Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei yesterday unveiled its flagship smartphone - the Huawei Mate 8 - at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The global launch comes after Huawei announced its smartphone shipments rose 44% in 2015, to 108 million. The company has become the first Chinese handset vendor to ship more than 100 million smartphones annually, defying a market slowdown to challenge leaders such as Samsung and Apple.
The Huawei Mate 8 will be initially available in 30 countries, with SA being one of them. The device will cost R11 000 for 3GB + 32GB and R12 000 for 4GB + 64GB. It is available in four colours - champagne gold, moonlight silver, space gray and mocha brown.
"We're delighted to also announce that from an Eastern and Southern Africa point of view, we're planning to launch the Mate 8 in March this year, at the same time across nearly 20 of all our main African markets such as South Africa, Kenya, Angola, Uganda, Tanzania, Congo, Zambia, Mauritius and many more," says Charlene Munilall, GM at Huawei SA.
Huawei describes the Mate 8 as a productivity-driven device with significantly enhanced power, efficiency and battery life. It adds the Huawei Mate 8 is the ideal smartphone for today's on-the-go professional.
"With the Mate 8, we have delivered a device that meets the needs of a new style of business," says Kevin Ho, president of handset business at Huawei Consumer Business Group.
"With this fast, impeccably designed smartphone, users can work more efficiently and free up valuable time to spend with friends, family and on personal pursuits. The Mate 8 is the ultimate high-end smartphone. It strikes the perfect balance between high performance and long battery life, enabling people to stay connected and be more productive in every facet of their lives."
The Mate 8 is the first smartphone to run the Kirin 950 chipset, with CPU boosting power up 100%, GPU performance up 125%, and power efficiency up 70% compared to the Kirin 925. The device's architecture balances energy efficiency with performance through four A72 2.3GHz processors and four A53 1.8GHz processors.
Equipped with a 4 000mAh high-density battery, the Mate 8 delivers power efficiency, offering over two days of normal usage, says Huawei in a statement. And with rapid charging technology, the phone is able to charge a day's worth of power in just 30 minutes, it adds. The company also claims regular users can go without charging their phone for 2.36 days, and heavy users can go without charging for 1.65 days.
Running on Huawei's EMUI 4.0, based on Android Marshmallow 6.0, the Huawei Mate 8 offers user experience tweaks and improvements, including a built-in automatic defragmentation service that continues optimising system performance. Additionally, the Mate 8 features a split-screen mode that enables enhanced multitasking between apps.
The new smartphone also comes with fingerprint security. The circular fingerprint sensor improves the effective identification area by 10% in comparison with its predecessor. In addition, says Huawei, the fingerprint friction ridge matching has three levels of security, providing a higher level of protection for users. The new sensor design also increases the unlock speed by 100%, it claims.
It comes with a 16MP camera as well as an 8MP front camera. The Mate 8 supports global connectivity and more bands, including four 2G bands, nine 3G bands and 18 4G bands in 217 countries and regions, with 1 334 operator settings.
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