Huawei reveals the new Mate 8, and no, not the M8

27 Nov 2015

Chinese phone giant Huawei has given us our first look at its new Mate 8, which comes with its brand-spanking new Kirin 950 processor and a name that sounds awfully similar to the HTC One M8.

The Huawei Mate 8 will be the company’s flagship phone when it launches in China in Q1 2016, with much hope pinned on the phone, which will be given its proper debut at CES 2016 in early January.

According to Android Central, the phone will certainly be one of the larger in the market, with a 6in screen and full aluminium casing and, much like the Nexus 6p, it features a fingerprint scanner at the rear of the phone.

While some may be critical that the phone’s screen resolution is just 1080p, the company will hope its new Kirin 950 processor will give it a significant performance boost.

Huawei revealed its new processor earlier this month, in what was described as being a major improvement on the Kirin 930 processor, with the 950 packing an octa-core of four A72 2.3GHz cores and four A53 1.8GHz cores.

As for its battery life, well, it will come in at a rather meaty 4,000mAh, which should put it on a pretty high pedestal compared with many other flagship phones.

On top of this, Huawei said its i5 Intelligent coprocessor is the most powerful one on the market, supporting speech recognition as well as low-power consumption MP3 and navigation.

This will also be Huawei’s first phone to ship with Android 6.0 Marshmallow and its new user interface (UI) dubbed the EMUI 4.0.

As for when we might see the phone launched outside of China, well, they’re keeping quiet about it, but this might be revealed in January at CES 2016, but we do know it will cost the equivalent of $460 in China when it launches.

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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