[rwp-review id=”0″]
While the iPhone has recently been playing catch up with some Android phones in terms of features and sizes, some Android phone makers have been playing catch up with the iPhone in a very important department, quality of build and design.
Huawei has recently been making some of the sexiest hardware out there with their Mate and Honor series. This has been crowned with Huawei’s partnership with Google in producing the critically acclaimed, Google Nexus 6P.
The Mate S is Huawei’s flagship smartphone and belongs to this sexy slew of products, and it’s our assessment that it’s a force to reckon with. Here’s our review of it.
Design
Our first impression when we opened that box was “wow”! This is one sexy device!
Its design isn’t revolutionary by any means, but it does tick lots of boxes and is very easy on the eye.
The Mate S’ 156g body is made entirely from metal, save for two strips allowing the antenna to do its business and obviously the Gorilla Glass 4 display. It comes in 3 colors, the Luxurious Gold (review unit), Mystic Champaign and Titanium Grey.
The Mate S has a 5.5” AMOLED FHD screen that allows multiple ways of touching, more on that later.
It also has a fingerprint sensor sitting on the back right under the 13MP shooter.
Some of the most notable features the Mate S has is dual SIM slot and a dedicated flash for the front camera. While the back cover isn’t removable and the battery isn’t changeable, it does have room for a micro-SD card.
The device is beautifully designed all around, it has some of the best design features from some of the most beautifully designed smartphones, taking queues from HTC, iPhone and the Note 5. The build looks and feels premium all around with a slight curve on the back to make handling the phone ever so natural to hold.
Hardware, Performance & Battery
The Mate S comes in a 64-bit Quad-core 2.2 GHz processor and 3GB of RAM with a variation of 32/64/128GB memory options.
The device performed flawlessly in every turn, we experienced zero lagging in any functionality across the board. It scored 47251 on the Antutu Benchmark 64-bit test, which puts it at a pretty low ranking among the rest of the powerhouses. That said, we noticed no issues in our day to day usage of the phone and it still performs admirably and on par with some of the best smartphones out there.
The almost flawless performance also applies to the fingerprint sensor, which is extremely quick in recognizing your finger from almost any angle. The positioning of the scanner makes it easy for the user to unlock the phone using the index finger, which naturally rests at that spot. I saw almost because it detects your fingerprint about 98% of the time, with a super high possibility of detecting it at the 2nd or 3rd try max. You’ll find that this is so quick that it doesn’t take longer to unlock the phone using any other method such as pin, pattern or password.
I used the phone for a couple of weeks and when I went back to my Galaxy S6 Edge I found myself reach out with my index finger to unlock the phone. You can get used to it quite fast.
One neat feature the fingerprint sensor has is the ability to swipe your index finger across it to perform some functions. While your display is one, swipe your finger down on the sensor and the notifications panel comes down, slide it up and it goes back up again. Double tap while its down and your notifications get cleared.
You can also use it to swipe through pictures and videos in your gallery. I found this to be quite practical as it comes so naturally to the user experience. Take your current phone, flip it sideways as if you’re watching a video or going through some pictures, notice where your index finger is naturally rested, voila!
The Mate S boasts a 2700 mAh non-removable battery, which lasted me well into one full day of average usage with some to spare. One thing that helps in this department is Huawei’s own built in battery and performance optimization tool, more on that in the software section of the review.
Software
The Mate S comes with Android 5.1.1 Lollipop, upgradable to 6.0 Marshmallow. The Android experience here is masked by Huawei’s own proprietary overlay, called Emotion.
I, personally, am I big fan of the pure (vanilla) Android experience. That said, as far as skins go, Huawei’s is in my top 5 list of likable Android skins.
Huawei’s Emotion doesn’t have an app drawer like most Android phones do, instead you just roll over through the pages going through all your apps…iPhone style. If you’re someone who’s switching from the iPhone (I don’t know many who do), you’ll find that part of the experience quite similar to your old one. However, if you’re an avid Android user, you might find it odd to deal with as you’ll need to keep those pages organized to avoid cluttering them with apps.
Huawei’s software experience is also one of the most customizable. With options to change how the home screens transition, how the layout of the back/home/multitasking buttons should be, the shade/warmth of white the display operates with and a Theme store with hundreds of free themes to choose from, the Huawei is one of the most versatile and customizable smartphones out there from a software perspective, making full use of one of the features I like most about Android, customizability.
Of course, with all that said, if the pure Android experience is what you like most, you can always download Google’s very own ‘Google Now’ launcher, which gives you that experience to a great extent.
Huawei’s high-end phones come with Phone Manager, which is your one stop shop to optimizing your phone’s battery life and overall performance.
The app is continuously running in the background (could be disabled) checking which apps are taking up lots of your processing or battery power and notifying you of them so you can make a conscious choice to keep or kill them.
You can also manually go to the app and perform a quick scan on the device which comes back to you with recommendations on how it could improve things. Recommendations include options like killing some background apps, dumping lingering cache memory and closing unwanted processes.
The Phone Manager is very easy to use and looks quite cool. I found myself coming back to it every once in a while to clean things up. Check the video in the display section for a quick rundown of the software.
Camera
The Huawei Mate S comes with a primary 13MP shooter capable of shooting images with up to 4128×3096 pixels resolution, with optical image stabilization, dual-LED (dual tone) flash and HDR+ shooting capability. In terms of capabilities, this phone’s camera is a beast!
The front camera is 8MP (remember when the primary camera was 8MP?!) with its own LED front flash as mentioned earlier. The front camera can be used together with a built-in Mirror app, which allows you to turn the flash on/off and control how bright you want it to be. It also allows you to zoom in if you want to focus on a certain part of your face (or whatever part of your body you’re checking out!). This may probably come in handy for the ladies when they’re putting their make up on or touching it up.
I found the camera to be quite good, but not good enough when compared to Samsung’s S6/Edge, Note 5 and the iPhone 6 series. The colors seem to be a bit washed out and the standard night photography isn’t that impressive. That said, it is still better than many others out there by leaps and bounds. Below is a comparison of the same shot taken by the Samsung S6 Edge and the Huawei Mate S, followed by a timelapse video taken by the Mate S, showcasing both the high quality it captures in timelapse mode and its OIS (Optical Image Stabilization), which works beautifully.
The camera comes with a special mode called ‘Light Painting’. It takes pictures at long exposure allowing the subject to trace a light source (writing or drawing something). Under Light Painting you have four options to choose from: Tail light trails, Light graffiti, Silky water, Star track. All are pretty much self explanatory from their names. The only downside of this innovative mode is that the phone needs to super still when taking any of these formats. Which means you’ll have to use a tripod fitted with a smartphone holder or any other stabilizing means.
Display
The Mate S’ AMOLED 5.5” 1920×1080 display covers the front of the phone in almost its entirety. The side bezel is almost non-existent, giving you the feeling that the display literally stretches from side to side.
While the resolution isn’t on par with some of the big flagships out there like the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and LG G4, it’s good enough for the human eye with no noticeable pixilation at all. As AMOLED displays go, the colors are vivid and bright with no deterioration in experience when in direct sun light.
One of the most notable features of the display is its 2.5D aspect. It allows for different types of interactions depending on how you touch the screen, and you long you press.
Similar to the iPhone, the Mate S has a force touch capability as well providing contextual menus and options depending on where you are and what you’re ‘force touching’. The tactile feedback isn’t as immersive a the iPhones though as it’s a mere slight vibration that you feel, similar to the one you’d feel if you touch the back button or any standard haptic feedback-enabled action.
While the tactile feedback isn’t the most sophisticated, the force touch feature does provide an array of extended functionality and practicality once you get used to remembering that it’s there to begin with.
Another interesting feature the display has, which is not an imitation to anything I’ve seen out there, is the Knuckle Gestures!
Basically, knock with your knuckles once and it takes a screenshot, knock twice and you can record actions taken on the screen. We found the latter to be very useful for this review as seen in the video below.
Moreover, you can also set a number of gestures (drawings) that act like shortcuts to access certain apps/functions of the phone straight from the lock screen, it’s called Draw in the settings under Motion Control. For example, draw, with your knuckle, a C on the lock screen while the phone display is off and the camera launches straight away, pretty fast too. Draw an E and the native browser launches, and so on. These are customizable and apps.
The only downside to Draw is that apart from the camera, all other apps require you to unlock the phone once the drawing is made if you have any form of lock enabled (pin, password, pattern, etc).
Conclusion
The Huawei Mate S is definitely a force to reckon with. This is one beautiful, well-rounded, feature packed and well-performing smartphone.
It is clear that Huawei has thought this one out really well and paid lots of attention to detail on both functional and design levels.
The display doesn’t have the highest resolution out there, though that’ not noticeable at all to the naked eye.
The Huawei Mate S is a massive contender to the phablet category and it is our recommendation that you seriously consider checking it out before making your decision when purchasing a new phone. It ticks all the boxes and comes at a highly competitive price.
