Huawei Mate S Lets You Feel The Force

Huawei is about to make your smartphone more interactive with a new device that it hopes will finally make it a mobile market heavyweight.

The Chinese manufacturer has revealed the Mate S smartphone at IFA 2015, showing off a device packed full of consumer-facing features.

However the company wasn’t done with just one reveal, and also released information about its Huawei Watch wearable, including the price of its first ever smartwatch, which will goes on sale in some European countries from today – although not the UK, which will see the device ‘soon’.

Touchy

Available to pre-order from September 15, the Huawei Mate S features a 5.5in FHD AMOLED screen backed up by an octa-core Kirin 935 processor clocked at 2.2Ghz, 3GB RAM, 32GB storage and a 2,700mAh battery.

Weighing in at 156g, the device also has a 13MP rear camera and 8MP front lens that come with several neat features, including the ability to tap with your knuckle to capture screenshots. There is also NFC compatibility and Huawei’s Fingerprint 2.0 system, which the company says improves fingerprint recognition speeds by 100 percent with more accurate self-learning functions, as well as adding new functions such as controlling the notification bar, erase unread notifications, preview pictures, and take phone calls.

The device also appears to have beaten Apple to including the Force Touch technology, which senses how hard users are pressing down on a screen, in a consumer-facing mobile device, which is not set to feature in an iPhone until later this year.

Huawei showed off several demos of how Force Touch will work on the Mate S (pictured right), including weighing an object by placing it on the screen, launching apps, selecting hard-to-find photos, or zooming in using a hard press.

“Our goal in designing the Huawei Mate S was to develop a smartphone that offers a personalized experience, rather than a commoditised one,” said Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer BG.

“The Huawei Mate S is based on insights we gathered about human interaction – most notably that touch is a natural action we take to understand our world. The Huawei Mate S redefines how we incorporate touch technology into our smartphones, breaking through the conventional way of touch screen control and ushering in new imagination for human-machine interaction.”

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