The Huawei Mate 8 Review
by Andrei Frumusanu on January 5, 2016 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Cortex A72
- Kirin 950
- Mate 8
- CES 2016
Conclusion & End Remarks
As we come to the end of the review I’m rather pleased with what Huawei was able to do with the Mate 8. Design-wise this is still very clearly a Mate device and fully embraces the form-factor and industrial design established by the Mate 7. This is clearly a large phone as the 6” screen is of the biggest on the market, and certainly one of the only devices of its size competing in the very high-end segment.
The small improvements that the Mate 8 design did bring were all beneficial. The move of the speakers to the bottom enables the phone to have better sound output, and we also saw improvement in build quality as the plastic top and bottom side-panels of the Mate 7 were replaced with aluminium ones. Although not sure if this affects other colour variants, I found the finish of the Mate 8 to be quite of a double-edged sword as while it offers very good grip for a metal phone it also is prone to collect smudges and due to the coarse anodization being hard to clean.
The screen of the Mate 8 has seen the least improvements over the Mate 7 as we’re still seeing usage of a JDI IPS-Neo 1080p panel with the same DDIC as last year’s model. It actually seems that this year’s display shows lower luminance efficiency which can slightly impact battery life. Display calibration has only seen slight improvements, although Huawei fixed the green tint that was present on the Mate 7, the Mate 8 still shows a calibration that favours a large colour gamut that exhibits more vivid and saturated colours.
Huawei continues to embrace dual-SIM capability in all of its phones and the Mate 8 is able to take advantage of this as well – although you have to sacrifice the microSD slot for the second nanoSIM. Coming in 32, 64 and 128GB variants with expandable storage the Mate 8 should offer plenty of space for even most avid power users.
Having discussed the Kirin 950 with HiSilicon during the November launch, I had sort of high expectations of the SoC as on paper it was able to show a lot of promise. Fast-forward to today and not only did the chipset fulfil the expectations and all of its promises, but it actually managed to exceed them as I hadn’t imagined that HiSilicon would be able to reduce CPU power consumption this much. This bodes well not only for the Kirin 950, but for what I hope is an indication of what other vendors with A72 silicon will be able to show. I’m now eagerly looking forward to testing the Snapdragon 820’s Kryo and Samsung’s Exynos 8890’s M1 to see if the two new CPU architectures will be able to match or beat the Cortex A72 implementation in the Kirin 950, as HiSilicon now sets the new bar in terms of power efficiency.
Performance of the Mate 8 was also extremely good. This was not only due to the 2.3GHz A72 CPU cores but also to what seems to be targeted software optimizations and improvements to Android. The Mate 8 is currently the fastest Android device on the market and should be able to perform very well against the upcoming generation of flagships.
On the GPU and 3D performance side Huawei and HiSilicon were able to show very large improvements compared to last year’s models. The new Mali T880MP4 at 900MHz enabled the Huawei device to showcase much needed performance boost. Although we saw large improvements, it’s unlikely that the Mate 8 will be able to compete against upcoming devices with new generation SoCs as the smaller Mali configuration of the Kirin 950 sacrifices power efficiency in favour of die size and thus when looking at overall power efficiency at the same TDP levels, the Mate 8 currently falls behind the competition. Nevertheless I applaud HiSilicon for balancing out the GPU in such a way that thermal throttling is not an issue, thus enabling the Mate 8 to be able to always operate at near its maximum performance, something we can’t say of many of today’s devices.
Through the efficient SoC and the large battery the Mate 8 is able to sport one of the best battery performances among today’s smartphones. It seems that the device is actually being held back by high RF power consumption, something especially visible in the LTE web browsing test where Mate 8 only narrowly manages to outperform the Nexus 6P. This skews usage patterns in favour of high CPU loads as that’s where the Mate 8’s strength lies, vastly outperforming the competition in terms of efficiency.
Still speaking of connectivity, Huawei has finally managed to equip one of its own devices with a competitive WiFi solution that is able to check all the feature boxes such as the much needed 5GHz band and 802.11ac compatibility. Performance is also good although we noticed some odd behaviour in the upstream bandwidth in the 5GHz band.
Lastly, there’s the Mate 8’s camera. In its current state with the B116 firmware version that the device was reviewed on the only way to accurately describe it is as a complete disaster. Huawei has promised that we’ll be seeing a software update in the near future that will be able to correct the problem – so until then we’ll hold out on a definitive conclusion. The Mate 8 did show promise in low-light photography so once and if the focus issue is alleviated and the camera sensor will be able to perform at its full potential, it should in theory be able to compete well against other flagships. Check back in the future as we’ll be updating the review for a complete camera evaluation.
As we arrive to the conclusion, I’m left relatively happy with the Mate 8. Over the last year since I reviewed the Honor 6 and Mate 7 I’ve seen Huawei being able to steadily identify and improve on its weaknesses. In terms of performance and power efficiency the Kirin 950 is able to mark an absolutely enormous jump over last year’s devices as we finally see a proper successor to 2014’s Kirin 920/925. Huawei has said that they’ve been able to gain a lot of software experience while working with Google on the Nexus 6P and it really shows in EmotionUI 4.0, as it showcases exemplary performance.
While this is definitely not a perfect device and Huawei can definitely improve in aspects such as screen quality, I’m tending towards calling the Mate 8 a worthwhile purchase – that is, if Huawei manages to fix the severe camera issues. Until we can revisit that aspect of the device and if the camera is a critical factor in one's purchasing decision of the phone, I’d recommend waiting out on the full evaluation before making a final decision.
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s.yu - Saturday, January 16, 2016 - link
Which will soon become among the slowest of all flagship CPUs. Please, it's one generation above Exynos 7420 (courtesy of ARM) and still doesn't beat it in all aspects.MrSpadge - Tuesday, January 5, 2016 - link
I don't think it makes any sense yet to name "phones" and "high end games" in the same sentence. (still doing it right now)beachletter - Tuesday, January 12, 2016 - link
The mate 8 achieved similar if not better sustained framerates than the Exynos 7420 in demanding games like nba 2k15/2k16. And that is when the 7420 is also running on 1080p, not 2k (Meizu Pro 5).I'd say GPU on the 950 is totally comparable to Exynos 74xx in actual gameplay because it has so little thermal throttling. In fact, it is probably superior to some phones using snapdragon 810, especially after a few minutes of playtime and on 2k screens. I know because I have a Oneplus 2 which plays like shit after 10-15 minutes game time.
This GPU won't compete with 2016 flagship SoCs, but it can easily match the high end chips currently available in actual usage. The graphics benchmark really don't tell you the whole story.
Lolimaster - Tuesday, January 5, 2016 - link
It seems only Apple, Samsung and maybe Xiaomi cares about display accuracy which is better than focusing on gizmos.5th element - Tuesday, January 5, 2016 - link
Google's devices arent half bad, but I agree with you display accuracy should be of primary concern and I, for the life of me, have no idea why it isn't an this extends right across the board to LCD TVs and monitors.ChronoReverse - Tuesday, January 5, 2016 - link
The reason is because more people prefer the overly saturated colours. The most common comment I get when people look at my previous phones where the colours were set to as accurate as possible for that model is "why does it look washed out?".This is why a screen capable of colour accuracy like the Nexus 6P ends up with a saturated default setting.
s.yu - Saturday, January 16, 2016 - link
That's why Samsung's approach with multiple screen modes makes so much sense. Most will leave it on Adaptive, those who care will change it to Basic or AMOLED Photo. Those watching really badly compressed videos could use AMOLED Cinema.s.yu - Saturday, January 16, 2016 - link
One up that!NZtechfreak - Tuesday, January 5, 2016 - link
I've had one of these for nearly three weeks, a 4gb/64gb one (coming from Note 4 and Nexus 6P previously). This review aligns with my experience. Battery life is easily the best I've had, in the same use it is basically doubling what I had with the Note 4 and 6P. Battery life is fairly high on my priority list and this device is a breath of fresh air in this regard. I had noticed the camera issues, but hadn't picked the reason until Andreilux informed me a few days ago. I'm on a newer B129SP02 firmware, which somewhat ameliorates the issue but not as successfully as it needs to. I think this should be able to be resolved in firmware though, so hopefully will see more of the sensors potential in upcoming updates (I've had three firmware updates so far, so certainly they are moving at a reasonable pace to address issues thusfar). Can update as more firmwares come in if people are interested. Regards the screen my subjective experience matches the review. Coming from the Note 4 in basic screen mode and the 6P in sRGB mode, the garish colours are a bit of an eyesore. Not sure if you mentioned it, but the screen is fairly reflective too, so despite a reasonable brightness sunlight viewing is mildly irritating at times. Blacks for a non-AMOLED screen are sufficient for me, white on warmest colour temp also good enough for me. Overall though the panels performance is acceptable for me. The last firmware update changelog mentioned changes to the colour temp adjustment, but I'm not perceiving a difference. I hope they can refine colour temp adjustment further with firmware updates. Again, not sure if I missed it, but the speaker performance here is really enjoyable - best bass I have heard from a smartphone till now. Speaker performace gets noticeably stressed as you approach 70%+ of the volume range, but volume is plentiful enough beneath that to not give me cause for concern. Pleased with your GPU write-up, a balanced viewpoint (it matches my own, so I suppose I would say that). While GPU performance is not wonderful in raw terms, it exceeds most devices this year for native resolution workloads on account of the 1080p screen. Throttling behaviour is particularly pleasing, since I do mostly emulator gaming on my phone and it's really nice playing the Gamecube's Fire Emblem Path of Radiance at fullspeed here (Dolphin overclock setting at 0.2). Overall I'm well pleased, the camera issue needs resolution, but I use my GH3 for when I really want to take nice shots, so for me it isn't the showstopper that it will be for some on current software.name99 - Tuesday, January 5, 2016 - link
"One characteristic that might be defining for the Kirin 950 is that it still uses a CCI-400 fabric"Might I suggest as a future article one that clarifies what the relationship is between all these ARM terms. We have AMBA, CHI, ACE, CCI and probably a few more I've forgotten. They all seem to have something to do with coherency between different "ARM ecosystem" cells, but what exactly, and how are they all related?