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
Camera Performance
The Mate 7 sports the same camera setup as the Honor 6. I've already determined for that device that the quality suffers quite a bit due to what seems to be very poor ISP performance.
For all practical purposes, I don't see any improvement in quality in the Mate 7. The device is still very lack-luster in the camera department.
f/2 1/658s ISO50
f/2 1/658s ISO50 HDR
During day-light shots we see the same lack of detail as found on the Honor 6. It's a pity that Huawei didn't manage to improve the processing here as the camera should have been able to produce better results based on the Sony IMX214 sensor. The HDR shots similarly see a colour balance issue as the image loses saturation.
f/2 1/16s ISO3200
f/2 1/16s ISO800 HDR
In night-time shots again the Mate 7 underperforms. Under dark conditions where other flagship phones would at least capture the scene in some reasonable manner, the Mate 7, like the Honor 6 will be hard to recognize what it is you took a shot of.
The camera application provides a fresh new UI that looks fantastic. But the problem here is that I find the usability has taken a toll, as previously easily available settings are now hidden behind various sub-menus.
In the end the still-picture performance of the Mate 7 is rather lackluster and competitor devices such as the Note 4 are on a completely other level in terms of picture quality. Huawei has a lot of progress to do if they wish to compete in the camera department.
In the standard 1080p mode we get a 24Mbps AVC Baseline@L4.0 video stream at 25fps with 96Kbps stereo AAC audio. The video is sharp and fluid, albeit the colours are a tad oversaturated. It's the lack of any kind of stabilization is very obvious and the video is very shaky. Again the device offers excellent video audio quality capture which is I think one of the best out there.
When turning on the electronic image stabilization the quality of the video dramatically decreases. We see a big reduction in the details of the video and what should be 1080p turns into something inferior to 720p. It's pretty obvious what's going on here: Instead of increasing the capture frame beyond 1080p on the image sensor, Huawei is retaining the 1080p capture frame and then reduces the actual video window inside of the frame and reserves the margins needed for the EIS to operate. The video window is then upscaled again to 1080p, resulting in a blurry image and loss of detail. The effect also reduces the field-of-view of the camera.
The 720p video with both HDR and EIS is even worse off. We go down to a 14.4Mbps AVC video stream on a custom encoding profile, while retaining the audio track quality. Here the resulting image resembles more what a 480p recording would produce. I've determined that this is solely due to a badly performing ISP on the Kirin SoCs.
NAND Performance
The Mate 7 employs the same Toshiba eMMC solution as found on the Honor 6. There's not much to say here other than the performance being outright horrible and unacceptable for a 2014 product. Although the model number of the chip is the same as on the Honor 6, it still manages to underperform what was already a device which was bottoming out our benchmark suite.
Competing flagships such as the Note 4 manage to outperform the Mate 7 by a hefty factor of 4 or 5 throughout all the tests. Surprisingly I don't seem to see the effect of this too much in everyday usage, but this might just be my subjective bias.
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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.