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
Display
With the Ascend Mate 7, Huawei introduces a JDI-manufactured IPS-Neo screen. The advantage of the IPS-Neo technology is that it provides better viewing angles and contrast ratio due to a change in the manufacturing process which allows for the the liquid crystal molecules to be uniformly aligned on the glass substrate.
Indeed, the viewing angles of the Mate 7 are much improved and I'd say it's one of the best in terms of LCD displays. Contrast ratio has also considerably gone up as we'll see in a bit.
The Mate 7 display offers lots of promise, but let's see if it holds up with our objective measurement tests. We use an X-Rite i1Pro 2 as our measurement hardware, in conjunction with SpectraCal's CalMAN software suite and our own workflow to be able to get an accurate display characterization.
The Mate 7 ends up at 484cd/m² in terms of brightness. It's plenty of bright for all but the most sunny days. Only direct sunlight reflectance may pose an issue.
In the black levels and respectively the contrast ratio is where we see the IPS-Neo screen perform extremely well. For an LCD screen, this is one of the deepest blacks I've come to meet in a device. The HTC One M7 seems to be the only other device to come near it, but that was at a lower brightness point with dynamic contrast.
The Mate 7 is able to achieve a 1750:1 contrast ratio, putting it at the top of the LCD pack. Only AMOLED displays are able to outperform this figure due to their ability to avoid any light emission on a per-pixel level.
In terms of colour temperature, the Mate 7 performs again quite well while hitting 6605K. This time Huawei seems to have aimed for 6500K instead of colder colours as on the Honor 6. If you still prefer the more colder and blue-dominated whites, Huawei as retained the colour temperature slider under the display settings which allows you to adjust the tone of the display to your own preference.
While the colour temperature figure seems to be quite good, under further investigation we see that there's a problem. Our grayscale accuracy test shows that there's much too much green at all grayscale levels. In fact, this is actually clearly visible on the device as we see a slight green tint. Gamma reaches an acceptable 2.11, still a bit off a perfect 2.2. Due to the green tint of the device the grayscale dE2000 ends up at 6.33, much worse than any device released in the last 18 months, and above the average perceivable threshold of 5.
Looking at the saturation accuracy graph, we see again an overabundance of green. It looks like the whole spectrum is pulled slightly towards green, which results in a whole offset of all measured colourpoints. This is a pity as the display seemed to be quite well calibrated in terms of saturation compression. The end result is that we end up with a meager dE2000 of 3.99. While this is much less worse than the grayscale measurements, it's not too bad, for example, it performs better than this year's G3.
Our Gretag MacBeth test is a measurement of accuracy of several commonly used colours. The Mate 7 ends up with a respectable dE2000 of 3.88 here. We again find that the score is merely thwarted by the green-shift of the display, prohibiting this display to enter the group of outright excellently calibrated devices such Samsung's and Apple's newest models.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
72 Comments
View All Comments
tipoo - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Ach, and that storage performance...Yup, all interest gone.massig93 - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Thanks for the great review! I'm so thankful you review products that are noto exclusively Samsungs, Apples or HTCs. I'd love to see more chinese phones reviews on anandtech (Xiaomi Mi4, Meizu MX4, Nubia Z7, Nubia X6, Huawei Honor X1)protomech - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Any comments on wifi performance? No 802.11ac so not expecting much.The Ascend Mate 2 was an interesting device: inexpensive and fantastic battery life, due to the 2011-class resolution and SOC performance. If you wanted a physically large display and were okay with the lower performance then it was easy to recommend.
There's no reason to recommend this phone.
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
I'm still lacking the proper equipment for Wifi tests, but from what I can see the Wifi reception and performance didn't change from the Honor 6.alfredska - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Especially for Android devices, it would be great if you could spend more time discussing a manufacturer's historical commitment to long-term support on their products. This includes: how regularly a product receives OTA updates; how recent the base operating system is (version of Android); whether kernel source is released in a timely manner following each update.In the case of Huawei, I'm very leary, because their first US phone offering, the Mate 2 which was just released this year, still runs Jellybean. While they claim a Lollipop is in its future, this only came after a barrage of harassment from users complaining about abandoned support. Even then, I don't want to give them praise until the update actually exists.
Reference 1: http://blog.gethuawei.com/huawei-device-usa-update...
Despoiler - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Huawei has been caught numerous times straight up stealing other company's intellectual property. They deployed an exact copy errata and all of Cisco's IOS in their routers. They are in a lawsuit with T-Mobile for corporate espionage. They also got caught siphoning non-anonymous user data from their cell phones and then they lied about doing it. Huawei is a government sponsored corporation and the Chinese government uses it to do whatever they want. I wouldn't anywhere near any Huawei product.pgari - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
The performance charts should have included the Nexus 6 and OnePlus One results, which have already been reviewed by Anandtechpichemanu - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Hi, just today I read another review and they didn't encounter any overheating nor did they have problems in low light photography. Also the autonomy was quite good (5h of gaming if I recall correctly)Is the terminal you reviewed on the latest firmware? Maybe a defective unit or another hw revision could explain this.
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
It was on the a late October released firmware.I'm getting the same gaming battery life of 5h (5.6h!) as pointed out in the review, I don't think there's changes in that regard.
pichemanu - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
Sorry for the gaming autonomy number, I mistakenly remembered around 2h.