It's been a while since I got the Mate 7 at IFA in Berlin and I have been using it on an off since then. As a new member of the AnandTech crew I still had to get the proper equipment to be able to go through our test bench on my own. After lots of delays for which I apologize, we finally take a thorough look at the Huawei's new flagship.

Huawei's been launching new devices at great speed this year. The Ascend Mate 2, which is the Mate 7's literal predecessor was only released earlier in the year, but came only as a more mid-range specced device with corresponding price-tag. Huawei has been gearing up and is now targeting the high-end to try to gain marketshare from other established manufacturers such as Samsung, HTC and Apple. 

The Mate 7's most differentiating factor here is the use of Huawei's subsidiary HiSilicon Kirin 925 in-house SoC. If you've been closely following this SoC you will know that I took an in-depth look into this chip in the review of the Huawei Honor 6. I recommend re-reading the SoC page to freshen up yourself on the more intricate details of the silicon, as the Mate 7 employs the same chip with only a slight speed bump on the CPU. In fact, the HiSilicon Kirin 925 seems to be a re-named Kirin 920, as both chips sport the same Hi3630 model number internally. As such, it offers the same fundamental capabilities as the 920: an ARM big.LITTLE design with a quadcore A7 at 1.3GHz and a quadcore A15 at a slightly raised 1.8GHz. Graphics capabilities is delivered by an ARM Mali T628MP4 GPU running at 600MHz, so no change over the Kirin 920.

Again, connectivity is provided by HiSilicon's own integrated Balong LTE Cat. 6 modem. I've mentioned in my review of the Honor 6 that I couldn't test the modem at all due to receiving a Chinese variant only compatible with TDD LTE and TCDMA frequencies and was limited to 2G only. Luckily, the Mate 7 supports a very wide range of frequencies which should make it compatible with all European networks, supporting bands B1/2/3/4/5/7/8/20/28.

The 16GB model priced at 499€ comes with 2GB of LPDDR3-1600 RAM, while the more expensive 599€ priced model offers 32GB of eMMC storage with 3GB of RAM. Power is provided by a large 4100mAh / 15.79Wh embedded non-replaceable battery. 

In terms of design and build quality, this is Huawei's best attempt to date. The Mate 7 comes in a mostly aluminium frame which covers its sides and most of the back. We find plastic covers at the top and bottom on the device, undoubtedly the RF windows used for the antennas of the various networking components. There is a single large speaker on the lower of the phone, which performs surprisingly well, as it offers a deeper and louder output than the Note 4 which employs a similar design.

The front glass panel is surrounded by a plastic coasted metal rim on the very edges. On my white model, this made for an odd contrast with the metallic look of the sides and back of the device, the black model that I took some photos of back at the announcement which you can see here is definitely a more attractive variant. I'm not too sure why Huawei opted for this plastic coating, as it can be easily damaged during a fall and expose the underlying metal, as a full sturdy plastic rim would have been more sturdy.

With a 6" 1080p display the Mate 7 is well into the phablet category of devices. The dimensions figure at 157 x 81 x 7.9mm, making this one of the biggest phones out there and easily matching the Nexus 6 in terms of footprint. The 185g weight is also something to consider - in my subjective opinion this is an aspect of phablets that gets overlooked easily, and can easily be a negative point for everyday usage.

On the top back of the phone we have a raised camera bulge, encasing the Sony IMX214 module. A strong LED flash accompanies the camera. There is a thin slip of plastic coming from the top of the phone towards the camera module separating the aluminium back, this is done as to enable NFC to work through the metal design.

Finally, under the the camera we find the fingerprint sensor. This is a touch-sensor manufactured by Swedish company FPC, which may be the FPC1020 that was announced late last year. As such, Huawei is the first manufacturer following Apple's TouchID to offer a full touch sensor as opposed to a swipe implementation as found on Samsung's devices. It offers full 360° print rotation readout support, no matter if you have wet fingers or not. Huawei implements a RF sensing ring around the sensor that makes it possible to detect your finger even when the device is sleeping (as it will wake the device up). This allows for turning on of the device and unlocking in a single action. I've found the success-rate of the sensor to be extremely high, but only as long as you center your finger well on the sensor area, as I have the impression the sensor itself is much smaller than what the design makes you believe.

One thing I found very odd and unsatisfying is that the USB 2.0 port on the bottom isn't actually symmetrically in the middle of the device, but slightly to the left. A strange design decision that may have been result of technical limitations in internal layout of the phone.

On the right side of the phone we have the volume and power buttons in a comfortable and reachable height, the buttons are made out metal and offer good tactility. On the left side, we find two ejectable trays which hold, for one, a microSIM, and in the other, both a microSD and a nanoSIM. The design of the second (bottom) tray is quite innovative in that regard. A SIM eject tool comes packaged with the phone.

Overall, the Mate 7 is an attractive device with good build quality. Due to the thinness of the device it's not as uncomfortable as you might expect it given the size. I definitely prefer the black model as it gives it a more sleek look than the white plasticky front of the white one.

Next, let's view Huawei's new take on Emotion UI, introducing version 3.0 of the Chinese manufacturer's Android interface...

User Interface - Emotion UI 3.0

We've seen our first taste of Huawei's direction in UI design in my Honor 6 review. With the Mate 7 Huawei also introduced their new design language and overhaul of Emotion UI. Version 3.0 is basically a complete fresh take in terms of looks while still keeping the additional functionality that Huawei seems to be very good at to differentiate themselves from other vendors.

The basic skin that covers the notification shade and the settings menus employs a very minimalistic and white colour scheme. Simplistic icons throughout the interface offer one of the more conservative interface experiences on Android. I'd even be pressed to say that I preferred the more colourful icons in EmUI 2.3 as they added more diversity. This might not be at all an issue to most users as the main interface and colours in most applications is determined by the user applied theme.

The phone comes with a theme manager and allows for download of a wide variety of skins offered in its online browsing catalogue. Themes now also are able to set basic colour schemes of the built-in applications, meaning there's something there for everybody's taste. 

The recent tasks menu has also received a unique design, instead of having a linear list of screen caps or a card design as found in Android 5.0, Huawei offers a "tabbed" interface, showing 4 applications per screen and swipeable screens to be able to scroll through the tab windows. Swiping a tab up closes the application, swiping it down locks it from being closed by the memory manager. Alternatively you can swipe from the bottom of the screen to close all apps.

I find this very convoluted and actually impractical compared to the stock Android recent tasks screen, it adds nothing in terms of usability and even prevents you from quickly reaching an application which was less recently used as you have to swipe screens to search for it.

I've praised Huawei's modification of Android in EmUI 2.3 - luckily we find the same functionality again here in EmUI 3.0. Huawei provides fine-granularity controls over installed applications on the phone. As such, you're able to determine network access (WiFi or mobile data) on a per-app basis in the Network Manager, while also monitoring their data usage. A Notification Manager enables you to control which applications are allowed to push notifications to the system, giving the possibility to have apps prompt, or directly whitelist or blacklist them.

The Permission Manager is also extremely competent, almost totally foregoing Android's built-in permission settings. You can have an application prompt for specific permissions whenever they actually need them, and accept or deny them on a per-app, per-permission basis. The Android app ecosystem has an issue with applications requesting a lot of, sometimes dubious permissions. I see this as Huawei's attempt at alleviating user concerns about security. For those who think this might be a too bothersome system - I strongly disagree; it is not very intrusive, while still being able to provide lots of power of control.

The Battery and Power Consumption managers again offer lots of information - Huawei seems to be very strict in trying to reign in power abusive and misbehaving applications. If you have an application which is running in the background and taking up a more-than normal amount of CPU cycles a notification warning will tell you about it and give you the possibility to kill the app. A manager dedicated to listing the background power of all applications on the phone enables you to identify power drains.

A totally new feature in EmUI 3.0 is the introduction of a vast array of new security and privacy features. With the introduction of the fingerprint sensor, Huawei is able to implement easily accessible privacy features on the phone. Beyond the obvious unlocking via the fingerprint sensor, you can also use your fingerprint to protect contacts, and message conversations, private albums and even per-app locking mechanism.

The album and application locking mechanisms is what I see people actually would be using pretty often. Being able to lock certain parts of your phone while still being able to not fear to give your phone to your friend or family member is a great feature that should avoid many embarrassing moments for some people. How it works is that the OS asks for a fingerprint scan (or passcode fallback) any time you access a given album or application.

Overall Huawei offers a lot in terms of software. EmotionUI 3.0 is a great overhaul over version 2.3 and might subjectively be one of the more attractive Android OEM skins. Aside from the recent tasks screen I don't have much critique in terms of functionality of the OS. Huawei continues to pack in unique features into the OS without affecting performance or overly bloating the device. 

CPU Performance

Let's a better look at the Kirin 925's performance in terms CPU power. Again, this SoC is merely a slightly higher clocked Hi3630 as we've already benchmarked on the Huawei Honor 6. The basic hardware remains the same - a 1.8GHz quad A15 cluster with 2MB of L2 and a 1.3GHz quad A7 cluster with 512kB of L2 cache. The setup is running on an HMP (Heterogeneous Multi-Processing) hardware implementation running on a Linaro GTS (Global Task Scheduling) software stack on the Linux kernel. Memory is provided by 2GB of LPDDR3-1600 memory in this unit, with a higher 3GB variant available.

First, we take a look at our browser suites, testing general Javascript performance inside Chrome.

As expected, the Mate 7 doesn't differ too much from the Honor 6. The slight 100MHz boost on the A15 cluster brings it a few slight percentages above the Kirin 920. Again we see the big.LITTLE configuration and the A15 in general being extremely well-performing in these tests, being at the forefront of Android performance and only being beaten by Apple's own chip architectures. It's safe to say that the CPU has no issues at all in delivering an excellent and fast web-browsing experience.

WebXPRT has behaved weirdly on the Mate 7, it consistently scores less than the Honor 6 even although they employ the same chip. I'm not too sure as why this happened. My assumption is that there might be some software regressions in Huawei's OS libraries, but it's weird to see WebXPRT being the sole test unit to suffer from this effect. Because the CPU is running at a higher clock and voltage, we might be seeing some problem with throttling as WebXPRT tends to run much longer than the previous benchmarks.

Let's continue on with BaseMark OS II, a benchmark which tries to measure several aspects of a system.

The System and Web tests in BaseMark are mainly CPU limited. We see a similar ordering as in the Javascript benchmarks, with the Kirin leading the Android devices behind Apple's iPhones.

The memory benchmark is performing very weakly here. As a reminder, BaseMark is also testing the NAND performance in the memory sub-test, and not the main memory.

Like on the Honor 6, the Mali is having big issues with BaseMark OS II's Graphics benchmark and ends up below even Qualcomm's last generation's GPU. This, in conjunction with the lower memory score brings the overall BaseMark score further down.

Again the Mate 7 performed worse than the Honor 6. We're starting to see a trend here where longer lasting performance tests perform worse on the Mate 7, again I suspect a throttling issue here. Before we dwell more deeply into that, let's revise the performance of the Mali T628MP4 again.

GPU Performance

The graphics processing unit in the Kirin 925 remains unchanged from the one in the Kirin 920. It's the same ARM Mali T628MP4 running at 600MHz. What did change though, is the software. HiSilicon no longer employs such an aggressive GPU governor logic for the DVFS scaling, but adopted this time a more linear approach that scales from one frequency to the next, making it much less aggressive than the one found in the Honor 6.

In 3DMark 1.2 Unlimited, we see no change compared to the Honor 6, as one would expect. The Physics score, which is dominantly CPU-bound, is more or less also unchanged. The Physics score here is rather low because the GTS mechanism limits the load onto the A7 scores, which have less performance headroom than the A15 cores. I don't see this as too much of a problem in real-world usage as the A7 cores should be able to handle most existing games without much issue, and it's in my opinion even a good thing as it brings down platform power down by quite a bit to avoid using the A15 cores.

Checking in on BaseMark X 1.1, the Mali continues to be underwhelming. The MP4 configuration of the T628 is simply not enough to be able to compete with Qualcomm and Imagination's current high-end GPUs. 

In GFXBench 3.0, the Mali is again dragging its feet and is barely capable of competing here. A lack of fill-rate performance is what is limiting it in the T-Rex benchmark, and a bottleneck in ALU power is what is stopping the Mali from performing better in the Manhattan test. 

The biggest change I've seen between the Mate 7 and the Honor 6 is the way the GPU throttles. I've mentioned that I've had a hard time to get the Honor 6's GPU to throttle at all, and thus it performed quite well in our performance degradation metric. The Mate 7 seems to have changed its thermal policies and brings with it one of the worst scores we've every seen. It throttles very fast and limits itself to roughly half the frequency, resulting in only 8.8fps from the 15.8fps instant performance score. The result is that the Mate 7 performs much better in the GPU battery test, but before we get to that, let's characterize the screen of the Mate 7 so we can get a good notion of what we should expect in terms of battery life.

Display

With the Ascend Mate 7, Huawei introduces a JDI-manufactured IPS-Neo screen. The advantage of the IPS-Neo technology is that it provides better viewing angles and contrast ratio due to a change in the manufacturing process which allows for the the liquid crystal molecules to be uniformly aligned on the glass substrate. 

Indeed, the viewing angles of the Mate 7 are much improved and I'd say it's one of the best in terms of LCD displays. Contrast ratio has also considerably gone up as we'll see in a bit.

The Mate 7 display offers lots of promise, but let's see if it holds up with our objective measurement tests. We use an X-Rite i1Pro 2 as our measurement hardware, in conjunction with SpectraCal's CalMAN software suite and our own workflow to be able to get an accurate display characterization.

The Mate 7 ends up at 484cd/m² in terms of brightness. It's plenty of bright for all but the most sunny days. Only direct sunlight reflectance may pose an issue.

In the black levels and respectively the contrast ratio is where we see the IPS-Neo screen perform extremely well. For an LCD screen, this is one of the deepest blacks I've come to meet in a device. The HTC One M7 seems to be the only other device to come near it, but that was at a lower brightness point with dynamic contrast.

The Mate 7 is able to achieve a 1750:1 contrast ratio, putting it at the top of the LCD pack. Only AMOLED displays are able to outperform this figure due to their ability to avoid any light emission on a per-pixel level.

In terms of colour temperature, the Mate 7 performs again quite well while hitting 6605K. This time Huawei seems to have aimed for 6500K instead of colder colours as on the Honor 6. If you still prefer the more colder and blue-dominated whites, Huawei as retained the colour temperature slider under the display settings which allows you to adjust the tone of the display to your own preference.

While the colour temperature figure seems to be quite good, under further investigation we see that there's a problem. Our grayscale accuracy test shows that there's much too much green at all grayscale levels. In fact, this is actually clearly visible on the device as we see a slight green tint. Gamma reaches an acceptable 2.11, still a bit off a perfect 2.2. Due to the green tint of the device the grayscale dE2000 ends up at 6.33, much worse than any device released in the last 18 months, and above the average perceivable threshold of 5.

Looking at the saturation accuracy graph, we see again an overabundance of green. It looks like the whole spectrum is pulled slightly towards green, which results in a whole offset of all measured colourpoints. This is a pity as the display seemed to be quite well calibrated in terms of saturation compression. The end result is that we end up with a meager dE2000 of 3.99. While this is much less worse than the grayscale measurements, it's not too bad, for example, it performs better than this year's G3.

Our Gretag MacBeth test is a measurement of accuracy of several commonly used colours. The Mate 7 ends up with a respectable dE2000 of 3.88 here. We again find that the score is merely thwarted by the green-shift of the display, prohibiting this display to enter the group of outright excellently calibrated devices such Samsung's and Apple's newest models.

Battery Life

We find a monstrous 4100mAH battery inside of the Mate 7 which should theoretically provide it excellent runtimes. Let's see if that is the case.

The Wifi web-browsing test ends up at 13.5 hours for the Mate 7. While this is a enormous lifetime for usual Android devices, it's pretty disappointing in conjunction with the size of the battery. The iPhone 6 performs almost equally with a 1200mAh smaller battery. Even the Note 4 with its AMOLED screen which is usual unfavourable to our web-browsing test isn't too far behind with its 3200mAH battery. Of course the Mate 7 has a slightly bigger screen, but it's still only 1080p compared to the Note 4's. I would have expected the Mate 7 to be in the range of its predecessor, the Mate 2, but that device remains very lonely among the top of our battery charts.

I did not do a objective run on 4G to be able to test the new Balong modem inside the Kirin. This is mostly due to a very different test environment than what we've ran our previous devices, mostly by Josh and Brian under 700MHz on AT&T. Here in Luxembourg we still only have access to 1600MHz LTE while 800MHz EUDD is still being freed for commercial use. As such, I prefer to avoid publishing any misleading numbers until I get a good portfolio of devices which I can all run under the same test conditions.

I can however give my subjective opinion on the matter: I haven't been impressed at all by Huawei's new modem. In daily usage under a mobile connection the device gets quite hot and drains the battery more than other devices sporting Qualcomm modems. I'm very skeptical of Huawei's modem and RF back-end, and hope that in the future they'll be able to improve power consumption.

You might be wondering where the Mate 7 is on the BaseMark OS II graph. The truth is rather ugly.

I've tried several times to complete the battery test on BaseMark OS II and failed each time. After 25 minutes the device would shut off due to overheating and reach scorching hot temperatures. This is the hottest I have ever seen any mobile device be, and I could not comfortably hold the device after it crashed on the test. The phone discharged at a rate of 0.7% per minute during those 20 minutes, meaning it should have reached about 2.3 hours of lifetime, again one of the worst scores we've ever seen, short of the Honor 6. This projects a sustained TDP of about 6.5W, much above what a phone factor is able to dissipate.

The GFXBench 3.0 battery run is much improved over the Honor 6, again due to more aggressive thermal throttling on the GPU. Here the Mate 7 manages to reach 5.6 hours lifetime, but with a great performance sacrifice.

Overall, I deem the Mate 7 battery life to be bad, and a step back in terms of efficiency. For users who just browse a lot with their device or frequently use social media applications, the Mate 7 performs quite well. If you are a frequent gamer, I'd strictly recommend against the Mate 7.

Charge Time

The Mate 7 uses a what has now become a standard 5V 2A charger. The charger IC sets up a 1750mA input power rate which ends up at around 7W charge power in the fast-charge phase of the battery before it slows down to three slower phases of trickle-charging.

Camera Performance

The Mate 7 sports the same camera setup as the Honor 6. I've already determined for that device that the quality suffers quite a bit due to what seems to be very poor ISP performance.

For all practical purposes, I don't see any improvement in quality in the Mate 7. The device is still very lack-luster in the camera department.

f/2 1/658s ISO50

f/2 1/658s ISO50 HDR

During day-light shots we see the same lack of detail as found on the Honor 6. It's a pity that Huawei didn't manage to improve the processing here as the camera should have been able to produce better results based on the Sony IMX214 sensor. The HDR shots similarly see a colour balance issue as the image loses saturation.

f/2 1/16s ISO3200

f/2 1/16s ISO800 HDR

In night-time shots again the Mate 7 underperforms. Under dark conditions where other flagship phones would at least capture the scene in some reasonable manner, the Mate 7, like the Honor 6 will be hard to recognize what it is you took a shot of.

The camera application provides a fresh new UI that looks fantastic. But the problem here is that I find the usability has taken a toll, as previously easily available settings are now hidden behind various sub-menus. 

In the end the still-picture performance of the Mate 7 is rather lackluster and competitor devices such as the Note 4 are on a completely other level in terms of picture quality. Huawei has a lot of progress to do if they wish to compete in the camera department.

NAND Performance

The Mate 7 employs the same Toshiba eMMC solution as found on the Honor 6. There's not much to say here other than the performance being outright horrible and unacceptable for a 2014 product. Although the model number of the chip is the same as on the Honor 6, it still manages to underperform what was already a device which was bottoming out our benchmark suite.

Competing flagships such as the Note 4 manage to outperform the Mate 7 by a hefty factor of 4 or 5 throughout all the tests. Surprisingly I don't seem to see the effect of this too much in everyday usage, but this might just be my subjective bias.

Conclusion

Having spent plenty of time with the Mate 7 I think I've build quite a good opinion of the device. Huawei's new flagship remains polarizing as it offers some quite positive aspects while carrying some big compromises. Huawei again impressed me with their software implementation of Android - they're delivering extremely innovative and useful features with EmUI 3.0 while still packaging it in an attractive presentation that doesn't compromise the user experience. I really wished more OEMs would follow suite in offering such substantial additions to the OS. The security and privacy features on the Mate 7 really left a mark on me as things such as blocking off select galleries or apps with help of a security code or with ease of the fingerprint sensor really made me wonder why we haven't seen this already years ago as it makes so much sense in a mobile device.

While I've had very little criticism towards their software stack, it's on the hardware where we find the Mate 7's weaknesses. And it's not the build of the phone that I'm talking about. The phone itself is very sturdy and with even though it's wider than the Note 4 for example, it makes up in terms of ease of use due to comfortable edges and a thinner design. Speaking of design - there's nothing to object to the Mate 7. It's a traditional phablet industrial design which tries to differentiate itself with help of small distinctive features such as the lips of the phone or back features like the fingerprint sensor and the camera housing.

Rather than any build quality issues, the Mate 7's weaknesses are primarily centered upon component choices. I understand Huawei wanting to try to achieve vertical integration for their products, but I think it's too early for the HiSilicon SoC to be a viable alternative to solutions from dominant suppliers such as Qualcomm. Even though the 4100mAh battery is large enough to push the device towards the top of the battery charts, it's more due to brute force of the battery capacity itself than due to efficiency of the platform.

Outside of the power and thermal management configuration issues, we see issues with the GPU, NAND and camera performance. I'm convinced the first and the last would have been an non-issue had Huawei made a pass on its in-house SoC, and the NAND performance could have been fixed with a slightly higher investment in a better quality eMMC solution.

I've mentioned that I still haven't done objective tests due to my network limitations, but Huawei's integrated modem was an aspect that many people were looking forward to being investigated. I don't think Huawei delivered anything groundbreaking here - battery performance under mobile connectivity suffers visibly in my subjective usage.

I find myself in a eerily similar situation while writing this as when I was doing the conclusion for Honor 6 review. The Mate 7 is an overall good device with some major drawbacks. It's the price which decides if this is a worthy purchase or not. At 499 and 599€ official price points (and now can be found for down to 450€ for the 16GB version) it's not worth the money. If you spend that much, you might as well get a Note 4 for an additional 150€ and enjoy a device that is better in almost every aspect. 

Here's hoping that Huawei continues to improve as they've again showed that they have the potential. They're on the right track with the ideas, but still stumbling on execution.