What makes the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 the best tablet-like Android phone we’ve reviewed to date? Here are 7 reasons.
Alora Uy Guerrero and Ramon Lopez | Yahoo
It’s no secret that we’re fans of the P27,890 Huawei Ascend Mate 7 ever since we saw the phone in person about 2 weeks ago. The phone suggests a major leap for the company in terms of product design and engineering.
Add to that a well-placed fingerprint scanner that works as prescribed, a stunning 6-inch IPS display, and high-level specifications, and you have a tempting product based on its hardware alone.
But it doesn’t stop there. The Ascend Mate 7 provides a worthwhile alternative to the most functional mobile interfaces that Android has to offer. This isn’t just Huawei’s best effort to date. This is, in many ways, arguably the best tablet-like Android phone we’ve reviewed.
Here are 7 things that detail that claim.
1. Hardware
Let’s get this out of the way now: The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 in gold sells itself. You can almost hear it scream “premium” the moment you pick it up. It’s one of the most impressively built and styled smartphones we’ve used thus far. In fact, we prefer its high-end aesthetics to the HTC One M8’s, which, until recently, was our daily Android driver.
The phone is mostly made of aluminum alloy and surprisingly feels light in the hand. Even better, it flaunts a near-bezel-less frontage, which puts greater emphasis on the 6-inch IPS display and makes it seem larger than it already is.
To put the Huawei Ascend Mate 7’s minimal screen bezels to perspective, its 83-percent screen-to-body ratio is more than the Samsung Galaxy Note 4’s 80-percent ratio.
The 7.9-mm-thick form factor is also pretty much par for the course for a 2014 flagship smartphone, and combined with a slightly curved, anodized aluminum back, results in a big-screen device that sits more comfortably in the hand than any member of the Galaxy Note family.
2. Fingerprint sensor
Huawei claims that on average, we unlock our devices 110 times daily and, assuming the gadgets are password-protected, spend roughly 11 minutes doing so. Do the math. That’s 67 hours per year, a staggering number of hours spent pressing the power button and keying in security codes.
It’s with that in mind that Huawei says it created an advanced fingerprint scanner and positioned it close to where your index finger naturally rests when holding the Ascend Mate 7 in portrait mode.
The sensor works the same way as Apple’s Touch ID; it can read fingerprints in any direction and can be used to unlock the device and authorize PayPal transactions. That’s beside being able to wake the phone from sleep and take selfies, of course—something that the Touch ID can’t do unless you have a jailbroken iPhone.
Up to 5 fingerprints can be stored in the Huawei Ascend Mate 7, and depending on your needs, you can set up individual profiles for each one.
The best part here is the Huawei’s fingerprint scanner is way more reliable than the sensors found on the HTC One Max and top-end Samsung Galaxy handsets. It gets the job done in a fraction of the time.
3. Display
IPS panels are known for their superb color fidelity and generous viewing angles, and the 6-inch IPS screen fronting the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 is no exception.
Black levels, though not as deep as what you’d find on an OLED, are satisfyingly dark; colors are exceedingly close to natural; and the display is easy to see when you look at it from an angle.
The panel has a high-def resolution of 1080p, which translates to a screen density of 368 pixels per inch. It’s by no means the sharpest in the business, but it does look crisp even from a few inches away, with no jagged lines whatsoever.
As for the elephant in the room: Sure, the Ascend Mate 7 represents the middle ground between the largest phones and the smallest tablets, but we think that’s a concession Huawei made for a tablet-like experience.
And we get it. After weeks of using the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 to browse the Web, catch up on our favorite TV shows, and write articles and respond to emails while in transit, we could hardly bring ourselves to use a smaller handset for the same purpose. The iPhone 6, despite its nearly 5-inch screen size, doesn’t quite compare, though we do use it as our main device because of its cameras and iOS.
4. Performance
Looks are important, but it’s what’s under the hood that really matters as far as Androids go. Thankfully, the Ascend Mate 7 is about as good as it gets. Running the show is a Huawei-made HiSilicon Kirin 925 chip with eight CPU cores, 3GB of RAM, and 32GB of expandable storage.
Of course, there are many factors that add up to a smartphone’s performance, but with an octa-core processor powering the Huawei Ascend Mate 7, speed should be the least of your concerns here.
The handset is responsive and feels smooth when navigating the latest version of Huawei’s Emotion UI on top of Android KitKat 4.4.2. That slick experience extends to synthetic tests, with the Ascend Mate 7 notching an AnTuTu Benchmark score of 43,613, which ranks among the highest we’ve seen from any Android phone.
5. LTE connectivity
The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 has dual-SIM slots and, unlike most of the competition, supports both TDD-LTE and FDD-LTE standards, which is good news for globetrotters who value 4G roaming. Essentially, what that means is you’ll be able to connect to most LTE networks in parts of the world where 4G is available.
The phone is capable of Category 6 LTE data speeds, delivering peak download rates of 300Mbps—assuming your carrier allows it, of course.
The Huawei Ascend Mate 7’s clever dual-antenna-switching technology, on the other hand, brings improved reception, better signal strength, and fewer dropped calls. It works by detecting and automatically choosing the strongest signal source for the transmission or reception of data.
6. EMUI 3.0 OS
Huawei’s EMUI 3.0 user interface is at the core of what makes the Ascend Mate 7 tick—and it’s more than just a complete redesign of a mobile platform that has improved dramatically with each major update.
The aim, Huawei says, is to offer an interface that’s simple yet functional, with no shortage of features and customization options. True enough, EMUI 3.0 does build on the positives of KitKat and moves the Android experience forward in ways that benefit end users.
Virtually every aspect of the OS can be tweaked in the device’s settings—from how colors look on the screen, to how notifications are handled at a particular time of day, to the way apps behave in the background.
Want to prevent certain apps from chewing up your data allowance and sucking down your battery? Fire up the Phone Manager app to blacklist them. Want to keep your private photos and files, um, private? Hide them behind your fingerprint info. Having a hard time navigating the device with one hand? Activating One-hand UI, which uses the phone’s gyroscope to tilt the Dialer app, Swype-based keyboard, and navigation bar toward your fingers, can make your life easier.
The list goes on.
Phone Manager
One-hand UI
7. Battery life
One of the advantages of having a massive footprint and a 6-inch screen is the potential for an equally sizable power source, and Huawei’s latest offering does not disappoint in that respect.
The tablet-grade 4,100mAh battery inside the Ascend Mate 7 easily outclasses the competition in size and delivers surprisingly long usage times for a phone this big.
Our unit had no problems lasting through two full days of moderate-to-heavy usage despite occasionally connecting to LTE networks to send emails and monitor social-media feeds. Most days, we get around 7 hours of screen-on time, a good metric for gauging a mobile device’s battery life. For reference, that’s an hour longer than most Android handsets in the market now.