Gadgetory

huawei built its big CES announcement on the back of its new flagship smartphone and we're here at CES 2016 to take a look from Las Vegas it's michael fisher with pocket now and this is a quick hands-on with the Huawei mate 8 the mate 8 doesn't exactly represent a big leap and industrial design but considering how impressive the mate family's Hardware has been thus far that's hardly a problem the casing is bead blasted aluminum with chamfered edges the formalist square camera lens and fingerprint scanner replaced with rounded ones the camera is the 16 megapixel Sony IMX 298 backed up by OIS a custom isp for faster focus and processing and flanked on the front side by an 8 megapixel selfie shooter which you can trigger using the fingerprint scanner as a shutter release fingerprint recognition is very fast and quite accurate in our show floor testing and the six inch IPS display is colorful though it's blacks could use some work the phone is powered by a very large 4,000 milliamp hour battery and it feels every inch the powerhouse with a substantial 185 gram mass phablet is kind of a meaningless word these days but if you're going to call anything a phablet this is it the software is traditionally where Huawei has stumbled over the years and the good news here is that it's been thinned out some animations are brief graphics are flat and fairly restrained and the combination of Android marshmallow and emui 4.0 on the new Kirin 950 chipset actually runs quite smoothly not everyone will like the home screen design whose rounded icons and spotlight like search shortcuts still feel derivative of iOS but this isn't a skin that'll make you run screaming either where while way really goes over the top is in these obscure gestures that knocking on the screen knuckle dragging to take screenshots the double knock to capture video the two knuckle tap to crop video there's nothing wrong with adding new interface touches but none of these gestures are intuitive in the slightest there's a substantial learning curve fortunately Huawei distributed review devices to most folks in attendance so we'll be going deeper with the may date in the days ahead in particular we're looking forward to testing the steerable microphones in speakerphone mode scenario detection and the camera and the various shortcuts that can be assigned to the fingerprint sensor m88 isn't scheduled to hit us shores at all but even at 600 or 700 euro unlocked depending on storage there's plenty here to pique the interest of the importer enthusiasts so stay tuned for our full review coming soon at pocket now till next time this has been michael fisher with high auto Houston behind the camera stay tuned for much more from CES 2016 both here on YouTube and at pocketnow.com thanks for watching