$470 Huawei Mate 8, Kirin950 ARM Cortex-A72 Mali-T880 Smartphone

Posted by – December 13, 2015

Here’s the world’s most powerful smartphone, running an Octa-core Hisilicon Kirin950 quad ARM Cortex-A72 and quad ARM Cortex-A53 in big.LITTLE configuration with the ARM Mali-T880 GPU and also an ARM Cortex-M7 for the sensor hub on TSMC 16nm FinFET+ node. With a 1080p 6″ display with 2.5D “elevation”, 4000mAh battery, dual-SIM LTE Cat-6, 32GB/64GB/128GB storage and 3GB/4GB RAM. Now for sale in China starting at $470 for 3GB RAM and 32GB Flash to $570 for 4GB RAM and 64GB Flash. So for about the same price as a Nexus 6P 64GB you get more RAM, more CPU, more GPU (possibly, I didn’t check performance configuration benchmarks), dual-SIM slots, MicroSD card support (you have to choose between MicroSD or the second SIM card in the same slot as far as I understand) also I hear that maybe that the 4GB/64GB version and above have worldwide LTE/HSPA+ bands and are not limited to either European/Asian or US bands (to be confirmed?) possibly that the Camera optics are the same from Sony as in the Nexus 6P, though it records only 1080p video and not 4K and the display is only a 1080p and not 2K. The battery life, usability benchmarks, connectivity speed is to be tested. This might be the best smartphone in the world today. Rumors are that Huawei plans to manufacture at least 1 Million units per month, they plan to overtake the Huawei Mate 7 sales amount that was over 7 million units over the previous year. I think that if Huawei wants to sell 70 million units of this one, they can do it if they price it $100 or $200 lower and make it available everywhere where people demand to buy it. I think that Huawei should use Google Now Nexus Style launcher as default and full Google designed UI instead of EMUI. I wonder if video output such as MHL works to use the powerful processor with an external Laptop Dock or Desktop Dock and I wish that using MicroSD and Dual-sim at the same time was possible. USB Type-C would have been more interesting.