An excruciating hour long flight consisting of air sealed peanuts (I still don’t know what these really are)and lightly salted peanuts, and we finally made it to the Huawei Mate 8 launch event at Studio Blue in Johannesburg.
This device takes all the good bits from the Huawei-made Nexus 6P and puts them into a case that’s large – or larger, rather. This device works with an octa-core Kirin 950 processor with four Cortex-A72 and four Cortex-A53 CPU cores and a 6-inch, 1080p display. And it has a very, very good fingerprint scanner on its back. The device has been available to selected service providers and Huawei partners for a few good weeks already, but it officially went on sale with Vodacom today.
My few minutes (read: 16) with the device proved that Huawei listened to their consumers, those half a million plus that cconributed to the sale of the Mate 7 and improved it drastically. Huawei has their own EMUI user interface installed here on top of Android Marshmallow, and it works more or less the same as what you’ve experienced with EMUI before, the one on my Mate 7. It’s a simple UI, looking just a TINY bit different from Android, using Huawei’s own icons and list designs. Basically it’s a well designed skin that you’ll quickly learn to love.
A quick fiddle with the camera seems to be up to snuff when it comes to comparing to the Nexus 6P. It very well should be – if the fingerprint scanner is any indication, this device’s camera might just be the same model inside. Although we’re told the Sony IMX298 is what we’re working with here.
One big difference between this and the Nexus 6P is its use of a micro-USB (read: not Type-C) on its bottom. I’ll be putting this device through our review paces over the next few days and week. If you can’t wait that long you can always pick one up for a recommended R12 999, otherwise stay tuned to see what it’s all about.
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