Published in Mobiles

Huawei Mate 8 is a new home for Kirin 950

by on26 November 2015


Android 6.0 and Cat 6 modem in 6 inch

Huawei Mate 8 has been officially announced by the Huawei and the company has confirmed that you will see it at CES 2016.

Huawei Mate 8 is the company's first phablet to house the new Kirin 950 SoC – a company's custom design. The Kirin 950 is an octa-core product with four Cortex A72 cores clocked at 2.53Ghz and four lower-power Cortex A53 clocked up to 1.3GHz.

Surprisingly the company said that its Mate 8 phone runs four Cortex A72 cores at 2.3GHz and four Cortex A53 cores at 1.8GHz.

The new SoC has a Mali T880MP4 GPU running at 900 MHz and it looks like Mali T880 will be popular for non-Qualcomm / Apple SoCs for 2016.

mate8a

The phablet features 6-inch 1920x1080 IPS LCD screen which is not small, but not the greatest resolution either. The phone will ship with 3 to 4 GB LPDDR4 RAM, and a choice of 32GB/64GB/128GB NAND. It has microSD storage card support.

Huawei has included its own in-house Integrated HiSilicon Balong Modem that iruns a 4G Cat 6 LTE. This will get the Huawei to 300 Mbits per second download and 50 Mbit uploads if your local carrier supports such a speed. Qualcomm has modems capable of Cat 12 and 600 Mbit download but while Apple is happy with Cat 6 modem and 300 Mbit maximum speed, so are the other players.

The phablet comes with a much needed 4000 mAh battery as 6-inch screen needs a lot of power. Huawei announced fast charging of up to 2A at 9V or 18W and promises it can charge 37 percent in 30 minutes.

Huawei is using Sony's 16 megapixel IMX298 sensor with 1.12µm pixels F/2.0 aperture for the rear camera and Sony IMX179 8 megapixel F/2.4 aperture, 26mm eq. for the selfie shooter.

mate8b

The phablet measures 157.1 (h) x 80.6 (w) mm and the company is still shy about revealing the thickness of the device.

The phone can support two nano SIM cards or a single nano SIM and a micro SD card.

Huawei will use Android 6.0 covered by its own EmotionUI 4.0. The company revealed Chinese prices and the MSRP for 3GB + 32GB should end up around ¥2999-3199 (USD~479, ~449€). The more attractive 4GB + 64GB version should sell for ¥3699 (USD~591, ~554€) and the King of the Hill with 4GB + 128GB for ¥4399 (USD~703, ~659€).

Mate 8 has plenty to offer but it won't be cheap and it is not a small phone – it won't fit everyone's pocket, just as Nexus 6 didn’t.

Last modified on 26 November 2015
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