Huawei Mate 8 Hands-on Review, Price in Nepal

Mate 8
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The Huawei’s Flagship smartphone, Huawei Mate 8 was already launched in CES 2016 few months back. Now the phone has been exclusively launched for the South East Asian market at the recent Huawei event held in Paragon Hall@Siam Paragon, Bangkok, Thailand. The phone is priced at Rs. 80,000 here in Nepal for the 4GB RAM /64GB ROM variant. We played with the handset for some time, and here’s our initial impressions:

First Impression of Huawei Mate 8

Mate 8 has a strong design language with stunning construction, but still manages to feel light while carrying it. Also, we have this smooth metal body which is spitting premium at every touch. Up front, we have this massive 6 Inch 1080p display with the resolution of 368ppi. It seems less compared to the size of the screen, but the display up front looks really amazing. Also, the display is protected with corning gorilla glass 4.

Despite having a massive form factor, the curved back helps the phone to sit comfortably in the hand. The phone is currently running on Android 6.0 marshmallow with Huawei’s Emotion UI 4.0 on top. The interface is similar to the previous generation’s Huawei phones, but the animations are a lot smoother and the icon design seems flatter this time. You won’t have a hard time coping with this phone if you have used Huawei or other phones with no app drawers in the past.

Talking about the performance, it is one area where you don’t have to compromise anything. Everything just flies off smoothly. This phone is rocking the Huawei’s own in-house chipset, Kirin 915 coupled with 4GB of RAM, which has the highest ANtutu benchmarks score compared to any other android devices today. And also on real life usage the phone doesn’t lags, app opening is fast and the animations are smooth.

Mate 8 comes with a massive 4000mah of battery, but we still have to test how it Handles on our day to day usage. Overall Mate 8 feels like a solid phone, Huawei always has worked great on its hardware but the software still feels like it needs a lot more attention.

The camera also looks pretty good, even at low light condition. We will talk about the camera in our full review. Overall, the phone looks solid and should compete against Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and iPhone 6s Plus.

Huawei Mate 8 Full Specs:

Size
  • Height: 157.1mm
  • Width: 80.6mm
  • Depth: 7.9mm
  • Weight: 185gms
Display
  • 6″ FHD 1920 x 1080 with pixel density of 368ppi
  • 16.7M colors, color saturation(NTSC) 95%
  • High contrast 1500:1
CPU
  • HUAWEI Kirin 950 (64-bit,16nm FinFET+)
  • Octa-core (4 x 2.3 GHz A72+ 4 x 1.8 GHz A53)
  • i5 co-processor
Operating System
  • Android™ Marshmallow 6.0
  • Emotion UI 4.0
Memory & Color
  • 4GB RAM
  • 64GB ROM
  • Champagne Gold; Mocha Gold
Network Dual SIM with 4G
GPS GPS/A-GPS/Glonass/BDS
Connectivity
  • Wi-Fi 2.4G/5G, a/b/g/n/ac with Wi-Fi Direct support
  • Bluetooth 4.2, support BLE
  • MicroUSB (High-Speed USB)
Sensors
  • Fingerprint Sensor
  • G-Sensor
  • Gyroscope sensor
  • Compass
  • Ambient Light Sensor
  • Proximity sensor
  • Hall sensor
  • Barometer
NFC
  • NFC supported
Camera Main camera

  • 16MP, F2.0
  • OIS (optical image stabilization)
  • Dual-tone flash
  • PDAF+CAF autofocus
  • Digital zoom, up to 4x
  • Timelapse recording
  • Video recording: 1080p, 60 fps
  • support 720P 120FPS Slo-Mo recording

Front camera

  • 8MP, F2.4
  • Video recording: 1080p, 30 fps
Battery 4000mAh
In the box Handset; Headset; Charger; Flip Cover; USB cable; Quick Start Guide; Safety Information