Huawei Mate S review

The Huawei Mate S might have beaten the iPhone 6S to the punch with its pressure-sensitive force touch technology, but it still has some way to go before it's as useful as Apple's 3D Touch. Yes, you can weigh an orange on the Mate S or anything else up to 400g, but being able to zoom in on photos or magnify images in your gallery preview is hardly as practical, or indeed as exciting, as being able to peek and pop through your emails or access additional app shortcuts from your home screen.

Still, it's probably for the best, as Huawei's force touch technology is only available on the Luxury 128GB edition of the Mate S, which will no doubt cost a lot more than the Standard £420 version reviewed here when it eventually launches in the UK. The Standard and Premium models, on the other hand, have just a regular touchscreen. It's not a huge problem, though, as you're really not missing out on much.

Design

Besides, force touch is probably the least interesting thing about the Mate S. Instead, Huawei strikes again with its top notch design, this time opting for an all metal unibody chassis with dual diamond cut edges. It's a seriously good-looking handset, and its curved back sits very comfortably in the hand.

Likewise, with chamfered edges measuring just 2.65mm at their thinnest point, it gives you plenty of grip to counter its smooth metal rear. Huawei's also said that its new nano-coating technology should give it better protection against rain and sweat, too, giving it an extra layer of durability in addition to its sturdy metal frame.

Fingerprint sensor and KnuckleSense

The Mate S also takes several design cues from the Honor 7, which is also made by Huawei, such as its rear fingerprint sensor. It's extremely quick and can unlock your phone from sleep in little more than a second. However, the sensor isn't just for unlocking your phone. Like the Honor 7, it can also be used to answer calls, stop alarms, swipe through your picture gallery, pull down your notification menu and take photos without having to reach for the onscreen camera button, making it particularly handy for selfie shots. Admittedly, the swiping actions can be a bit fiddly, as it didn't always work first time round, but in most cases, each action worked perfectly fine and it made the phone easier to use single-handedly.

Less useful is Huawei's KnuckleSense technology. I've seen this on previous Huawei and Honor devices, but have never found it to be particularly useful. With KnuckleSense, you can use your knuckles to interact with the screen to take screenshots, cut out shapes to send to your friends, or launch up to four apps by drawing specific letters on the screen (W, E, M and C). You can launch any app of your choice with these letters, but in the time it takes to actually draw them out correctly, you might as well have hit the home button and launching them from your homescreen instead.

Display

With a 5.5in, 1,920x1,080 AMOLED display, the Mate S is quite sizeable, but it's still pretty compact compared to other handsets of this size. Measuring 150x75mm, its overall footprint is almost identical to the LG G4, which is one of the smallest 5.5in handsets currently available. It's a shame Huawei hasn't opted for a 2,560x1,440 resolution to match its LG rival, but the Mate S's AMOLED panel is arguably much more attractive than the G4's IPS display.

With a full 100% coverage of the sRGB colour gamut and perfect 0.00cd/m2 blacks, the Mate S delivers bright, punchy colours that are arguably cleaner and more natural than those on Huawei's Nexus 6P. Likewise, with a contrast ratio of infinity:1 according to our colour calibrator, the Mate S is capable of showing a very high level of detail in even the darkest areas onscreen. The only downside is that it's not very bright, as I measured a peak brightness of just 256.69cd/m2. This is below average for an AMOLED display, so you'll need to keep it on max brightness if you're planning to use it outside.

Performance

Still, Huawei's octa-core, 2.2GHz Kirin 935 processor and 3GB of RAM certainly give the Mate S plenty of raw processing power, and its GeekBench 3 scores put it more or less on par with its Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 rivals. With a single core result of 946 and a multicore score of 3,958, the Mate S performs better than the HTC One M9, LG G4 and even the Sony Xperia Z5, although the latter pulls back in the single core test. It's still not quite enough to catch the coattails of the Samsung Galaxy S6 family, but the Mate S ran Android 5.1.1 beautifully and apps loaded in no time at all.

It's just a shame that, once again, Huawei has skinned the Mate S with the latest version of its Emotion UI rather than stick with plain Android like the Nexus 6P. I'm not a big fan of Huawei's EMUI, as the lack of app tray, poorly designed app icons and distinct settings and notification tabs lacks the simplicity of stock Android and make it a bit of a chore to use every day.

Likewise, the Kirin 935 may have great CPU performance, but its GPU is decidedly poor compared to its Qualcomm-based rivals. With a GFX Bench GL offscreen Manhattan score of just 328 frames (around 5.3fps), the Mate S just isn't built for demanding 3D games. It handled simple games like Threes! and Alphabear perfectly fine, but others such as Hearthstone often struggled to maintain a smooth frame rate during battle animations and dialogue sequences.

Thankfully, its Peacekeeper score of 1,297 meant that web browsing was much smoother, as it was able to handle complex web pages with multiple images, adverts and comments without too much trouble. It stuttered occasionally when scrolling down articles on the Guardian, but nothing too major.

Battery Life

Another relief is that the Mate S's battery life is much better than Huawei's abysmal P8, as its 2,620mAh battery lasted 10h 33m in our continuous video playback test when the screen brightness was set to 170cd/m2. This is much more in keeping with other flagship phones I've tested this year, although it's still a little low compared to the LG G4, which lasted two minutes shy of twelve hours, and the Xperia Z5, which managed 11h 29m. Still, you'll definitely get a day's use out of the Mate S, even if you're a particular heavy media user. 

Camera

As for the camera, this has been practically lifted wholesale from the P8, as it has the same 13-megapixel sensor and four-colour RGBW imaging module with optical image stabilisation. It does, however, get a sapphire glass lens cover for added protection and a new Pro camera mode which lets you customise the ISO, exposure compensation, exposure time and white balance via the onscreen slider wheel. It's rather fussy to control, though, as the slider rarely landed on the setting I wanted, often sliding three settings down rather than stay on the one I was trying to select.

Generally, though, the Mate S can take some fairly decent pictures. Photos weren't quite as sharp as I was hoping, as Huawei's excessive smoothing often erased the finer details of each picture, but colours were rich and accurate and there was a decent level of contrast.

^ Photos look good from a distance, but zoom in and there's a distinct lack of fine detail

Indoor shots were less impressive, though, as these became very overprocessed in lower lighting conditions, and object outlines continued to be a fraction too soft for my liking. The colour temperature was also slightly off when I turned on our external lamp, as whites became very orange and our wooden train track looked very oversaturated. I was able to rectify this somewhat by switching to the Pro mode, but even my best efforts still resulted in a rather pink-looking background.

^ With our external lamp turned on, the Mate S struggled with our white background

^ Turning our lamp off, however, made everything appear very grainy and ridden with noise

Conclusion

Ultimately, though, the Huawei Mate S just doesn't do quite enough to stand out from the rest of its £400 competition. It's beautifully made and has decent performance and battery life, but it's trumped in almost every way by the Samsung Galaxy S6, which now costs just £400 SIM-free or as little as £27.50-per-month on contract. Huawei's Emotion UI is another big turn off, as for me it just makes it very fussy to use on a daily basis. The Galaxy S6, on the other hand, is faster, has a longer-lasting battery, is just as well made and has an infinitely superior camera.