Design and Build Quality
Build Quality and Design
There is no question the Huawei has been working with really good manufacturing team out there and have been making quite competitive designs and with the premium build quality. The Mate 8 is no exception wearing the slim and sturdy outfit. Fully aluminium with matte finish on the back the panel slightly curves from one through the other edge.
Still on the rear, the Mate 8 hosts a bundle of things including the 16 megapixel camera with a prominent hump on the module. Besides, there’s a dual-tone flash. Following the placement of the fingerprint scanner on the wide array of their devices, the company puts it right there below the camera unit in Mate 8.
Huawei’s graphical logo and branding are present at the lower half of the rear side along side the device model and made information.
Top and bottom panels seem to be covered with thin layer of plastic probably to allow antenna signals pass through.
With the aluminium/metal frame on the back and chamfered edges on both the back and front, this thing is really sturdy and give premium feel – well it actually is.
Looking over at the device components, the top side of the Mate 8 hosts 3.5mm audio jack along side a secondary microphone for nose cancellation. While on the bottom of the side you can see duo of the speaker grille, only one of them covers a speaker that is mono. In the middle the micro USB port is provided. On the sides, you can see screws for the assembly.
Volume up/down buttons are on the right side of the Mate 8 with the power key below them. The left side of the phablet hosts the SIM slot which is a Dual-SIM slot and can serve for a micro SD card as well if you give up with one of the two SIM cards. It’s SIM1+SIM2 or it’s SIM1+microSD card. You can’t use all of the three at once.
Let me add here, that it’s a phablet measuring as 80mm wide and 157mm tall with 6 inch display. So you will not be in any luck to hold and operate the phone with single hand – there is a single-handed mode however, unless you have bigger hands. First element is only the size that you will decide over to buy it or not but it’s all about personal preference. So if you like carrying bigger devices than it should not be a trouble for you.
Handling the device doesn’t seem to be so easy due to its slim edges but it does have support for chamfered edges and sharply rounded corners which do not bother at all when fit into the thumb’s base near your palm.
Another element is that picking the device up from the desk is rather easy due to its slightly curved rear panel so that you could be comfortable while picking the device that has its edges up away from the table surface.
In a single statement, Huawei Mate 8 indeed has a high-end quality with components built with precision-machined metal, glass and frame. Labeling it as bigger, doesn’t mean it’s something bad but in its size with 6 inch display, Mate 8 is much compact among competition and have 78% screen-to-body ratio that means it has minimal spared space on the front side and mostly covered by the display.
So visually, Huawei Mate 8 can be said as beautifully stunning design, finished with clean and fine aluminium that is not slippery. Looks heavy but feels lighter than that. But one thing again, Mate 8 is not for average or smaller sized hands.
Display
As Huawei believes that smartphones even with 6 inch displays don’t need the resolution more than FHD. Following their believes – which I guess are alright, Mate 8 is no wonder to have another 1080p display instead of the most competitors offer QHD resolutions on their high-end smartphones. With 1920 x 1080 pixels of resolution Mate 8 still serves at the pixel density of 368PPI which is still above what we know as Retina resolution, a point where human eye can not differentiate at pixel level.
The company prefers providing quality battery life with moderate resolution which is quite right.
The Mate 8 features an IPS-NEO LCD display developed by JDI. It indeed offers deeper blacks but sure not comparable to what we have on OLED displays. However it seems to be better than other IPS displays. Outdoor display performance was pretty nice with Mate 8.
