Best finger-charming metal phone in the market
WHILE HUAWEI HAS ADDED MANY FEATURES, THE GRAPHIC PROCESSOR LACKS POWER
Huawei has focused on the design element heavily and it can be seen on the Mate S smartphone. The aluminium unibody is simple and pure, with its slight curve at the back for extra grip.
The 5.5-inch AMOLED device is powered by home-grown 2.2GHz Hisilicon Kirin 935 octa-core processor, coupled with 3GB of RAM and 64GB of storage capacity. It weighs only 156 grams.
The dual-SIM Full HD device has a pixel per inch density of 401 with Gorilla Glass 4. The second SIM card slot doubles as a microSD card slot.
The Mate S takes several cues from the Honor 7, which is also manufactured by Huawei.
The customised version of Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with its EMUI 3.1 interface includes some key features not found on stock Android devices.
Swiping down from the home screen will take you to the notification centre while swiping right to access a timeline view of all the notifications.
The fingerprint sensor on the back of the device, just below the camera, has many added features. The sensor can be used as a shutter button to take selfies, swiping down will allow access to the notification centre and swiping left to right in the Gallery app will swipe between photos and videos. The fingerprint sensor is very fast and faster than iPhone to unlock the phone.
The device also includes a knuckle touch control 2.0, which can be set up to wake up your phone whenever you tap on it with your knuckle, and you can also use your knuckle to crop photos, any shape, and take screenshots anywhere in the OS. Users can draw gestures on the screen to act shortcut for different apps to open. A tap on the sensor can also be used to snooze your alarm.
The 13MP rear f/2.0 aperture camera with a four-colour (RGBW) sensor helps to capture more vibrant and colourful image. The optical image stabilisation and dual-led flash helps the device to take good nonshaky images.
The rear camera also boasts a digital SLR level sensor within the stock camera app by using the ‘Pro’ mode to adjust the ISO, exposure compensation, exposure time and white balance on a handy onscreen slider wheel. It also has real time black and white filters for more creative shots, as well as the ability to auto-align rectangular objects you shoot from side on so you never have to put up with bad viewing angles.
Dynamic range and colour saturation are good and white balance is reliable. The shots lose some contrast when shooting a scene that has both bright and dark areas.
Swiping from left to right from the camera app gives the Beauty, Photo, Video and Time Lapse modes. Additional modes like Watermarking (date, time and weather), mirror, panorama and audio note are tucked behind an overflow menu.
In daylight conditions, the camera performs as good as a 16MP camera. Low-light performance is pretty good too, because you still get usable results, even though there’s some inevitable noise.
Videos and selfies are both great. The videos can be shot in full HD.
Options and settings
There are a lot of options and settings in addition to the major shooting modes.
The 8MP front camera looks sharper than the competitors. The ‘Beauty’ mode enhances the selfies and an option for a front illuminator to aid with pictures in lowlight.
Regarding connectivity, it has 4G LTE, NFC, GPS, WiFi (b/g/n), Bluetooth.
The 2,700mAh non-removable battery can last up to 15 hours for moderate users and the fast-charging facility can give two hours of talk time on a 10-minute charge. The battery is fairly average. The battery management facility is very good. It gives a notification when an app is eating battery in the background.
It gave 11 hours of 720p MP4 video playback which is not impressive. But many power saving features to extend the battery life.
The real let down is the graphical processor and playing graphic-rich 3D games will let you down. Games like Asphalt 8 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted had dropped frames but less demanding games like Fallout Shelter ran without issue.
Huawei needs to add more power to its graphics processor.
The ‘protected apps’ tool helps users to choose which apps can run when the screen is off: great for saving battery and data as well as networked apps which helps you choose which apps can use mobile data and which ones you want to restrict to WiFi only. It is priced at Dh2,299.