There's a new flagship phablet on the market and we're pretty sure that everyone will want to get its hands on it. After the enormous success with the Nexus 6X, Huawei continued to work on its line of beautiful smartphones and brought a big phablet with the fastest processor ever, which is superior even to Samsung's Exynos 7420.
Designs and DisplaysThe Mate 8 was released a few days ago and it comes with a metal body, just like its predecessor, but it has almost the same dimensions, only that the bezel is almost nonexistent on the front side. The available colors for the back are Champagne Gold, Moonlight Silver, Space Gray and Mocha Brown and under the rear camera with a circular lens, placed in the center, sits a fingerprint scanner. The phablet is very large, measuring 157.1 x 80.6 x 7.9 mm, and it could have been heavier, but Huawei managed to make it weight 185 grams. The 6-inch IPS-NEO LCD screen extends to the left and right sides, giving the impression that it's larger than in reality. It's crammed with a Full HD resolution, which results in a pixel density of 368ppi, and before you rush to criticize it for not being too sharp, remember that a lower resolution doesn't consume the battery as fast as a QHD resolution.
The Note 5 supports that QHD resolution which we were telling you about, but its screen is smaller at 5.7-inch and indeed, it's very sharp with a pixel density of 518ppi. The images are also more vibrant, because the Samsung used its screen technology, Super AMOLED, but the battery lasts long enough because this technology is shutting off pixels and makes blacks very deep. The Note 5 offers also an S Pen stylus with which you can draw or take notes directly on the screen. As for its design, it comes with a glass back (which was introduced on the Galaxy S6) and a metal frame, and there are four available colors you can choose from: Black Sapphire, Gold Platinum, Silver Titan and White Pearl. The phablet weights 171 grams and its dimensions are 153.2 x 76.1 x 7.6 mm.
HardwareThe Huawei Mate 8 is incredibly fast with its new HiSilicon Kirin 950 octa core processor (built using a 16nm process) which consists of four cores clocked at 2.3GHz and four cores which run at 1.8GHz. The processor is backed by a Mali-T880 MP4 GPU and 3GB of RAM, which is available for the variant with 32GB of storage, but there is also a model with 4GB of RAM, which is coupled with 64GB or 128GB of RAM. You won't be stuck with the internal memories with small capacities, because they can be expanded up to 128GB with a microSD card, but you'll sacrifice the SIM 2 slot.
The Note 5 is limiting you to one of the available internal memories of 32GB and 64GB, which can't be expanded. Inside, it houses a very powerful Exynos 7420 octa core processor clocked at 2.1GHz, which was built using a 14nm process. The processor does a good job, especially because it's coupled with a Mali-T760MP8 GPU, which supports the latest and most complex games, and if it matters, we'll tell you that the device has 4GB of RAM, which boosts the processor's performance.
Cameras and BatteriesThe Mate 8 sports a 16MP main camera with OIS, phase detection autofocus, dual-LED (dual tone) flash and 1/2.8′ sensor size, but it's capable of recording only Full HD videos. The Note 5 has also a 16MP rear camera with OIS, but it supports autofocus, LED flash, 1/2.6′ sensor size, 1.12 µm pixel size and 4K video recording. The front camera of the Mate 8 has a higher resolution of 8MP, beating the 5MP secondary camera of the Note 5.
The Mate 8 is powered by a large non-removable battery of 4000mAh, which will surely prove its value and will convince you that it will last a lot longer than the 3000mAh battery that is found inside the Note 5. Unfortunately, the Huawei Mate 8 doesn't support wireless charging.