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
Camera Still Picture Performance
The Mate 8 is equipped with a new camera module sporting a new sensor from Sony. The IMX298 is a 1/2.8” sensor with a 1.12µm pixel pitch offering resolutions of up to 16MP in 4:3 format. This marks a departure from the RGBW design that Huawei had adopted last year with the IMX258 in the P8 and Mate S. While the RGBW sensor definitely was able to demonstrate advantages in low-light photography it lacked detail compared to traditional Bayer RGBG sensors in well-lit scenarios.
| Camera Setup | ||
| Main (Rear) | Front | |
| Sensor | Sony IMX 298 1/2.8" 1.12µm pixel pitch |
Sony IMX179 1/3.2" 1.4µm pixel pitch |
| Resolution | 4608 × 3456 16MP 4:3 |
3264 × 2448 8MP 4:3 |
| Optics | F/2.0 aperture 27mm eq. focal length |
F/2.4 aperture 26mm eq. focal length |
| Stabilization | 3-axis 1.5° OIS | - |
For the first time we see Huawei push the sensor’s resolution up to 16MP which should theoretically allow the new module to resolve more detail compared to last year’s models as well as the Mate 7. Huawei continues to maintain a F/2.0 lens aperture with a 35mm equivalent focal length of up to 27mm, enabling a wide field-of-view.
Early software issues: A case of severe near-sightedness
When I received my Mate 8 review unit I was curious to test out Huawei’s promised improvements in camera quality, but I what I was met with were some very concerning samples that were worse than what a cheap budget smartphone could produce.
Mate S - Mate 8 B116 - Galaxy S6
The phone consistently was producing extremely blurred pictures that were far inferior to any other smartphone. At first I didn’t know what was causing this as the Mate 8 introduces both a new sensor, module as well as ISP in the Kirin 950.
Mate 8 vs Mate S
After further testing and investigation it seems that the focus mechanism of the camera is malfunctioning. A good way to demonstrate this is to launch the camera in the phone’s “Professional” manual mode and to open up the manual focus slider UI. While focusing on objects via manual selection on the screen, one can see the focus slider adjust between its minimal and maximal focal length.
The issue seems to be that the Mate 8 in its early software isn’t able to focus correctly on objects further away than ~75cm-1m away and tries to focus to infinity in basically any shot that is not a close-up frame of an object.
Reaching out to Huawei they confirmed that this is currently a software issue and that we’ll be seeing an update pushed out in the “near future”. Unfortunately this means that I wasn’t able to complete a proper camera evaluation of the Mate 8 as basically all pictures suffer from severe blurriness and chromatic aberrations due to the out-of-focus lens.
We’ll be updating the article with a revisited camera evaluation and comparison tests against competing devices once Huawei pushes out the firmware update to resolve the focus issue.
Day-Time Photography
As such, the following samples aren’t representative of the end product but at least we’ll be able to get an idea of Huawei’s processing and exposure handling in the Mate 8.
Ignoring the lack of detailed due to the focus issue, the Mate 8’s daylight camera samples seemed to lack vibrancy, colour saturation and contrast. This was mostly caused by the HDR mode that tended to cause shots to become washed out as the SDR shots were better in terms of colour reproduction in bright light. The issue with the SDR shots however were that they consistently weren’t exposed enough.
Night-Time Photography
In night-time shots the Mate 8 fared much better and seems to offer good exposure and colour reproduction with low noise levels. Unfortunately again because of the focus issue it’s hard to give a more detailed evaluation as we continue to see blurred out photography.
Overall it’s just impossible to rate the Mate 8’s camera so we’ll have to delay the full verdict to more in-depth follow-up once Huawei updates the device’s firmware.
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lilmoe - Tuesday, January 5, 2016 - link
CCI (Cache Coherent Interconnect) is basically responsible for connecting and "shifting" load between CPU clusters (, GPU and various other compute blocks) in a big.LITTLE configuration based on compute load needs.For the rest, Google is your friend.
name99 - Tuesday, January 5, 2016 - link
Andrei, do you always use the same compiler, version, and settings for the SPECInt2000 measurements?The reason I ask is if you compare these results to the A9 results
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphon...
things are mostly as you'd expect except 300.twolf and (especially) 175.vpr
The latter in particular is discrepant enough that the only thing that seems like it might have caused it is a substantial compiler optimization like a loop re-ordering.
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, January 5, 2016 - link
On Android we use the same binaries unless we specify some flag changes which happen over longer periods (Last change was in August). Generally we try to publish a given article with apples-to-apples scores.For iOS it's impossible to use the same compilers and we have to rely on Apple's LLVM. It's very possible that Apple's scores are higher due to better optimizations. I have in mind to try LLVM on Android (currently it's GCC) but it's something of a long-term project rather than something we can just switch to and even then it will never solve the optimization issue as Apple's LLVM toolchain has additions that we simply can't keep track of.
name99 - Tuesday, January 5, 2016 - link
To add to my point, compare withhttp://www.anandtech.com/show/9330/exynos-7420-dee...
Here the Exynos 7420 SPECInt2000 numbers are sometimes EXTREMELY different (like sometimes over a factor of 2, eg 175.vpr) from the Exynos 7420 A57 numbers you give in this article.
Maybe it would be good form, going forward, to publish this information, just so we can all keep track. (And obviously it is interesting to see when LLVM results differ greatly from gcc results, or even when the LLVM results show a great jump.)
Obviously one can't hope for PERFECT LLVM parity. Certainly Apple are keeping the back-ends of the compiler toolchain (Typhoon and Twister, maybe even the current Cyclone and Swift back-ends) secret; and given that they use a slightly different linker, there may be differences in exactly how, eg, they handle LTO. But one would expect mostly similarity between the Apple and Android LLVM, and rather more difference with gcc.
My point is not some sort of "rah rah Apple"; it's more just a desire to understand. For example, IS it the case that gcc happens to have some sort of (presumably fairly recent) optimization that managed to double the 175.vpr result? (And if so, what's the nature of that optimization.)
I think we'd all be curious to know, for example, whether you use LTO in building these SPECInt2000 binaries. And whether, if you use PGO, you get a substantial boost in performance.
Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link
There were issues with the 7420 harness that caused us not to immediately catch validation failures and it treated the runtime as if the test were simply faster. SPEC is relatively complex so unfortunately such problems do happen.RdVi - Tuesday, January 5, 2016 - link
Nice improvements from Huawei. If the P9 can keep this up while being no larger than the P8, it might be my next phone.SHartman1976 - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link
No complaint about the power and volume buttons being on the same side? That seemed to vex you on the Nexus 6P a couple of weeks ago despite it being a recurring design choice.Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link
My complaint on the 6P wasn't them being on the same side, it was that the volume buttons were extremely low on the phone and positioned below the power button, an odd positioning that kept one pressing the volume buttons when holding or picking up the phone. The Mate 8 has a traditional layout which doesn't cause any issues.raghwendra123 - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link
When should we expect the iPad Pro review?Piscupescu - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link
Nice review. Keep up the good work.