обзор Huawei Ascend Mate

Design and construction

Externally, we are almost a complete copy of the metal phablet HTC One Max, introduced last year. The Taiwanese giant did not become popular, despite its powerful stereo speakers, high-quality materials, sleek design, good hardware, and fingerprint scanner (a first for Android-smartphones from HTC).

Huawei has removed everything unnecessary from the One Max (the speakers that eat up the lion’s share of the front panel workspace, the touch buttons on the body, and the inarticulate ultra-pixel camera), reduced the screen frames, improved the fingerprint scanner, added the actual filling and kept the body materials. That’s roughly how the Mate 7 turned out, and it’s not bad.

Despite the huge 6″ screen, the novelty is compact and comfortable enough even to control with one hand. The rear panel is slightly curved, which has a positive effect on ergonomics. The control elements are all in their places, right under your fingers, you do not have to stretch anywhere. Slots for memory cards and micro-SIM are on the left side, ports 3.5 mm and microUSB, traditionally, on the opposite ends. Fingerprint scanner is located on the back, just under the camera, it is convenient to use with right or left index fingers.

As already mentioned, the smartphone has a very narrow frame (2.9 mm), as a result of which the screen occupies 83% of the front panel. The display itself did not receive the 2K resolution expected by many, but there is not much need for it. The screen in the Mate 7 is excellent (JDI IPS without an air layer, 1500:1 contrast, Gorilla Glass 3 protection), with high-quality color rendering, maximum viewing angles without strong inversion, and the image does not seem grainy at all (dot density is 368 ppi).

The use of 2K resolution, of course, would have added points to the Chinese brand among enthusiastic fans of the highest technology, but it would have had to pay the price of operating time and performance, plus such screens themselves are not yet fully optimized and can not always match the quality of excellent Full HD panels.

There were no complaints about the build quality of the device (a couple of small roughnesses will probably be corrected by the release, after the production), the device feels expensive and impressive. Silver metal case is quite dirty and not bad collects dust and dirt, but a quality branded tight magnetic case with a large window for clock and player, trimmed with leather, will perfectly cope with all the troubles. If the issue of preservation of appearance is very acute, this case is recommended to purchase.

Software

The tablet phone received an updated interface Emotion UI 3.0, which absorbed the best practices of many competitors. The appearance of the shell is a mixture of Android L and Material Design concept from iOS 7/8 (Huawei prudently redrawn the control buttons for the future version of Android, for which we can only praise them).

When headphones are connected, an auxiliary mode “More comfortable with headphones” is activated in the status bar, offering appropriate applications for this scenario (the same appeared a few years ago in TouchWiz by Samsung). The status bar itself is divided into a tab of notifications and controls, and the display of notifications is clearly borrowed from another Chinese tablet phone Vivo Xplay 3s with the Funtouch OS shell and Timeline interface, adjusting to the specific time of day.

The design is similar, but the idea is completely different. In the settings you can find the choice of the appearance of the row of on-screen buttons (and this was already in LG devices). The most unexpected borrowing was the analog of the Spotlight device memory search from iOS, activated in exactly the same way as in iOS 7/8 – swipe down from the center of the screen.

All branded applications and settings have been redesigned in accordance with the new appearance of the shell, it became much more pleasant to use them. Loncher received the possibility to choose the grid of icons from three options (4×4, 5×4 and 5×5), which will be useful for those who want to get more useful space on the big screen.

The fingerprint scanner allows you to use the data not only to unlock the device, but also to access the personal data section, locked applications, Huawei account. A total of 5 fingers can be registered, and side touches are also recognized. We can say that the implementation of this function is similar to iOS and iPhone 5s, only it has a scanner on the front panel in the Home button.

In the case of the Mate 7, the location of the scanner does not cause any problems, and all because the speed and accuracy of touch processing (namely light touches, not swipes and friction) is maximum and comparable to the child of Apple. Another point worthy of praise. By the way, just like Apple, all scanning data is stored in encrypted form inside the “iron” of the smartphone and is not sent anywhere.