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
CPU Performance
Let's a better look at the Kirin 925's performance in terms CPU power. Again, this SoC is merely a slightly higher clocked Hi3630 as we've already benchmarked on the Huawei Honor 6. The basic hardware remains the same - a 1.8GHz quad A15 cluster with 2MB of L2 and a 1.3GHz quad A7 cluster with 512kB of L2 cache. The setup is running on an HMP (Heterogeneous Multi-Processing) hardware implementation running on a Linaro GTS (Global Task Scheduling) software stack on the Linux kernel. Memory is provided by 2GB of LPDDR3-1600 memory in this unit, with a higher 3GB variant available.
First, we take a look at our browser suites, testing general Javascript performance inside Chrome.
As expected, the Mate 7 doesn't differ too much from the Honor 6. The slight 100MHz boost on the A15 cluster brings it a few slight percentages above the Kirin 920. Again we see the big.LITTLE configuration and the A15 in general being extremely well-performing in these tests, being at the forefront of Android performance and only being beaten by Apple's own chip architectures. It's safe to say that the CPU has no issues at all in delivering an excellent and fast web-browsing experience.
WebXPRT has behaved weirdly on the Mate 7, it consistently scores less than the Honor 6 even although they employ the same chip. I'm not too sure as why this happened. My assumption is that there might be some software regressions in Huawei's OS libraries, but it's weird to see WebXPRT being the sole test unit to suffer from this effect. Because the CPU is running at a higher clock and voltage, we might be seeing some problem with throttling as WebXPRT tends to run much longer than the previous benchmarks.
Let's continue on with BaseMark OS II, a benchmark which tries to measure several aspects of a system.
The System and Web tests in BaseMark are mainly CPU limited. We see a similar ordering as in the Javascript benchmarks, with the Kirin leading the Android devices behind Apple's iPhones.
The memory benchmark is performing very weakly here. As a reminder, BaseMark is also testing the NAND performance in the memory sub-test, and not the main memory.
Like on the Honor 6, the Mali is having big issues with BaseMark OS II's Graphics benchmark and ends up below even Qualcomm's last generation's GPU. This, in conjunction with the lower memory score brings the overall BaseMark score further down.
Again the Mate 7 performed worse than the Honor 6. We're starting to see a trend here where longer lasting performance tests perform worse on the Mate 7, again I suspect a throttling issue here. Before we dwell more deeply into that, let's revise the performance of the Mali T628MP4 again.
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Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Here at AnandTech we post objective and reproducible benchmarks, this includes the battery test.Of course the phone will last 3-4 days if you use it lightly, but this all depends on your personal usage, your environment, the brightness of the screen and a plethora of other variables.
Bondurant - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Interesting to note also that phonearena's battery test results puts Mate 7 to be better than Note 4HUAWEI ASCEND MATE7 9h 3 min (Excellent)
SAMSUNG GALAXY NOTE 4 8h 43 min (Excellent)
SONY XPERIA Z3 9h 29 min (Excellent)
HUAWEI ASCEND MATE 2 4G 11h 26 min (Excellent)
Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
The Mate 7 also leads the Note 4 in our tests, but only by 12%. Considering the Note 4 powers a QHD screen and has 900mAh higher battery capacity, means that the Mate 7 is much less efficient.Ethos Evoss - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
because they like slagging chhinese mobiles and they ar isheeps so they dont want look bad bcos they own all iphones..Bondurant - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
With regards to the UI, you mentioned the theme also customized the buit in apps, but if you notice carefully even by a basic change of the wallpaper, the whole UI and in built apps cleverly adapts to the color of the wallpaper in an elegant way. I love that aspect on the Emui3.0 and is way advanced then the amateurish theme implementation to come on Samsung.There are a plenty of other aspects you UI you didn't mention, like swiping down from anywhere in homescreen you get a indepth search option, or the double click vol down on screen off for 0.6 second quick shot photo or the pretty gallery interface and other minor aspects like the addition of a button on navigation bar to bring down notification panel, their one hand UI unique implementation of moving keypad to a side by motion gesture, long press of multitask navigation button to switch quick between last two used apps (they have also added split screen functionality in their latest update of Emui3.0 in China).
Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
EmUI 3.0 has a huge amount of features like the one you mentioned, but I can't allocate several pages just to mention every small feature found in the phone. Things like the configurable navigation buttons are for example visible on my screenshots, and much more if you look at the UI gallery.Hrel - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
"5.9” Stopped reading.Stupid phablets, can I get a 5" phone again? PLEASE?!
Ethos Evoss - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
yeah get honor 6Arbie - Thursday, December 4, 2014 - link
Especially on a big-ticket item like this, I see a non-replaceable battery as a major negative. I don't mean non-swappable; I mean not user-replaceable at all.There are years of experience with such things by now, especially among the folks on this forum. What are people doing when their tablets or high-end phones won't charge anymore and they can't replace the battery themselves? Send it in to the manufacturer? Throw away a $500 item? Are there reliable US third-parties that do it quickly and cheaply?
spixel - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
So did you actually do a real gaming test on this phone, or just basemark? Because I don't play basemark and neither does anyone else.You should put more emphasis on the real life performance of the phone and not results from benchmarks.