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Maaaaaate. Huawei Mate, to be specific. It comes out next week, it’s freaking enormous and we’ve been hands-on.
The new Huawei Mate is a 6.1-inch monster phone with a bright IPS+ display, powered by Huawei’s own 1.5GHz, quad-core chipset, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage (expandable to 64GB) with an 8-megapixel camera, all powered by a huge 4050mAh battery.
It’s really smooth to use thanks to that quad-core chipset, and it doesn’t feel too massive in your hand, despite the fact that it eclipses the screen on something like the Galaxy Note II.
Huawei has built its own skin on top of Android for the Mate and it’s calling it the Emotion UI.
What Emotion UI does is try to put everything you need all the time in front of you with what the manufacturer is calling the Me widget.
The Me widget is a single customisable panel that lets you put stuff like weather, clock, pictures, music and favourite contacts front and centre.
The Emotion UI, despite the fact that it’s built on top of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, Huawei have built the Mate without an app drawer, so everything is thrown out onto your home screens. Might get a bit messy for those with a whole bunch of apps down the track.
Emotion UI also allows deep customisation of menus, fonts, camera favourites and other stuff, too.
Speaking of the camera, the 8-megapixel shooter comes with a few nifty software features, including subject tracking which is always welcome.
The best part about the device has to be that battery, though. 4050mAh is incredible, and it beats the closest competitor, the Galaxy Note II, by a big margin on battery. The Note II has 3100mAh.
Huawei says that its battery will get you nine days of standby time and two days of usage. That’s pretty impressive for a 6.1-inch, high-res device with a quad-core chipset.
Huawei isn’t ashamed that it’s phone is a “phablet”. It’s designed to straddle the form factor between tablets and smartphones at 6.1-inches.
So how much is all this phablet-y (shudder) goodness? Harvey Norman will be the first retailer stocking it from Monday next week for $429. That also gets you one of the new Boost Mobile starter packs, running on the Telstra network. Here’s everything you need to know about Boost Mobile. That’s great value for a phone like this.
Despite the Boost Mobile inclusions, Huawei probably won’t team up with any carriers to offer the Mate on contract. A shame.
Stay tuned for our full review of the Huawei Mate soon.