Huawei Ascend Mate 7 phablet unveiled at IFA, Note 4’s competitor

Murmurs about Huawei releasing something to rival current Apple, Samsung, HTC, LG, Xiaomi and other models have been around for some time now, but the company has finally announced two new additions to its portfolio: the Ascend Mate 7 and the Ascend G7.

Huawei announced the two handsets at IFA earlier and many have been taken aback about what the company tried to accomplish with the new devices. First off, the Ascend Mate 7 is a monster of a phablet with a 6 inch screen, while the Ascend G7 sports a more friendly 5.5 inch screen. People are dubbing Huawei’s Mate 7 the behemoth of phones because it is indeed one of the largest you’ll find on the phablet market nowadays.

The outstanding features of Huawei’s bigger flagship encompass a single-touch fingerprint scanner, called the industry’s fastest by Huawei itself. The scanner is said to function at the slightest touch, either with wet or dry fingers. Huawei compared the scanner to those of Apple and Samsung on their flagships and said that compared to those 2-step scanners, the Huawei one will surely be the leader in the industry.

 

Huawei’s Ascend Mate 7 measures 157mm, width of 81mm, and a thickness of 7.9mm, making it a surprisingly thin gadget to handle, but it’s also heavier than most devices out there, weighing 185 grams. Nonetheless, the Mate 7 rocks an aluminium body and thin bezels giving it an 83% screen to body ratio. It also sports a 6 inch LTPS display with a 1080*1920 resolution at 368 ppi, which places it among the phones with the better screens, although not as great as the Galaxy Note 4’s Super AMOLED version.

The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 seems to be one of the most powerful devices out there with a Hisilicon Kirin 925 SoC with “8+1” core CPU, meaning that it has 4 initial cores clocked at 1.8 GHz, another 4 clocked at 1.3 GHz and another core running at 230 MHz. This last core is a Tensilica HiFi3 Auto DSP (digital signal processor), which paves the way for high-fidelity, dedicated audio processing. Wow. I wonder what that gets on Antutu.

The Ascend Mate 7 will be available in a 2 GB RAM/16 GB storage and a 3 GB RAM/32 GB storage variant. The device will sport a 13 MP Sony camera, 4100 mAH battery, ultra power-saving mode, LTE Cat 6 and EMUI 3.0 UI running on top of Android 4.4 Kitkat. The first storage configuration variant will go for about $500, whilst the second one with more storage for $600. These are prices that will surely impress, since the device has specs comparable to devices like the HTC One M8, Galaxy S5 and even the Galaxy Note 4.