Huawei Mate S

The Huawei Mate S debuted at the IFA 2015 as the new high end smartphone from the Chinese manufacturer. This page contains a review, news and information for this device so, here is everything you need to know about Huawei’s new smartphone, The Mate S in one article. Reminder: Be sure to use the Table of contents (provided for your convenience) to navigate to the sections that interest you.

Huawei Mate S Design

The Huawei Mate S sticks to the general design of its predecessor, with a 7.2mm full metal frame that gives a premium look and feel. The slightly curved rear allows it to fit comfortably in your hand, and though  it has the same screen size as the iPhone 6 Plus, Huawei keeps bezels to a minimum making it shorter and narrower. The Mate S weighs 156g making it very lightweight given the size of the device.

Huawei Mate S Hardware, Materials, Pictures and Design

The Mate S comes in a variety of colors that are visible in the slideshow below:

Huawei Mate S Buttons

The volume and power/lock buttons sit on the right side of the device towards the top. This placement allows for easy access.

Huawei Mate S Camera and Fingerprint Scanner

The Mate S relies on a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 8MP front camera.  The overall quality is decent but it does not have the same performance of LG G4 or Galaxy S6 cameras which are certainly better. The videos are decent, with good audio quality, but again it cannot compete with those already on the market. Perhaps with future upgrades they will improve the quality.

Luckily,  the standard features including HDR, time-lapse, beauty mode and light painting are included, giving you a full range of shooting options.

Below the 13MP camera sensor there’s a fingerprint scanner. Huawei updated the software for the Mate S, with Fingerprint Sense 2.0 allowing for greater sensitivity and improved recognition. You can also use it to take a photo, scroll through images in the gallery, answer calls, pull down the notification panel and silence an alarm.

Mate S Display and Force Touch

Huawei sticks to the custom quality display panel. The full HD resolution adopted by the company allows you to maintain a high number of ppi and at the same time ease the burden on the CPU and GPU during daily use. Bright, beautiful colors, excellent calibration general and perfect touch screen.

The big talking point here though is Force Touch. The 3D Force Touch Technology allows the display on the Huawei Mate S to gauge the amount of pressure you’re applying, and then provide different functions depending on the level of force.

When looking at a photo you can hold down on an area to see it magnified in a bubble. The harder you press, the more zoomed in your magnification is. Come out to the gallery overview and hard pressing on the images provides you with a larger thumbnail preview.

Audio/Sound

The audio quality on the  Mate S satisfies both from the point of view of the calls and speakerphone. The speaker is indeed very powerful, placed on the lower end of the device and with  very good quality in the reproduction of multimedia content.

Connectivity

It also has good network management in terms of connectivity. It offers dual SIM LTE, NFC, Bluetooth and all the latest connectivity standard. The one thing that is missing is the 5GHz band for Wi-Fi, a minor detail not expected from this product.

Mate S Battery Life

The Mate S features a 3000mAh battery, allowing it to fit in more productivity. However, that’s smaller than the 3300mAh battery found in the similarly sized OnePlus 2. The full HD display eases the strain on the Mate S battery, and Huawei promises more than a day of usage from a single charge. The good news is that the Mate S is fast charging enabled, with a ten minute charge allowing for up to two hours of talk time.

Software/UI

The Mate S runs on the latest distribution of Android Lollipop and features a completely customized design which offers many features and above all customization. The EMUI is more or less the same that you find on P8 or other smartphones.

Also, in addition to interaction through touch and biometric sensor, we find a number of options to make the experience smart. There is the possibility to modify the navbar in addition to a convenient gesture to reduce the size of the UI.

Regarding the fluidity of the system, the Kirin 935 processor works very well and 3GB of ram allows you to use different applications simultaneously. Screen multitasking is not perhaps the most immediate and convenient view, considering the few apps visible on one page, but everything flows very well anyway.
Excellent Web browsing  capabilities with Chrome, the browser which allows users to open any website without complications and even heavy load pages in a few moments both using data connection via Wi-Fi.

Huawei Mate S Specs

Huawei Mate S specifications review:

NETWORK Technology GSM / HSPA / LTE
2G bands GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 – SIM 1 & SIM 2 (optional)
3G bands HSDPA 850 / 900 / 1700(AWS) / 1900 / 2100 / TD-SCDMA – CRR-UL00
HSDPA 850 / 900 / 1700(AWS) / 1900 / 2100 – CRR-L09
4G bands LTE band 1(2100), 2(1900), 3(1800), 4(1700/2100), 5(850), 7(2600), 8(900), 17(700), 20(800), 38(2600), 39(1900), 40(2300), 41(2500) – CRR-UL00
LTE band 1(2100), 2(1900), 3(1800), 4(1700/2100), 5(850), 7(2600), 8(900), 12(700), 17(700), 18(800), 19(800), 20(800), 2526, 28(700), 40(2300) – CRR-L09
Speed HSPA, LTE
GPRS Yes
EDGE Yes
LAUNCH Announced 2015, September
Status Available. Released 2015, October
BODY Dimensions 149.8 x 75.3 x 7.2 mm (5.90 x 2.96 x 0.28 in)
Weight 156 g (5.50 oz)
SIM Optional Dual SIM
DISPLAY Type AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
Size 5.5 inches (~73.9% screen-to-body ratio)
Resolution 1080 x 1920 pixels (~401 ppi pixel density)
Multitouch Yes
Protection Corning Gorilla Glass 4
– Force Touch display (optional)
– Emotion UI 3.1
PLATFORM OS Android OS, v5.1.1 (Lollipop), planned upgrade to v6.0 (Marshmallow)
Chipset HiSilicon Kirin 935
CPU Quad-core 2.2 GHz & quad-core 1.5 GHz
GPU Mali-T628 MP4
MEMORY Card slot microSD, up to 128 GB (uses SIM 2 slot)
Internal 32/64/128 GB, 3 GB RAM
CAMERA Primary 13 MP, 4128 x 3096 pixels, optical image stabilization, autofocus, dual-LED (dual tone) flash
Features Yes
Video Yes
Secondary 8 MP, LED flash
SOUND Alert types Vibration; MP3, WAV ringtones
Loudspeaker Yes
3.5mm jack Yes
COMMS WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, hotspot
Bluetooth v4.0, A2DP
GPS Yes, with A-GPS, GLONASS/ Beidou (market dependant)
NFC Yes
Radio FM radio
USB microUSB v2.0
FEATURES Sensors Fingerprint, accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass
Messaging SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Email
Browser HTML5
Java No
– Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic
– Xvid/MP4/H.265/WMV player
– MP3/eAAC+/WAV/Flac player
– Photo/video editor
– Document editor
BATTERY Non-removable 2700 mAh battery
Stand-by
Talk time
MISC Colors Luxurious Gold, Mystic Champagne, Titanium Grey

Huawei Mate S Price

The Mate S goes on sale for €649, a bit on the high end of the price spectrum when it comes to smartphones.

Review

The Huawei Mate S is perhaps one of the most beautiful products on the market and undoubtedly the star of the recently concluded IFA 2015. The hardware and software have the “usual” Huawei feel and look and will be very familiar to those who already owned devices from this brand. Ultimately there are few real defects, battery and camera are overall decent.


 

Huawei News/Updates

This section is dedicated to providing important and up to date news/information on the Huawei Mate S.

Huawei Reveals Feature to Find Mate S When Lost

The feature allows you to call out to your Mate S device using a customizable keyword and the “Where are you?” command. The phone then vibrates, alarms, flashes and shouts “I’m here” to alert the owner of its location. You can see the feature in action below in the source video from instagram.

Never lose your Mate S thanks to this slightly creepy "I'm heeeerrrreeee"

A post shared by Richard Devine (@ricker666) on

Images/Sourced Via: source 1 source 2, Huawei Mate S GSM Arena

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