The Gen XY Lifestyle

Huawei’s Flagship Phone is Worth its Weight in Gold

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It’s never easy to make a classy phone in gold, but Huawei’s Mate S perhaps is one of the rare few to make the cut.

And it’s not hard to see why. The clean-cut bezels catch the light beautifully and draw your eyes to its fine-brushed, curved back. While the design may be a derivative of many ‘classic’ smartphones before it, the Mate S still delivers in that respect, thanks to the combination of considerable restraint (not to overdo things) and fine machining work. The Mate S looks and feels every bit its price tag, and fits the bill as Huawei’s flagship device. And yet, some will argue that the phone suffers from not having an outstanding feature. To an extent they’re not entirely wrong.

For a flagship phone, the processor and graphics unit on the Mate S isn’t quite top tier (Kirin 935 chipset), and lags slightly behind its flagship peers. This is somewhat tempered by the fact that this shortcoming only comes to a head when you put on graphically challenging content like video games. You’ll experience a little sluggishness here and there for the most demanding apps, but in truth it’s really nothing alarming for the average user: the day-to-day experience is pretty flawless, and thanks in part to an adequate 3GB of RAM. It’s only an issue for a very small percentage of apps.

More importantly, you’ll be experiencing a phone that showcases its good side most of the time. The speaker is loud and clear, the fingerprint sensor is blazingly fast and fairly accurate, and the 5.5-inch AMOLED display is pin-sharp and rich in colour. Even the optically-stabilised 13-megapixel rear camera isn’t half bad either. And as a bonus, you get an impressive 8-megapixel camera in front.

Huawei’s choice of going with Full HD, as opposed to 4K display, is an astate one (in my book at least) as 4K is rather redundant on a 5.5-inch device; 4K content is taxing on the phone in terms of battery as well as storage space.

The Mate S uses Huawei’s interpretation of Android, called EMUI. It could well be their interpretation of iOS as well, so well loved is Apple’s ubiquitous OS in China. As such, there is no app drawer, and all apps are laid out a la iOS. Fans of Android’s stock layout will have to do their own tweaks. But for the most part, EMUI is actually pretty slick, and boasts its fair share of nice touches. For example, the notifications screen is well-organised, and actually is quite aesthetically pleasing. Huawei’s attempt at adding novel features like knuckle gestures may sound ill-conceived, but some aspects of it works out better than expected. For example, you can easily a screenshot by simply tapping your knuckle on the screen.

The fingerprint sensor is fast; really fast. Maybe a little too good – I’ve unlocked the phone by accident more times than I’ve cared to; perhaps I’m not used to the placement of the sensor. Give it a go to see if it works for you. But placing the sensor there has its merits; for example it’s an intuitive way to pull down the notifications screen.

Battery life is OK, but its standby battery life is quite good. It’s not as if it does anything significantly different from its peers, it’s just that the power-saving implementation is rather neat. It’s especially useful for those who don’t like to tweak their phones extensively.

The Mate S’s most advanced feature – Force Touch, which is essentially a pressure-sensitive screen – is not likely to be available here. However it’s not a big loss, as it is essentially a novelty. The Force Touch equipped model however, is the only variant that comes with 128GB of built-in storage. Thankfully, the presence of an expandable storage slot renders this moot.

The S$999 price tag places the Mate S in the high end of the smartphone spectrum, and it’s limited to 999 units (gold only) in Singapore. While it has no distinctive flagship feature – or party trick for that matter – but what that money gets you is an impeccably built (and rather pretty) phone with no major weaknesses. Definitely worth a look.

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