Huawei might be not as good in Marketing as Xiaomi, but the Chinese Company keep improving their devices constantly and the Huawei Mate 7 is a truly beautiful gadget.Read our full Hands On Huawei Ascend Mate 7 Review. 

Huawei’s latest phablet the Huawei Ascend Mate 7, shows that Huawei can achieve Top Level hardware and performance to compete with Apple iPhone 6 Plus and Samsung Galaxy Note 4. And while the Ascend Mate still has some room for improvement on OS Site, Huawei secures themselves a firm position in the World Smartphone Race.

Read our Huawei Ascend Mate 7 Review

Huawei Ascend Mate 7

The Ascend P7 Phone showed already what huge potential Huawei has, if they really focus. For sure Huawei took a lot of design inspiration from the Apple iPhone 4 Series, but it was still a very well built and solid phone, much better then most plastic rivals. The big problem with the Ascend P7 was the Software, as one Reviewer said: “it’s nice until you turn it on.” Due to the laggish software the performance gap between Ascend P7 and the competition from Apple and also Xiaomi was very huge.

Now Four Month later, the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 shows the same focus and classy high end materials, while erasing a lot of the previous software problem with Huawei’s new EMUI OS. The Ascend Mate 7 is a huge premium metal phablet, which is roughly the same size as iPhone 6 Plus, but with more Screen estate of half an inch. The Screen of the Ascend Mate 7 is 1080p and not 2K like some of the competitors like the Note 4. At the IFA 2014 Huawei told us that the increased battery usage for 2K screen is just not worth it yet, and we agree with that. The Ascend Mate 7 screen is definitely very good looking and crisp enough.

The Ascend Mate 7, though beautiful, is due to its 6 inch size, still a very big phone. Overall Huawei achieved though to make a device that is just a tad bigger then the Note 4. You get a large screen, huge battery and slim metal body. As the enormous success of the Samsung Note Series showed, huge phones have their benefits. The Ascend Mate 7 is definitely a strong portable tablet, while still fitting your pocket. Especially the extreme strong battery life on the Mate 7 makes it really interesting and a worthy competitor for the Note 4 and other rivals.

Premium High End Quality on all Edges

The Mate 7 is not just compared to older Huawei Models beautiful, its an attractive and high class device in general. The lightly curved metal back blends into plastic sections in top and bottom, you get the impression of a nearly seamless case and design. The Mate 7 definitely can compete with the bigger players, for sure it can compete with the Note 4.

The Rear of the Mate 7 sports one of the best and most surprising features on this Android Phone – the fingerprint scanner on the back of the phone. Huawei does a good job with the fingerprint scanner implementation, much closer to Apple’s Touch ID then other brands like HTC for example. The Sensor is activated by touch, and recognizes your fingerprint in any direction. While its not 100% accurate it comes very closely. Because, similiar to Apple Touch ID, its touch activated and not like Samsung Swipe activated, it feels much more premium.

Ascend Mate 7 Camera

One surprising use of the Fingerprint Scanner is to use as a shutter button. Since its placed on the backside of the Mate 7 we wouldnt recommend it though.

The 13MP Main Camera of the MATE 7 is a very decent camera. In daylight scenes the camera gives us very bright and highly detailed pictures even in very bright scenes. For darker conditions software sharpening helps capturing more details. Especially low light photography remains very inconsistent on a lot of high end Android Smartphones. The Mate’s 7 13MP Shooter can definitely keep up with with other expensive FlagShips like the Note 4.

Mate 7 camera shots

Huawei Ascend Mate 7 Specs and Performance

The Mate 7 is powered by Huawei’s own eight-core Kirin CPU . The Kirin CPU sports four ARM Cortex A7 cores and four high power Cortex A15s combined with a Mali T628 GPU. Thats similiar to Samsung’s Eight Core Exynos Setup. Huawei’s setup seems just as fast as the Exynos Combination, provided the software is optimized correctly.

Our Mate 7 review unit is the 16GB storage and 2GB RAM option. In selected markets there will be a 32GB/3GB version that also comes in a gold finish. Aside from storage and RAM, the two variants are identical. Even with the 2GB RAM version the Mate 7 is powerful enough in combination with the Eight Core Kirin CPU.

Ascend Mate 7 Power Options

Out of the Box, we must say Huawei’s software is not really set for optimal performance. If you have a look under settings/power savings, the settings are set to smart. If you switch back to normal the phone gets much faster and smooth. Then, after these changes, the Mate 7 gets actually lightning fast and can compete and even beat most other Android Flagships in terms of speed and user experience.

Especially in terms of battery life the Ascend Mate 7 has huge advantage with its 4100 mAh battery. The Nexus 7 tablet for example comes with only 3900 mAh battery and Note 4, the direct competitor is at 3100mAH for the same screen estate. This brings you at least two days of normal usage and even under the most extreme circumstances at least one full day of usage for the Mate 7 phablet.

Huawei’s EMUI, gets better but is not optimal yet….

On Huawei’s EMUI 3.0 a lot of previous issues with Huawei’s OS are fixed but not everything perfect yet. On the positive site, things are very smooth and much better looking the before. EMUI has a new style triangle, round and square navigation buttons from Android L and matching colors. Huawei is definitely prepared for the Android L Lollipop Launch. The EMUI UI and its focus on Lines and circles gives the UI a really clean and geometric look, clearlydeoms inspirations from iOS 7 though.

On some other spots we get the same problems as before with the EMUI OS though. One some spots the EMUI still reminds of the mess out cartoonish OS and rounded icons everywhere. Huawei just has to make all app icons round, combined with its own colored background, in the whole UI not only the Launcher. The only option to get around it is to install a custom launcher and new icon pack. Still even then the issue persists on the mate 7.

Huawei Ascend Mate 7 Summary

EMUI 3.0 is a big improvement for Huawei’S OS compared to earlier versions, but software is still Huawei’s weak side. Especially Samsung and their NOTE Software seem to fully use the potential of this big screen estate with several multitasking and business apps. Huawei has beaten lag and slowness from previous versions though, the Mate 7 is very fast and guaruantess smooth user experience – very promising!

If we look at the Huawei Ascend Mate 7, it seems like Huawei is definitely a brand to watch for the rest of 2014 and the coming year. They are already Number 3 in terms of global Sales, but not it seems they will be able to compete on product designa and quality as well. If Huawei can achieve to bring their OS and Software up to the Standard of their Design and Hardware, we predict that Huawei will be a very worthy competitor for 2015.

As you can see the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 is supposed to launch in October in Malaysia. In terms of pricing the international versions has a price of around 2100RM for the 2GB Ram and 16GB Version that we tested.  If you want to double your RAM and storage the price wil go up to 2500RM and for 3GB/32GB ROM Version.

What do you think of the Huawei Ascend Mate 7? Would you buy it or prefer the Note 4 or even Nexus 6?