After announcing the phone back at IFA in Germany, Huawei has tonight launched their current flagship phone, the Ascend Mate 7 in Australia.
Hauwei are launching two versions of the Ascend Mate 7 in Australia, one with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of on-board storage and one with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. Vodafone will be selling the lower-specced version, in Obsidian Black, through Dick Smith stores, with pricing and plans to be announced soon. The higher end model will be available from Harvey Norman and JB Hifi for $699 on November 17th in Amber Gold.
Huawei has poured a lot of effort into the Ascend Mate 7, including a long list of premium hardware specifications inside a premium body. The body of the phone is constructed of 95% metal, including an aluminium alloy interior chasis. The metal body also houses a surprise on the rear, a rear mounted fingerprint sensor which works with a press as opposed to the swipe action of other fingerprint scanners. The scanner also works with 360 readibility and has the ability to work even when your hands are wet, which Huawei says adds to making the unlocking process up to 85% faster. The sensor will store up to five fingerprints in the ARM TrustZone within the chipset which protects the prints from being accessed by third parties.
At just 185 grams and just 7.9mm thin, the phone is fairly lightweight, especially considering the phone contains a massive 4,100mAh battery. With three battery saving modes built-in, Huawei say this insanely massive battery will last up to two days, something we look forward to testing. Also packed into this body is a 6″ in-cell FullHD (1920×1080) resolution LTPS display with a 1500:1 high contrast ratio and ultra-narrow 2.9mm bezel with an 83% screen-to-body ratio, which shrinks the overall size of the phone from what you’d expect.
Huawei has used their in-house developed Kirin 925 Octa-Core processor, which uses ARM’s big.LITTLE configuration, featuring 4x 1.8 GHz A15 cores and 4x 1.3GHz A7 cores. Camera wise, you can expect some great shots, with a 13MP Sony BSI sensor with f/2.0 aperture for the rear-facing camera, as well as a 5MP front-facing camera with a 5P non-spherical lens, which Huawei advise will allow for ‘higher definition and less image distortion’.
All the usual specs are included – Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 but it’s when you get to the LTE radios it gets interesting. Huawei is a world leader in mobile telephony, and they haven’t skimped on the Ascend Mate 7 including a Cat6 LTE modem, which offers download speeds up to 300 Mbps.
The Ascend Mate 7 is running the latest version of their customise Emotion UI – called EMUI – which has reached version 3.0 and is based on Android 4.4 (Kitkat). The new version is specifically designed to be operated with one hand – something important to think about on a phone with a 6″ display. As part of EMUI, functions such as call, contact, and messaging can now be switched through using a single horizontal swipe.
Huawei also unveiled some new accessories for the Ascend Mate 7, announcing UltimoPower Active Noise Cancelling Earphones which will offer noise reduction by up to 15-30db. They also announced their new leather Smart cases will be available to purchase down under. Pricing for the accessories will come at a later stage, but we hope they won’t be too much.
The Ascend Mate 7 is looking like quite a good looking handset, with the addition of the biometric scanner on the back, it adds that little spark of difference that could make all the difference in the saturated Australian phone market. At $699 with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, it’s quite a bargain too when compared against some of the higher end flagship phones from other manufacturers. We look forward to checking the Ascend Mate 7 out in a full review as soon as possible.
