Huawei Mate S

Huawei has announced its latest smartphone: the Huawei Mate S. It looks gorgeous, and offers some pretty interesting features.

Design

Huawei has concentrated heavily on the design of this handset, which is reflected in its gorgeous metal unibody (dual diamond cut for precision). The phone has a slight curve at the back, which makes using it over long periods of time more comfortable.

Dimensions wise, the Mate S is just 2.65mm at its thinnest point, widening to 7.2mm at the thickest point of the device. It comes in at 149.9x75.3mm, which is surprisingly smaller than the dimensions of the iPhone 6s Plus (158.2x77.9x7.3mm). Why is this surprising? Because the S Mate has the same size display as the iPhone 6s Plus (5.5in), but is smaller, and in our opinion, a lot more comfortable to hold and use.

Huawei wanted to minimise the presence of antenna lines with the Mate S, an issue that all unibody phone manufacturers (including Apple) have to deal with. The antenna lines are the plastic strips that run across the back of many phones including the iPhone 6s, HTC One M9 and Huawei’s own P8. While it’s not currently possible to completely remove these antenna strips as these allow signals to be sent and received by the phone, Huawei has tried its best to minimise their presence.

How? Huawei has designed the Mate S in such a way that it doesn’t require as many antenna strips as other leading smartphones, and the company has managed to make them thinner too, 1.5mm compared to the iPhone 6’s 2mm strips.

Display

The Mate S has a full 1080p HD 5.5in display that looks crisp, clear and bright thanks to a high contrast ratio. It has a pixel density of 401ppi. The Huawei comes with Corning’s 2.5D Gorilla Glass 4 to protect the display.

The 64GB variations offer Force Touch technology, much like that used on the Apple Watch and the iPhone 6s. Its capabilities seem limited at the moment, with Huawei looking for suggestions on how best to implement the technology in future. At present, you can Force Touch a photo to get multi-level photo magnification, plus it can be used to weigh objects by placing them on the screen.

Hardware

Huawei has placed a fingerprint sensor on the back of the device, which the company claims is a lot more convenient than having it on the front of the smartphone. Tapping this will trigger the shutter when taking a selfie, swiping down on the sensor will allow access to the notification center, while swiping from left to right (and vice versa) in the Gallery app will swipe between your various photos and videos.

The Mate S also offers dual-SIM technology, with support for 13 mainstream 4G LTE frequencies that cover Europe, USA and Asia. If you don’t want to use two SIMs at once, the second slot can be used buy a microSD card.

Internally, the Mate S has a Hisilicon Kirin 935 octa-core processor (a Huawei-designed chip), coupled with 3GB of RAM. Alongside the Kirin 935 sits the Mali T628 MP4 GPU.

We ran benchmark tests to see just how well the hardware performs compared to its competitors. In Geekbench 3, the Huawei Mate S scored 778 in single-core and 3265 in multi-core mode, which puts it in line processor-wise with the Galaxy Note 4 and Honor 6 Plus.

We use GFXBench to test the graphical power of the phone, and the results were surprising, though for all the wrong reasons. It scored 5.8fps in Manhattan and 11fps in T-Rex, putting it in line with mid-range smartphones such as the Ulefone BeTouch and the Honor 6 Plus. SunSpider wasn’t much better. We recorded 1448ms, which may sound impressive until you realise that with regards to SunSpider results a lower the score is better.