Huawei Mate 8 goes official with 6-inch display, Kirin 950 SoC

As expected, Huawei has launched the Mate 8, which is being called the company's "most advanced flagship smartphone." In line with what was teased before, the smartphone is powered by the Chinese firm's latest Kirin 950 SoC with octa-core CPU and Mali T880MP4 GPU, and sports a 6-inch FHD IPS display.

For those who aren't already aware, the Kirin 950 chipset comes with four high-power Cortex-A72 cores, clocked at up to 2.3 GHz and an additional four power-saving Cortex-A53 ones, working at 1.8 GHz.

There's also an i5 coprocessor that "supports speech recognition, low-power consumption MP3, all the functions of a sensor hub, fused location provider (FLP) navigation, and reduces location-based power consumption," the company said in a press release. The SoC is manufactured using TSMC's 16 nm FinFET process.

Made from aerospace-grade aluminum and 2.5D curved diamond cut glass, the Mate 8 also comes with a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor. In terms of camera, the smartphone features Sony's latest IMX298 16MP sensor at the back and an 8MP shooter on the front.

Packing in a large 4000mAh battery, the handset will be available in 3GB/32GB, 4GB/64GB, and 4GB/128GB variants, priced at around $480, $590, and $700, respectively. Color options include Champagne Gold, Moonlight Silver, Space Gray, and Mocha Brown.

On the software side, the handset comes with the company's next-generation EMUI 4.0 OS based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow, and offers features including voice controls, a power-saving firewall, a defragmenter, and eRecovery.

As for the availability, the press release says the handset is currently available in China. The international availability details will be announced at CES in January next year.