The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 Review
by Andrei Frumusanu on December 2, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Mobile
- Ascend Mate 7
- HiSilicon
GPU Performance
The graphics processing unit in the Kirin 925 remains unchanged from the one in the Kirin 920. It's the same ARM Mali T628MP4 running at 600MHz. What did change though, is the software. HiSilicon no longer employs such an aggressive GPU governor logic for the DVFS scaling, but adopted this time a more linear approach that scales from one frequency to the next, making it much less aggressive than the one found in the Honor 6.
In 3DMark 1.2 Unlimited, we see no change compared to the Honor 6, as one would expect. The Physics score, which is dominantly CPU-bound, is more or less also unchanged. The Physics score here is rather low because the GTS mechanism limits the load onto the A7 scores, which have less performance headroom than the A15 cores. I don't see this as too much of a problem in real-world usage as the A7 cores should be able to handle most existing games without much issue, and it's in my opinion even a good thing as it brings down platform power down by quite a bit to avoid using the A15 cores.
Checking in on BaseMark X 1.1, the Mali continues to be underwhelming. The MP4 configuration of the T628 is simply not enough to be able to compete with Qualcomm and Imagination's current high-end GPUs.
In GFXBench 3.0, the Mali is again dragging its feet and is barely capable of competing here. A lack of fill-rate performance is what is limiting it in the T-Rex benchmark, and a bottleneck in ALU power is what is stopping the Mali from performing better in the Manhattan test.
The biggest change I've seen between the Mate 7 and the Honor 6 is the way the GPU throttles. I've mentioned that I've had a hard time to get the Honor 6's GPU to throttle at all, and thus it performed quite well in our performance degradation metric. The Mate 7 seems to have changed its thermal policies and brings with it one of the worst scores we've every seen. It throttles very fast and limits itself to roughly half the frequency, resulting in only 8.8fps from the 15.8fps instant performance score. The result is that the Mate 7 performs much better in the GPU battery test, but before we get to that, let's characterize the screen of the Mate 7 so we can get a good notion of what we should expect in terms of battery life.
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Lwazis - Monday, September 21, 2015 - link
Awesome phone, awesome battery life, fast processor especially in gaming. great screen, a bit low on brightness but not too bad. 6" feels good on one hand use that you actually forget it's that big. Fingerprint scanner is great, works very well. The camera is really good, surprisingly so.While software is eye candy (which i personally am a fan of) and offers more functionality than standard Android (A lot of functionality, the little things that make it a joy to use), it is a bit buggy. EMUI 3.0 looks good, like a cross breed between iOS and Android and i love that, however, it tends to reset to default settings on some applications kinda like forcing you to stick with EMUI's default apps, like the launcher, Messaging app, phone app, music app, etc. (this can be really annoying at times, but it is controllable).
Another thing is, and this is really strange, EMUI doesn't allow other 3rd party apps to gain access to the phone's "notification access", e.g. lockscreen apps. the functionality simply doesn't work, so you end up being forced to use only EMUI's native lockcreen, which by the way is the only lockscreen that works with the fingerprint scanner, meaning if other 3rd party lockscreen apps could actually work, they’d still not work with the fingerprint scanner. make sense?
So to sum it all up... phone hardware is superb and the internals are beastly too, especially battery life, in fact best in class. It also feels and looks expensive and premium. software is a joy to look at, really eye-candy, the little things like installing apk's, checking for software updates, the shutdown screen, all look visually pleasing, even uninstalling a app looks and feels like a beautiful process. However, if you like to customise Android, then the software experience could prove to be a little bit frustrating but nothing over the edge. And since it’s software, Huawei can fix it with an update. This is a good phone.
Jay Park - Sunday, December 20, 2015 - link
I'm a big advocate of Samsung Note series. However I have been using Mate 7 since the first launch...because the price was much cheaper, and I found the specs to be better (160GB, sensors, larger screen, brighter screen and a more intuitive UI) and have been using it to test games. So far I am impressed by the solid build, as I have dropped the phone many times and the screen barely has a scratch. Small dents in the frame but none too noticeable. It's been a year, and I find the phone to have been quite stable. I look forward to the next series.