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
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.