Straight from the Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer Huawei comes the latest smartphone model – Huawei Mate S – that brings more than just great functionality, a large 5.5” AMOLED display and sleek design; it is, as a matter of fact, the host of the Force Touch technology that you might have heard of before as being used by Apple in several of their products.

The Huawei Mate S is a successor of Huawei Ascend Mate 7 that brought the 360 degree fingerprint sensor to the series and this time around it takes it up a notch. With great incorporated utilities, a great design that will possibly take you back to the HTC One series as its source of inspiration and the hardware to back it all up – the Huawei Mate S packs everything that you would ever wish for in a smartphone destined for the European and American markets.

Taking into consideration the hardware specs that it comes with and the price range that the Huawei Mate S falls into, the model is a bold release on the smartphone market – considering that it would be competing with phones such as Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and Nexus 6P. Let’s see if the Mate S has what it takes to be considered a worthy opponent on the telecommunications equipment market of late 2015.

Huawei Mate S Design

Even from the first look, the design of the Huawei Mate S is undoubtedly elegant and brought to the highest western standards – coming with an extremely thin all-metal frame that despite its pretty impressive size only makes up for a 156 gram phone. Size-wise, it’s narrower and shorter than the iPhone 6 Plus even if the screen size of both models is the exact same, summing it up to a 73.9% screen to body ratio.

The sharp diamond-cut sides however are not the most comfortable aspect of the frame in spite of the visual effect on the model, having elicited a number of groans from several users. On the other hand, the curved edges and phone rear help alleviate the grip issue, giving the Mate S a good feel when held in one hand.

The phone has its headphone jack questionably placed on its top along with a microphone, leaving the bottom to house the unfortunately only mediocre speaker.

But while that might be a downside of the Mate S, the haunting problem of antenna lines on smartphones was heavily discussed even during the first showcasing of the phone and improved on: this particular model was designed to only need 2 antenna strips, built thinner than previous or competitor models (only 1.5mm thick in comparison to iPhone 6’s 2mm) but also less visible and aesthetically irritating.

The Huawei Mate S was made available in 4 different color versions – Titanium Grey, Luxurious Gold, Mystic Champagne and Rose Gold – allowing the sleek exterior design to appeal to any taste.

Huawei Mate S Display

As mentioned before, the Mate S has a display as large as the popular iPhone 6 Plus – 5.5 inches to be precise. Here, the Chinese model falls behind its other top-end competitor handsets of the year; instead of the quad-HD panels that most of those smartphones come with, the Huawei Mate S limits itself to a 1080p display.

That’s certainly no reason to be disheartened however, as the on-screen images are still crisp and particularly detailed, with a highly-varied color range and decent contrast. The AMOLED technology helps the display produce adequately bright images that are visible even in sunlight. However it suffers a small bit on over-saturation of some colors.

It’s fairly important to mention a setting that the phone comes with – it allows you to change the screen temperature higher or lower, customizing the palette to your liking. Lastly, the panel is covered with a layer of Gorilla Glass 4 that allows great viewing angles and no gap whatsoever between the actual display and the cover. The screen has a 1920 x 1080 resolution meaning that you end up with a 401 ppi pixel density – on par with the iPhone 6.

The great new feature that is incorporated in the Huawei Mate S is – as previously mentioned – the Force Touch technology. Long story short, the Force Touch is a new feature that detects the amount of pressure you apply to the screen through force sensors and provides different effects.

Even though the effects in question revolve around zooming in on images and previewing larger thumbnails, the Force Touch feature is still in its incipient stages of development meaning that there’s a limited functionality to actually making use of it. But it’s fairly certain that in the near future, when app developers shift their attention towards this sector of technology the feature will gain more and more applicability. Sure, there’s that one application that allows you to weigh objects by placing them on the screen that was showcased during the phone’s presentation but that only earns you so much.

The bad news however, is that Force Touch technology is currently only included in the 128GB version of the phone, and not on its smaller 32 and 64GB brothers respectively. Overall, the Force Touch does only currently come as a luxury feature that you probably won’t get as much as you expect from and should be taken as such.

Huawei Mate S Specs & Features

Also present in its predecessor, the Huawei Ascend Mate 7, one of the most worthwhile features to talk about is the fingerprint sensor placed on the back of the device. The company has claimed that having the sensor on the back is more convenient given the way you’re normally holding your phone and gave it several functionalities to make your smartphone operating life easier. You can tap it to trigger the camera shutter when trying to take selfies, and swiping on it in different directions can either allow you to access the notification center or navigate your photo gallery for example.

In comparison to the Ascend Mate 7, the fingerprint recognition on the Mate S has dramatically improved in both speed and sensitivity. Issues that so many other devices have with fingerprint recognition such as it being sluggish or downright unresponsive when your hands are sweaty are close to inexistent here.

In matters of hardware, the Huawei Mate S packs a Hisilicon Kirin 935 octa-core processor – meaning it is comprised of two separate quad-core processors: a 2.2Ghz and a 1.5Ghz processor respectively. Along with the octa-core processor, you get the Mali T628 MP4 graphics processing unit which, while a couple of steps behind the Adreno 330 GPU that most of the top-end smartphones of the market make use of nowadays, can still hold its own fairly well with most, if not all games and mobile apps out there.

As a further compliment to the hardware specifications of the Mate S, you get no less than 3 GB of RAM memory. With this entire arsenal of medium to high end technology, the smartphone runs exceptionally well in nearly anything you choose to have it running.

The Mate S has nearly everything you would ever wish for in terms of connectivity – hotspot, Bluetooth and even near-field communication though the latter may be limited with devices from different manufacturers of course. The phone also has a great amount of support for photo, video and document editing.

On top of that, the Huawei Mate S packs three microphones meant to be used with its smart directional algorithm for directional audio recording. In a more user-friendly way of saying it, that means that recording is greatly improved on this model, allowing you to cut background noise as well as either automatically or manually detect audio sources to focus on – making it a great device to use as an audio recorder for interviews and such.

Huawei Mate S Camera

Like any other high-end smartphone on nowadays’ market, the Mate S graces us with two cameras – both front and rear. The rear presents a 13MP 4128 x 3096 pixel camera gifted with a four-color RGBW sensor; this is one of the features that the manufacturer proudly presented as being an addition to what other competitor smartphones have to offer when it comes to capturing vibrant photos.

To make things even better, the camera also packs a 1.2 degree optical image stabilization that helps remove shakiness from both image and video captured using the Mate S. The developers have certainly given the development of the camera a lot of thought and effort as they also implemented a color temperature LED flash with it; its purpose is to reduce the flash-generated tinge that most smartphones struggle with when capturing photos in various circumstances.

Furthermore, in terms of protection, the rear camera is covered with the same sapphire glass that is used in the Apple Watch, making it particularly durable.

The front camera has had plenty of attention given to it too, featuring a fully-optimizable Digital SLR level sensor that can be fiddled with at the fullest using the inbuilt camera app. Selfies can be taken to the next level with no less than 8 megapixels along with the LED flash capability that makes it easier to take shots in dark environments.

Along with the beauty algorithms that you get to set up the first time when you use the front camera – destined to help with improving real-time selfies by giving you brighter eyes and smoother skin – the Mate S is a selfie powerhouse.

Both cameras support video recording in 1080p, maybe slightly disappointing to some users given that the 4k option is always the better one, but under no circumstance greatly inferior to most high-end phones in terms of performance.

Huawei Mate S Battery

The Huawei Mate S comes with a non-removable 3000 mAh power pack. While the non-removable part is not a problem and basically a trend with its own ups and downs, the power of the battery is questionable. On par with the LG G4 but smaller than the ones featured in comparable sized phones, the Mate S battery may prove to not live up to the expectations. Developers promised over a day of usage with a single charge, but results may vary depending on a number of factors. Naturally, under strenuous conditions the phone doesn’t fare that well and sadly doesn’t come remotely close to the “over a day” statement.

On the upside, however, the Huawei Mate S is fast-charging enabled meaning that you can hook it up for 10 to 30 minutes and have it keep going for another few hours. Along with a low power mode setting, the phone can go into a sort of hibernation mode when battery levels are too low for the full feature phone to keep functioning, meaning that you would only have access to calling and texting.

Huawei Mate S Software

The Huawei Mate S runs on the v5.1.1 Android Lollipop operating system and also incorporates the Emotion UI 3.1 feature – a trademark customization layer for all of the Chinese company’s products as a matter of fact. The user interface is made simple to navigate and provides some great usability features to the phone and it takes onto the iOS model of designing operating systems – with an accent on removing the folder and sub-folder clutter, overly complicated settings menu and stuffed UI.

However, this comes at the cost of an inexistent app tray, meaning that all of your apps will rest on your home screen like they normally do on iOS for example, taking a leap away from the things that the regular Android user may be accustomed to. There’s some more customizability available when it comes to themes and icons but that means that you’d be giving up the minimalist and tidy way things look on your regular Android device.

Huawei Mate S Verdict

On paper, the Huawei Mate S makes for a great phone altogether. The close to state-of-art components that it packs may prove to be adequate for some but not enough for others. However, given that the smartphone can be purchased for prices lower than the flagship devices on the market, this could prove to be a worthy purchase in the end.

The phone is beautifully designed and will cater to any of your needs. However, the real downside of the Mate S is that while it does everything wonderfully, it doesn’t exceed any of his competitors in anything; its purpose seems to have been to at least be as good as other smartphones of this caliber.

While one could argue that the Force Touch feature on it could make up for this to some extent, the technology is not yet much of a thing of the present and won’t bring you much consolation at the end of the day.

The Huawei Mate S costs $739 for the 32GB version and $799 for the 64GB variant. There has been no price set for the 128 GB model yet.

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