Huawei Mate 8 Review

 the Huawei Mate 8 is Huawei’s “power-user” smartphone, designed to last longer and to perform well in most common use cases, including productivity, web browsing, video, and photography. As such, it comes with an impressive 4000 mAh battery and a 6-inches 1080p LCD display. We gave it a Best of CES 2016 during the show.

The Mate 8 is powered by the HiSilicon Kirin 950 processor, which has powerful A72 cores and is built using a 16nm FinFET transistor technology. This sounds impressive, but where does the Huawei Mate 8 stand in relation to today’s market? This review will show you the pro and cons of this true large-display phone.

The Huawei Mate 8 is an all-metal/glass phone that uses the proven design language of the company’s most successful handsets such as the Mate 7, Mate S or the Huawei Honor 7.

From a distance, all look similar, but a closer look reveals that the aluminum alloy used in the Mate 8 feels more premium and the sides use brushed metal now. These are subtle things that can be felt and contribute to a more pleasing handling of the phone.

Let’s jump directly to one of the strong points of the Huawei Mate 8: its large 4000 mAh battery. This is the reason of being for the Mate series, which has been designed and optimized for longer battery life from the get go, and this goes much farther than just putting a large battery, thanks to additional power management tools.

The sheer capacity of the battery remains the primary factor for battery life (within a platform, like Android). Since everyone’s usage model will differ, all the battery tests will at best provide an indicator of how the phone’s battery life will be, but never a realistic portrait of your potential experience. As far as capacity goes, the Mate 8 impresses and the chart below will speak for itself.

With a charge speed of 49.33 mAh/mn, the Huawei Mate 8 ranks among the fastest-charging devices. With its default charger, it can recharge as fast as the Galaxy S6 or the Galaxy Note 5. For example, the Nexus 6P is slightly slower and both the LG G4 and the Honor 7 are far behind. It’s rare to see a phone charge faster than 50 mAh/mn, but the Galaxy S6 Edge+ tops 52 mAh/mn in our tests.

Huawei has been unapologetic in its use of FHD (Full HD = 1080p = 1920×1080) instead of higher resolutions such as 2560×1440, mainly to save battery life, but it has the side-effect of optimizing costs as well.