Gadgetory

Huawei had a wonderful 2015 making the made seven and one of our favorite phones of the year the Nexus 6p now they're hoping to continue that momentum in 2016 with a follow-up to all of that does it get the job done well it's Josh Berg our from Android Authority what's going on everybody and this is your video review of the Huawei mate 8 now we are going to be changing things up just a little bit I am of course going to bring you the video review which you're watching right now but once you're done with this you can head on over to Android Authority calm for the written review done by Nora Gandhi who also is using the may 8's is daily driver and he'll be able to bring you his thoughts and comprehensively add in mind as well you can also find my camera samples over there some screenshots that I took as well and you can find both of our opinions put together so you can get a more comprehensive look at this phone so when you're done with this video head on over to Andrew authority comm to see that so before I get into my actual thoughts on the Huawei mate 8 I thought I could give you a bird's eye view of the phone just enjoy seeing all of the aesthetic while I list off all of the specifications all right let's get into it what we have here is the Huawei mate 8 of a metal construction that actually looks kind of familiar if you remember the made 7 and the mate s but this design language hasn't gotten stale just yet so that actually plays into the mates favour we still like this unibody symmetrical metallic body on here which is a wonderful thing to have in the hand especially considering the weight distribution because even though you are using premium materials on here the weight actually feels very even from top to bottom so the phone doesn't feel like it's going to just fall out of the hand it's really all of the little details that we enjoy the most about this phone over on the sides you have flat sides with the subtle chamfered edges but these sides are of a brushed metal design if you look underneath the front panel that glass you'll see that there's actually a pattern underneath right next to the Huawei icon and at the top of the front panel you actually have a notification light which already comes in handy especially for messages now we are dealing with a 6-inch screen up front here so handling is going to be a bit tough especially in one hand that said however gripping the sides is really nice and the phone doesn't feel like it's going to slip about despite this smooth metal on the back so it does feel pretty secure in the hand it's just when you're actually navigating from left to right or top to bottom you are going to have to perform some gymnastics now speaking of that display this is an IPS display that comes in at 1080p resolution now we know what you're thinking quad HD seems to make more sense for a flagship device like this and we are inclined to agree but the thing is 1080p we think is still more than enough to have some fun on this phone and even then you get a large canvas to be able to have fun anyway media and gaming all are still very enjoyable on here and as an IPS display maybe the colors aren't as punched out as an AMOLED display but really we don't have that many complaints about it out in broad daylight the IPS display when cranked up to the full brightness still looks quite nice and there's actually one little benefit to having a lower resolution on the large screen like this the DPI now take a look at this shot where we have the Huawei mate 8 next to the quad HD Nexus 6p you'll notice that the font on the mate 8 is a little bit larger so you users out there who actually want to have a large phone like this in order to better read the Internet well then mate is an example of how a lower resolution could actually probably help you out but now we can turn the phone around and of course you have that fingerprint reader on the back we can really make no bones about it this is one of the best fingerprint readers and Huawei is still creating some of the best ones best in class that are available a bit of inside baseball for you guys whenever I get an Asian device especially one that's imported one that may or may not come to the US I always have to contend with one big problem it doesn't connect to the fast mobile networks here in the US and with the Huawei mate 8 which is not supposed to be making it over to the West that could have been a problem but Huawei has thought ahead and they put every radio for major carriers so that you are able to use this phone across the globe so no you're not going to get this phone on carriers in the US but you can always import it and like I'm using right now on 18t and t-mobile I'm still able to get good call quality and I'm still able to get fast mobile internet speaking of sound we do have the bottom mounted speaker right here so obviously it's not going to be quite as good as a front-facing unit or dual front-facing unit even but this bottom mounted speakers still provides some pretty good body to the sound even if it doesn't get as loud as we would hope but that's still more than I could say for a lot of tinny speakers that are out there and over on the left side of the phone you can pop out that SIM tray and yes Huawei mate 8 still continued connectivity with dual-sim capabilities but one of those sim card tray is can actually be used for a microSD card so this particular phone that I have in my hand is a 32 gigabyte model there's a 64 gigabyte model but it doesn't really matter because you can put in microSD cards expandable storage is a feature I know a lot of you guys really want in your flagships again and then May 8 is leading that charge right now in 2016 but now we can get into what I think everyone should be really talking about when it comes to the may 8th power of four thousand milliamp hour battery is underneath here obviously not replaceable but trust us it's going to get you as much longevity as you need especially if you're smart as you can see here I'm going into the battery manager and you have some smart or performance modes that you can put into there even an ultra mode but what I did was I tested out the performance and the smart modes in performance mode where everything is cranked up to 100 I was able to get a full day's worth of work done with about 4 and a half hours of screen on time now that already feels pretty good especially for a large phone like this but once I turned on the smart mode and took the suggestions of the smart optimizer including things like turning down the screen brightness putting some apps in the background so they don't run when the screen is off I was able to get two days worth of battery life with seven hours of screen on time now really that's nothing short of amazing honestly that you are able to wake up in the morning and if you still don't have full battery if you have at least maybe around 40 to 50 you're still ok then that's not even mentioning the great fast charging that Huawei has been able to put here using the included charger as you can see here I was able to get from 15 to 50% in about half an hour to about 40 minutes so it really feels like Huawei is trying to put in as much as possible in this phone especially when you consider the hardware and they've made some really good choices on there so we're going to go ahead and move on to the camera the rear facing camera actually is made of a new Sony sensor so while we want it to be as updated as possible but first we'll talk about the front facing shooter which is 8 megapixels and I did use it for some selfies out at CES maybe one or two videos and it did seem to do the job pretty well 8 megapixels is nice because if you need to crop into the photo you're not going to lose too much of that detail but back to the rear facing shooter we have a 16 megapixel shooter on the back that should be able to provide some good optics and if you get into the app you have a lot of options in order to get the shot that you want you have everything from panorama it's even a document capture mode and a professional mode which we actually enjoy a lot you could actually get a better shot if you put in just that little bit of work my biggest problem with the camera app though is that you actually have to go into an HDR mode in order to do HDR it's not an auto setting and I think about HDR is that it actually doesn't feel like it's working all that well if you look at this photo I was able to spot meter it to a dark area so then things got blown out and then I did the same thing using HDR hoping that it would even everything out when in reality it just went ahead and blew everything out it didn't even add that much color to the new photo so it's kind of a disappointment that HDR is just not really a viable tool in the huawei mate AIDS camera but even then as we get into the image quality unfortunately processing kind of rears its ugly head again it's been a problem for huawei for a bit the actual photos lack a lot of color depth especially when you get from very well-lit situations and you kind of bring it medium and low light situations and even then in medium light situations there is still a noise reduction and a smoothening that's happening here that actually makes you lose quite a bit of the detail optical image stabilization does seem to help a little bit when taking these photos and for that matter it does also help in video now quick thing video you do have 1080p 60 frames per second capture but you don't get 4k on here again a feature that I know some of you might think should have made it onto a flagship device like this it's kind of a shame that we actually have to say that the camera on the May 8th is kind of subpar because they've already proven that they could do good optics and good processing on the Nexus 6p it may be a little bit more time with the new module the new Sony sensor could have helped them out because the processing has been a thorn in the side of Huawei for quite a few iterations of the mate by now but now we can get into the actual user experience and of course that means emui and what powers it the processor here is a high silicon Kirin 950 in-house made by Huawei so all the optimizations that they needed to make for emui or what you're seeing here it's backed by three or four gigabytes of RAM and Mali graphics honestly the curé 950 just might be one of the best processors that we've used in recent memory we've had a great time on it and me personally on this while we may date I haven't been able to slow it down not one bit I do some gaming with a Star Wars game and then I multitask and go in and out of all these different imaging applications I even use Adobe Lightroom mobile on here and I really haven't been able to have any problems on here and it hasn't slowed down one bit but that does bring us to the e/m UI now I've mentioned already in the power section that yes having a lot of control over what apps are doing and what the actual settings are for the phone mean that you can get really good battery life but that same amount of control is also found in a lot of other aspects of this phone and really it could be a little bit overwhelming Asian interfaces when it comes to Android do tend to do this one thing that people in the West don't really enjoy they don't have a app drawer now that means that all of your icons are going to be splashed out on all of your home screens and it's up to you to put in the work to organize everything now that's a lot of work that I know a lot of people may not want to put but you can always put a launcher on top of it that said there are parts of the EMU eye that we do enjoy like the notification drop down that shows notifications in a timeline way and even if the recent apps screen is pretty simplistic it actually is one of the smoothest that we've been able to use but ultimately as usual it's all about the extras all of the different features that they put into here that you might use once or twice and then you never use them again like for example the knuckle feature you can actually use your knuckle to draw on the screen to make any number of things happen now the issue that I had with it is that I actually had to hit the phone really hard it's almost as if I was punching the device just so I can get the knuckle thing to work and unfortunately if you are already failing at using the knuckle feature on here then you probably could have just hit your icon or just went through the interface and got to where you needed to go in a much faster way another feature that feels a little bit half-baked is the dual window with such a large canvas on here it should be nice to use for two different applications running at one time but you only have about nine Huawei based applications that you can use in the dual window and really nothing else after that so while we has a lot to catch up on when it comes to full multitasking on the May 8th it's a little paradoxical really like we love the emui because of the ki-rin 950 because it's one of the smoothest interfaces that we've used but it's also a pain to use because it's kind of a convoluted mess especially when you consider all the work you have to do just to make the home screens look well clean and all the features that are in here kind of don't really help at all and kind of just hinder the experience overall so it's obviously clear that Huawei really wanted to pack in as much as they could into this phone and in a lot of ways they succeeded but in a few very key ways they've actually kind of failed and it might be easier to look at what this phone lacks rather than what is packed into it for example the quad HD display which I know some people are really going to harp on and even then without quad HD you also don't have the forced touch capability that the mate s tried to introduce the biggest issue for me personally was the camera where the processing just really made all these images that should be a lot better just look very shoddy and then when you get into the software emui is not really something that a lot of Western users are going to enjoy that's pretty much just feet long and short of it and then you're able to look at what wow I was actually able to put into the phone all of the hardware the Kira 950 and the great power consumption on here are really the marquee features and they are just barely covering up the flaws of what is ultimately a phone that we still really really enjoy so of course you're going to be paying a very pretty penny for this because it's still a flagship device anywhere between six to eight hundred dollars is what you can find if you are going to import this phone from the other part of the world into the West so it's still a very expensive phone to have and if the power consumption and the long battery life along with the really great performance are really what you're looking for in a phone then this just might be the one that you need to put the money down for just remember you're going to have to put some work in to make it look clean like this or maybe you just put Google now launcher actually I think I'm going to do that right now so as always thank you guys very much for watching and I hope you enjoyed this video review of the Huawei mate 8 like I said before you are able to head on over to Android authority comm to take a look at the written review where you'll also see my camera shots but also you'll see a more comprehensive look on it adding in the two opinions mine and Arab Gandhi's so you can actually click me right now to go straight over there so before you do that however make sure you stay tuned to Android 30 for even more download the Android authority app so that you can get in touch with us in all of the ways that we reach out to you the andr thority podcast the android RDECOM website and forum and of course the YouTube channel here where you can subscribe to our channel if you haven't already and drop us some thumbs up on these videos because we love to see those likes so once you're done with all of that make sure you stick around because we are your source for all things Android