Huawei has unveiled its latest flagship device, Ascend Mate 7 at IFA Berlin last month. Just in case you don’t know, Mate series devices from Huawei are the phablets ─ big screens, more room to play, and could fit in your pockets. The name suggests that may be Mate 7 has a large 7-inch screen, but actually it’s not the case. The company just wants to streamline the naming for all the products launched this year; P7, G7 and Mate 7.
I’ve got the chance to play with this device briefly and it feels great, for some people it might be a big device to hold ─ but for me its not that big. Huawei Pakistan has communicated that Mate 7 is set to launch later this month in Pakistan. A special launch event may be held in Lahore and Huawei will introduce its new brand ambassador(s).
Lets take a quick look at the specs and features of Mate 7, more details and all the pros and cons of this device will be featured in our full review.
The Layout:
Mate 7 packs a 6-inch Full HD display with a rather low pixel density (368ppi), howbeit it looks sharp for a screen this big. The thin bezels around the screen are quite impressive, almost 83% area of the front side is covered by the screen, so you actually get plenty of room to play and at the same time you can easily carry it around.
The well-crafted body of Mate 7 is mostly made of sturdy metal and it is slightly curved at the back, which makes it nice to hold and give it a premium look. This phone will be sold with the choice of black and silver colors, and a premium version will be available in gold.
Mate 7 features a finger print scanner on the rear, the position may feel a little odd but I think it’s quite comfortable to use. You can store up to five prints on this device. It can not only lock the phone but individual apps and files could be locked separately.
The Hardware Inside:
Under the hood, it packs an octa-core Kirin 925 Chipset, made up of 1.8 GHz Cortex-A15 & 1.3 GHz Cortex-A7 quad core processors. It packs 2GB of RAM and 16GB on-board storage (Gold version will have 3GB/32GB). You can also expand the storage with the memory card, interestingly the memory card slot can take a nano-SIM card, which makes it a Dual-SIM phone.
To make the deal even better, both SIMs support 4G and with its Cat 6 capabilities, theoretically Mate 7 can achieve blazing fast 300Mbps speeds.
The Android Flavor:
On software side its runs on the latest, Android 4.4 KitKat along with Huawei’s home baked emotion UI on top of it. During my short hands-on of the device, it feels fluid and much improved from the previous versions. I’m not sure how other apps and resource hungry games would run on this device, but considering the octa-core processor and 2 gigs of RAM, it will do fine. A rumor suggests that Mate 7 will be the first device from Huawei to get Android L update, later this year.
The Snapshot:
Mate 7 lags behind in the megapixel count, the competition has moved up to 16, 20 or even 50 megapixels. However Mate 7 features a 13-megapixel rear camera and 5-megpixel front camera for selfies and video calls. I haven’t tried the camera, but I am hopping that it should be good as P7.
Battery:
To power the big screen and the octa-core chipset it packs a sizable 4100mAh battery. As per company claims it can last for more than 2 days on medium usage. But I think that it may be sufficient for a day and half for most of the users.
Pricing & Availability:
There is no word on pricing, however I suspect that it will be priced around 55-60 thousand rupees. If the company manages to price and market device successfully it can not only give tough competition to Note 4 but it could be a threat for devices having 5 to 5.5-inch screens.
Share your opinion about Mate 7 in the comments section below and feel free to ask any questions.
