Huawei Mate 8 Review: Examining ARM's Cortex-A72 And HiSilicon's Kirin 950

Name: Huawei Mate 8 Android Smartphone
Brand: Huawei

by Dave Altavilla — Tuesday, February 16, 2016, 12:20 PM EDT

Huawei Mate 8 Introduction And Specs

Page 1: Huawei Mate 8 Introduction And Specs

Huawei may not be a household name here in the US, nor does the brand name roll off the tongue easily for many Americans, but you might be surprised to learn that the Chinese networking and telecommunications manufacturer is the 3rd largest smartphone supplier in the world, behind Apple and Samsung. Much of that global market share comes from China, but the company has been making significant inroads here in the US with devices like Google's Nexus 6P, which is a Huawei private labeled device.

Further, like Samsung and Apple, Huawei has access to significant manufacturing capabilities, including their own semiconductor design house called HiSilicon, which is a wholly owned subsidiary. In fact, what's unique about the product we'll be looking at today is that Huawei and HiSilicon are the first manufactures to build an SoC based on ARM Cortex-A72 technology, which is ARM's highest performance 64-bit processor core. HiSilicon's Kirin 950 is an octal-core chip with four ARM A72 cores at 2.3GHz and four ARM A53 cores at 1.8GHz (dubbed the i5 co-processor for sensor processing, etc.) along with an ARM Mali T880 graphics core.

And so, as you'd expect, in addition to how the new Huawei Mate 8 handles and performs as a whole, we were very interested in how the new Kirin 950 system on a chip performs -- and that's exactly what we'll show you on the pages ahead.

Before we dig into the particulars, here's a quick video walk-around of the Mate 8, in live hands-on action...

Huawei Mate 8 (NXT-L29)

Specifications & Features

Size	Height: 157.1mm; Width: 80.6mm; Depth: 7.9mm; Weight: 185g (approx.)
Colors	Moonlight Silver; Space Gray; Champagne Gold; Mocha Brown
Display	6" FHD Screen 1080p (1920 x 1080), 368ppi 16.7M colors, color saturation(NTSC) 95%, High contrast ratio: 1500:1
CPU	HUAWEI Kirin 950 (64-bit,16nm FinFET+), Octa-core (4 x 2.3 GHz A72+ 4 x 1.8 GHz A53) + i5 co-processor
Operating System	Android Marshmallow 6.0 With Emotion UI: EMUI 4.0 Interface
Memory	3GB RAM + 32GB ROM or 4GB RAM + 64GB ROM
Network	4G TDD LTE：Band38/39/40 4G FDD LTE：Band1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/12/17/18/19/20/26 3G UMTS: 800(B6,Japan)/800(B19,Japan) /850/900/AWS/1900/2100MHz (Band6/19/5/8/4/2/1) 2G GSM: SIM1:850/900/1800/1900MHz SIM2:850/900/1800/1900MHz
Dual SIM	Dual SIM Supported
GPS	GPS/A-GPS/Glonass/BDS
Connectivity	Wi-Fi 2.4G/5G, a/b/g/n/ac with Wi-Fi Direct support BT4.2, support BLE MicroUSB (High Speed USB)
Sensors	Fingerprint Sensor, G-Sensor, Gyroscope sensor, Compass, Ambient Light Sensor, Proximity sensor, Hall sensor, Barometer
NFC	NFC supported
Camera	Main camera 16MP, F2.0, OIS (optical image stabilization), BSI CMOS Dual-tone flash, PDAF+CAF auto focus Digital zoom, up to 4x Timelapse recording Photos: max 4608 x 3456 pixels Video recording: 1080p, 60 fps Supports 720P 120FPS Slo-Mo recording Front camera 8MP, F2.4 Photos: max 3264 x 2448 pixels Video recording: 1080p, 30 fps
Battery	4000mAh (typical value)
In the box	Handset; Headset; Charger; USB cable; Quick Start Guide; Safety Information
Pricing	Currently as low as $629 on Amazon

The Mate 8 comes in two base flavors, one with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage and another with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, and a variety of colors including moonlight silver, seen here, space gray, champagne gold, and mocha brown. Unfortunately for now, the device isn’t sold in the US on any major carriers. However, it does have all LTE and UMTS carrier bands supported, and it is unlocked, so any SIM should work in the device.

Other notable standouts for the Mate 8 are Huawei’s EMUI 4.0 interface skinned over Android 6 Marshmallow and the Mate 8’s massive 4000 milliamp hour battery. The former has its pluses and minuses. Regardless, the device is still one of the few smartphones currently, other than pure Nexus devices, with an Android 6 setup, something that even Samsung has just gotten around to for their Galaxy S6 lineup.

Another significant area of concern might be the Mate 8's 6-inch 1080p display, which on the surface might appear to be relatively low-res compared to the 2K to even 4K screens that are showing up in high-end handsets these days. However, as you'll note, this display is capable of reproducing 95% of the NTSC color gamut, which is much wider than the sRGB color space. In short, don't let its resolution fool you, the Mate 8 sports a really nice display, along with virtually off of the latest technologies like 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2, though USB-C didn't make it to the party. Regardless, let's get a closer at the rest of the package look...