Huawei Mate S is the flagship device of Huawei which they launched few months back. It comes with a premium design and high-end hardware specs along with some fancy features like Force Touch and fingerprint scanner.
I was trying my hands on the device since last few weeks and now I am going to share the detailed review of the device and my experience of using it with you all Geeky Stuffs readers.
This review is divided in multiple section considering the pros and cons of each of them. Have a look on the detailed hands-on review of Huawei Mate S below.
Huawei Mate S comes in a big, black and beautiful retail box . Inside the retail box you will find the handset, a USB cable, set of earphones, charger and user manuals. The retail box also comes with a beautiful and good quality Huawei flip cover for Mate S.
You can have a look on the Huawei Mate S unboxing video below.
Huawei Mate S comes with Huawei’s indigenous HiSilicon Kirin 935 octa-core processor out of which four cores are clocked at 2.2 GHz and remaining four are clocked at 1.5 Ghz along with the Mali-T628 MP4 GPU and 3GB of RAM.
There are three versions of Huawei Mate S based on the internal memory internal memory – 32 GB, 64 GB and 128 GB. The one we got for our review is the 64 GB version which is also expandable up to 128 GB using the microSD card. And the Force Touch feature is available only on the 128 GB version of the Huawei Mate S.
The sensors provided in this device are fingerprint scanner, accelerometer, gyro, proximity sensor, magnetic compass and all of them are very responsive. But being a high-end premium device, it still lacks the heart rate sensor and pedometer app that was available in Huawei Ascend Mate 7.
The performance of the hardware and all sensors of Huawei Mate S are pretty good. You can watch our benchmarking tests in which Huawei Mate S scored equivalent to the many high-end smartphones of other brands, most of the time pretty equivalent to Nexus 6. Overall performance of the device is nice and you will not feel any kind of lag or any issues while using the device heavily and playing high-end games.
Huawei Mate S runs on the Android v 5.1.1 Lolipop OS and planned to receive the Android 6.0 Marshmallow update. It comes with the Huawei EMUI 3.1 which is feature rich UI and also very less resource hungry. For most of the task, you will find the feature in-built in the Huawei Mate S UI which is useful as you will not need to download the third party apps.
On the connectivity side, we got the 4G LTE connectivity, NFC and Bluetooth v4.0 with A2DP. It lacks the Infrared port though. There are two SIM slots provided in this device and SIM 2 slot can be used as the memory card slot too. So if you are looking for a dual-SIM smartphone with a separate memory card slot then, you can reject the Huawei Mate S but if you buy the 64 or 128 GB version of Huawei Mate S then, you will not feel the need of the memory card.
When it comes to the design, Huawei Mate S sports a premium one. We got the Luxurious Gold version of the Huawei Mate S which looks expensive and premium from every angle. Huawei Mate S is just 7.2 mm thick and the screen-to-body ratio is around 74% which makes it compact even with a screen size of 5.5 inches.
The primary camera is given on the top left corner along with the dual tone-dual LED. Huawei logo is given in the middle of the back panel and the back panel is non-removable, so you can’t take the battery out of Huawei Mate S. On the front side, we got the front facing camera coupled with the set of sensors at the top and there is a LED flash provided too for the better selfie shots.
3.5 mm audio jack and a microphone are given at the top of the device and USB port is given along with the speaker at the bottom of the device. You will find that there two grills for the speaker but it is just to for the sake of design and only one of them got the speaker which is pretty disappointing. But good thing is that Huawei improved the design this time and placed the speaker on the right grill. So the problem we faced of covering the speaker with Huawei P8 while playing the games is solved in Huawei Mate S.
Power key and volume rockers are given on the right side of the device and there is SIM card slot on the left. Power key got nice texture which looks pretty good. The SIM 2 card sot can be used as the memory card slot as well. The edges are curved smoothly and feel pretty good in hand.
From the back side, Huawei Mate S look very much like the Ascend Mate 7 but from the front side it is different. Overall the design of Huawei Mate S is really nice, elegant and beautiful.Though Huawei Mate S is not officially water resistant, we tried a running water test on our Huawei Mate S and it performed pretty good in that. You can watch the Huawei Mate S water test video below.
Huawei Mate S sports a 5.5 inches screen with 1080 x 1920 pixels resolutions which provides you 401 PPI pixel density. Since the navigation keys are provided on screen, it occupies a part of the screen and reduces the effective size. The screen-to-body ratio we get on Huawei P8 is 73.9% which is really good. The bezel is very thin and comes with the 2.5D curved screen which gives the beautiful look to the device too.
The screen is upgraded to AMOLED from the IPS-NEO LCD display of Huawei P8 and produces much better results in terms of display. The AMOLED display is very bright and the viewing angles and sunlight readability is impressive as well.
Huawei Mate S screen is protected by the Corning Gorilla Glass 4 which performs really nice to save the screen from scratches and minor damages. You can have a look on our Knife Scratch Test video of Huawei Mate S below.
Since the fingerprint scanner of Huawei Mate S is a multipurpose part of the device, we are talking about it a separate section here. The fingerprint scanner of the Huawei Mate S is one of the best and fastest among all other smartphones and the accuracy is also at highest level. It recognizes the fingerprint accurately every time and unlocks the device in a blink of the eye.
Other than the security feature, you can use the fingerprint scanner to scroll the images in the gallery, to quickly access the notification panel and quick-toggle section. You can also turn off the alarms and answer the call by using the fingerprint scanner on Huawei Mate S.
Huawei Mate S comes with the exact same camera like the one in Huawei P8. It sports a 13 MP primary camera which is capable of recording full HD videos. It is disappointing that a flagship and premium device lacks the 4K video recording. But this missing feature is compensated by providing more features, specially a great performing Pro mode.
The features which are included in the camera of Huawei P8 are Pro mode, Optical Image Stabilization (OIS), Dual-LED (dual tone) flash, Timelapse, Light Painting, HDR, Time Lapse, Super Night mode, Watermark, Best Photo, Audio Note and All Focus.
Pro mode in Huawei Mate S camera let you change the settings manually for the brightness, ISO levels, shooting mode etc. There also manual focus provided like the Lumia Camera app and user can select the shutter speed as high as 8 seconds which is really good for pro photography.
Light Painting is one of the highlighted feature of Huawei Mate S camera as it is having multiple modes depending on the kind of light painting you want to do. So, you do not need to go all pro and use the manual settings for the light painting on P8 and you can take them instantly just by selecting the right mode. All Focus mode is like the popular Lumia Refocus app which let you adjust the focus on the picture after taking it.
The front facing camera is supported by the LED flash to take good quality selfies in the low light situation. You can also manually control the amount of light coming out from the front camera flash which is also pretty impressive feature.
Images coming out from the camera of Huawei Mate S are pretty good in all factors. They are sharp, crisp and with lots of details even in low light condition, thanks to the RGBW sensor. And same goes with the 8 MP front facing camera which is also capable of 1080p full HD video recording and provide really good quality images. But the video quality of the primary camera is not good and lacks the details in it. Also the bitrate of the 1080p video at 30fps is low proving the lower quality video recorded by Huawei Mate S.
Huawei Mate S performs pretty good when it comes to gaming and entertainment but also faces some issues.
Gaming performance of Huawei Mate S is good and you can play most of the high-end games without any kind of lagging or issues. But the GPU used in this device affects the performance a bit for sure. So sometimes you may feel the issue with graphics quality while playing the heavy games but most of the time, it performs smoothly and produces good quality graphics. Specially the 3D graphics rendering was really smooth and fast in our gaming test.
Also as mentioned above, there is only right speaker which works in real. But the sound coming out of it is loud enough to compensate the lacking of dual speakers. Also, the device heats up a bit while playing high-end games. You can watch our detailed gaming performance test of Huawei Mate S to get the better idea.
The default music app of Huawei Mate S is pretty good and provides all the basic features of a nice music player. The device lacks the equalizer settings but let you grab the album art, song details etc. Also, you can select the length of music files of which you would like the songs to be included in the playlists.
The video player of Huawei mate S is pretty basic but supports most of the video formats except the AC3 audio but supports the Dolby Mobile enhancements. The sound quality is really nice, clear and loud enough for the casual smartphone entertainment.
Huawei Mate S comes with a non-removable 2700 mAh battery which performs poorly considering the same amount of battery is used P8 and its performance was good. With normal usage, the battery of Mate S will survive from morning to night and most of the time, you will need to charge it every night.
The main problem we have faced with battery of Huawei Mate S is the software related as the battery percentage changes randomly and sometimes very sharply. Hopefully this issue will be solved and the performance will improve or at least stabilized.
There is also Power Saving modes provided which can be used to improve the battery performance increase the battery life. You can watch our video below about how to improve the battery performance of Huawei Mate S.
Huawei’s EMUI ROM is really a productive and feature rich one. You will find lots of nice and interesting feature for your daily usage and there are few features which are exclusively available on only Mate S among other Huawei phones like Dual Window, Screen Recording etc
There are even four different methods of taking screenshot on it. There are lots of pre-installed aps and built-in features hidden in the settings which are very useful and you can watch our below video to have a look on all of the hidden features, productive and tricks of Huawei Mate S.
Huawei Mate S is a great phone in every aspect. The design is eye catching, build quality is great and very premium. Overall performance of the device is really impressive, though the GPU could be better. Camera performance is nice and it comes with many interesting features though it lacks the 4K video recording. The battery performance is just average and not recommended for a heavy user.
If you are not looking for the 4K video recording, quad-HD screen and can manage with an average performing battery then Huawei Mate S is a must buy device for its nice overall performance and great premium looks.
I was trying my hands on the device since last few weeks and now I am going to share the detailed review of the device and my experience of using it with you all Geeky Stuffs readers.
This review is divided in multiple section considering the pros and cons of each of them. Have a look on the detailed hands-on review of Huawei Mate S below.
Huawei Mate S : Hands-on Review, Features and Specs
Retail Box and Unboxing
Huawei Mate S comes in a big, black and beautiful retail box . Inside the retail box you will find the handset, a USB cable, set of earphones, charger and user manuals. The retail box also comes with a beautiful and good quality Huawei flip cover for Mate S.
You can have a look on the Huawei Mate S unboxing video below.
Hardware Specs and OS
Huawei Mate S comes with Huawei’s indigenous HiSilicon Kirin 935 octa-core processor out of which four cores are clocked at 2.2 GHz and remaining four are clocked at 1.5 Ghz along with the Mali-T628 MP4 GPU and 3GB of RAM.
There are three versions of Huawei Mate S based on the internal memory internal memory – 32 GB, 64 GB and 128 GB. The one we got for our review is the 64 GB version which is also expandable up to 128 GB using the microSD card. And the Force Touch feature is available only on the 128 GB version of the Huawei Mate S.
The sensors provided in this device are fingerprint scanner, accelerometer, gyro, proximity sensor, magnetic compass and all of them are very responsive. But being a high-end premium device, it still lacks the heart rate sensor and pedometer app that was available in Huawei Ascend Mate 7.
The performance of the hardware and all sensors of Huawei Mate S are pretty good. You can watch our benchmarking tests in which Huawei Mate S scored equivalent to the many high-end smartphones of other brands, most of the time pretty equivalent to Nexus 6. Overall performance of the device is nice and you will not feel any kind of lag or any issues while using the device heavily and playing high-end games.
Huawei Mate S runs on the Android v 5.1.1 Lolipop OS and planned to receive the Android 6.0 Marshmallow update. It comes with the Huawei EMUI 3.1 which is feature rich UI and also very less resource hungry. For most of the task, you will find the feature in-built in the Huawei Mate S UI which is useful as you will not need to download the third party apps.
On the connectivity side, we got the 4G LTE connectivity, NFC and Bluetooth v4.0 with A2DP. It lacks the Infrared port though. There are two SIM slots provided in this device and SIM 2 slot can be used as the memory card slot too. So if you are looking for a dual-SIM smartphone with a separate memory card slot then, you can reject the Huawei Mate S but if you buy the 64 or 128 GB version of Huawei Mate S then, you will not feel the need of the memory card.
Design
When it comes to the design, Huawei Mate S sports a premium one. We got the Luxurious Gold version of the Huawei Mate S which looks expensive and premium from every angle. Huawei Mate S is just 7.2 mm thick and the screen-to-body ratio is around 74% which makes it compact even with a screen size of 5.5 inches.
The primary camera is given on the top left corner along with the dual tone-dual LED. Huawei logo is given in the middle of the back panel and the back panel is non-removable, so you can’t take the battery out of Huawei Mate S. On the front side, we got the front facing camera coupled with the set of sensors at the top and there is a LED flash provided too for the better selfie shots.
3.5 mm audio jack and a microphone are given at the top of the device and USB port is given along with the speaker at the bottom of the device. You will find that there two grills for the speaker but it is just to for the sake of design and only one of them got the speaker which is pretty disappointing. But good thing is that Huawei improved the design this time and placed the speaker on the right grill. So the problem we faced of covering the speaker with Huawei P8 while playing the games is solved in Huawei Mate S.
Power key and volume rockers are given on the right side of the device and there is SIM card slot on the left. Power key got nice texture which looks pretty good. The SIM 2 card sot can be used as the memory card slot as well. The edges are curved smoothly and feel pretty good in hand.
From the back side, Huawei Mate S look very much like the Ascend Mate 7 but from the front side it is different. Overall the design of Huawei Mate S is really nice, elegant and beautiful.Though Huawei Mate S is not officially water resistant, we tried a running water test on our Huawei Mate S and it performed pretty good in that. You can watch the Huawei Mate S water test video below.
Screen and Display
Huawei Mate S sports a 5.5 inches screen with 1080 x 1920 pixels resolutions which provides you 401 PPI pixel density. Since the navigation keys are provided on screen, it occupies a part of the screen and reduces the effective size. The screen-to-body ratio we get on Huawei P8 is 73.9% which is really good. The bezel is very thin and comes with the 2.5D curved screen which gives the beautiful look to the device too.
The screen is upgraded to AMOLED from the IPS-NEO LCD display of Huawei P8 and produces much better results in terms of display. The AMOLED display is very bright and the viewing angles and sunlight readability is impressive as well.
Huawei Mate S screen is protected by the Corning Gorilla Glass 4 which performs really nice to save the screen from scratches and minor damages. You can have a look on our Knife Scratch Test video of Huawei Mate S below.
Fingerprint Scanner
Since the fingerprint scanner of Huawei Mate S is a multipurpose part of the device, we are talking about it a separate section here. The fingerprint scanner of the Huawei Mate S is one of the best and fastest among all other smartphones and the accuracy is also at highest level. It recognizes the fingerprint accurately every time and unlocks the device in a blink of the eye.
Other than the security feature, you can use the fingerprint scanner to scroll the images in the gallery, to quickly access the notification panel and quick-toggle section. You can also turn off the alarms and answer the call by using the fingerprint scanner on Huawei Mate S.
Camera and Imaging
Huawei Mate S comes with the exact same camera like the one in Huawei P8. It sports a 13 MP primary camera which is capable of recording full HD videos. It is disappointing that a flagship and premium device lacks the 4K video recording. But this missing feature is compensated by providing more features, specially a great performing Pro mode.
The features which are included in the camera of Huawei P8 are Pro mode, Optical Image Stabilization (OIS), Dual-LED (dual tone) flash, Timelapse, Light Painting, HDR, Time Lapse, Super Night mode, Watermark, Best Photo, Audio Note and All Focus.
Pro mode in Huawei Mate S camera let you change the settings manually for the brightness, ISO levels, shooting mode etc. There also manual focus provided like the Lumia Camera app and user can select the shutter speed as high as 8 seconds which is really good for pro photography.
Light Painting is one of the highlighted feature of Huawei Mate S camera as it is having multiple modes depending on the kind of light painting you want to do. So, you do not need to go all pro and use the manual settings for the light painting on P8 and you can take them instantly just by selecting the right mode. All Focus mode is like the popular Lumia Refocus app which let you adjust the focus on the picture after taking it.
The front facing camera is supported by the LED flash to take good quality selfies in the low light situation. You can also manually control the amount of light coming out from the front camera flash which is also pretty impressive feature.
Images coming out from the camera of Huawei Mate S are pretty good in all factors. They are sharp, crisp and with lots of details even in low light condition, thanks to the RGBW sensor. And same goes with the 8 MP front facing camera which is also capable of 1080p full HD video recording and provide really good quality images. But the video quality of the primary camera is not good and lacks the details in it. Also the bitrate of the 1080p video at 30fps is low proving the lower quality video recorded by Huawei Mate S.
Entertainment and Gaming
Huawei Mate S performs pretty good when it comes to gaming and entertainment but also faces some issues.
Gaming performance of Huawei Mate S is good and you can play most of the high-end games without any kind of lagging or issues. But the GPU used in this device affects the performance a bit for sure. So sometimes you may feel the issue with graphics quality while playing the heavy games but most of the time, it performs smoothly and produces good quality graphics. Specially the 3D graphics rendering was really smooth and fast in our gaming test.
Also as mentioned above, there is only right speaker which works in real. But the sound coming out of it is loud enough to compensate the lacking of dual speakers. Also, the device heats up a bit while playing high-end games. You can watch our detailed gaming performance test of Huawei Mate S to get the better idea.
The default music app of Huawei Mate S is pretty good and provides all the basic features of a nice music player. The device lacks the equalizer settings but let you grab the album art, song details etc. Also, you can select the length of music files of which you would like the songs to be included in the playlists.
The video player of Huawei mate S is pretty basic but supports most of the video formats except the AC3 audio but supports the Dolby Mobile enhancements. The sound quality is really nice, clear and loud enough for the casual smartphone entertainment.
Battery Performance
Huawei Mate S comes with a non-removable 2700 mAh battery which performs poorly considering the same amount of battery is used P8 and its performance was good. With normal usage, the battery of Mate S will survive from morning to night and most of the time, you will need to charge it every night.
The main problem we have faced with battery of Huawei Mate S is the software related as the battery percentage changes randomly and sometimes very sharply. Hopefully this issue will be solved and the performance will improve or at least stabilized.
There is also Power Saving modes provided which can be used to improve the battery performance increase the battery life. You can watch our video below about how to improve the battery performance of Huawei Mate S.
Productivity
Huawei’s EMUI ROM is really a productive and feature rich one. You will find lots of nice and interesting feature for your daily usage and there are few features which are exclusively available on only Mate S among other Huawei phones like Dual Window, Screen Recording etc
There are even four different methods of taking screenshot on it. There are lots of pre-installed aps and built-in features hidden in the settings which are very useful and you can watch our below video to have a look on all of the hidden features, productive and tricks of Huawei Mate S.
Conclusion
Huawei Mate S is a great phone in every aspect. The design is eye catching, build quality is great and very premium. Overall performance of the device is really impressive, though the GPU could be better. Camera performance is nice and it comes with many interesting features though it lacks the 4K video recording. The battery performance is just average and not recommended for a heavy user.
If you are not looking for the 4K video recording, quad-HD screen and can manage with an average performing battery then Huawei Mate S is a must buy device for its nice overall performance and great premium looks.