMs, SIM 2 can be used for microSD up to 128GB
- Cellular: GSM / HSPA / LTE Cat6 300/50 Mbps
- WiFi: 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, 2.4 and 5 GHz dual-band, DLNA, WiFi Direct, hotspot
- Other connectivity: Bluetooth 4.2 LE, NFC, A-GPS, BDS, GLONASS, microUSB 2.0, FM
- Sensors: Fingerprint, accelerometer, barometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, proximity
- Main camera: 16MP, f/2.0 aperture, 27mm lens, 1/2.8” sensor size OIS, PDAF, dual-LED
- Video recording: 720p at 120fps, 1080p at 60fps, 1080p at 30fps
- Front camera: 8MP, f/2.4 aperture, 26mm lens, 1080p videos
- Battery: Non-user-removable 4000mAh lithium-ion polymer
- Operating system: Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Emotion UI (EMUI) 4.0
- Other features: Fast charging, Knuckle Sense 2.0, charge other phones via USB OTG
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