Huawei Shows Off Mate 8 Phablet

Huawei hopes its new Mate 8 phablet can tempt fans of larger smarthpones away from the likes of the iPhone 6S Plus.

The Huawei Mate 8 features a 6 inch 1080 x 1920 pixel FullHD screen, and will be one of the first smartphones to come powered by Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box.

Inside, there’s the option of either 3GB or 4GB or RAM and the company’s latest octa-core Kirin 950 processor, powered by four ARM Cortex-A72 and four Cortex A53 CPU cores.

This is twinned with an i5 sub-processor, which constantly monitors input from the device’s many sensors, but also offloads tasks such as music playback firewalls, voice-controls and other display-OFF activities. This combination should mean that the Mate 8 consumes much less power allowing for a much longer battery life from the 4,000mAh battery.

Power on

As for cameras, the Huawei Mate 8 comes with a 16MP rear lens featuring a Sony IMX298 camera sensor with optical image stabilisation and f/2.0 aperture, as well as a 8MP front-facing camera,

The Huawei Mate 8 is available now in China in either 32GB, 64GB and 128GB configurations, with four colour scheme options – Champagne Gold, Moonlight Silver, Space Gray and Mocha Brown.

There’s no concrete date for a UK release as yet, but Huawei says it will provide information on international availability at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2016 in January.

The Mate 8 is the successor to the Mate 7, released last summer as Huawei looked to grab market share away from the likes of Samsung and Apple.

The company also released the Mate S back at IFA in September, although at 5.5in, the device was firmly in the smartphone market. However, it was the first device to feature Huawei’s Fingerprint 2.0 system, which offers functions such as controlling the notification bar, erase unread notifications, preview pictures, and take phone calls.

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