WHAT IS THE HUAWEI ASCEND MATE 7?
The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 is a very large phone, one whose display is close to tablet-like proportions. Gamers and those who like to watch videos on the way to work should have an instant interest in such a phone.
And, contrary to what the name suggests, it’s definitely phone-sized: the screen is six inches across, not seven.
As is so often the case with Huawei phones, you need to fiddle with the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 to iron out a few weird tweaks that have been applied. But with a little effort, this is one of the best large-screen phones money can buy. At £400, it’s a good lower-cost alternative to the Samsung Galaxy Note 4.
Awards
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SUMMARY
OUR SCORE:
PROS
- Decent value
- Solid design
- Huge, good-quality screen
- Good battery life
CONS
- Software not great fresh out of the box
- Some minor build issues
KEY FEATURES
- 6-inch 1,920 x 1,080 pixel IPS screen
- HiSilicon Kirin 925 CPU
- 13-megapixel main camera with LED flash
- Manufacturer: Huawei
- Review Price: £399.00
WHAT IS THE HUAWEI ASCEND MATE 7?
The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 is a very large phone, one whose display is close to tablet-like proportions. Gamers and those who like to watch videos on the way to work should have an instant interest in such a phone.
And, contrary to what the name suggests, it’s definitely phone-sized: the screen is six inches across, not seven.
As is so often the case with Huawei phones, you need to fiddle with the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 to iron out a few weird tweaks that have been applied. But with a little effort, this is one of the best large-screen phones money can buy. At £400, it’s a good lower-cost alternative to the Samsung Galaxy Note 4.
HUAWEI ASCEND MATE 7: DESIGN
Huawei is not a master of design. Often its inspirations are all-too apparent, and the original motifs it devises tend to be a little wonky. But it’s getting better, and the Mate 7 is certainly one of the best Huawei phones yet.
The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 has a look very similar to the HTC One Max. It’s imposing, mostly metal and has a fingerprint scanner on the back. A paragon of simplicity it is not.
However, aside from a slight lack of originality the design is remarkably good. Here’s the important bit – for a 6-inch screen phone, it’s very easy to use.
A handful of clever choices ensure this, and while not exactly a surprise, it is a relief after the Huawei Ascend P7, which seemed to value being thin over being enjoyable to use day-to-day. That phone missed the point. This one gets it, or at least seems to.
The first important bit is that the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 is clearly as much all-screen as the company could manage. Bezels are super-thin and there’s very little expanse above or below the display.
For empirical evidence – the Mate 7 is just 0.5mm wider than the 5.5-inch Samsung Galaxy Note 2. Granted, you’ll find much greater differences compared to phones of 2014 such as the LG G3, but clear effort has been put into making the phone as manageable as possible.
It’s not just the width, but the height too. This phone is thinner, shorter and less wide than its predecessor the Ascend Mate 2.
To make this possible, the soft keys are built into the software, and despite the current trend for front speakers, the Mate 7 keeps its one on the rear to ensure it doesn’t add more bulk. The result is a phone that's 7.5mm less tall than the HTC One Max, a phone we found to be flat-out too big at the time.
The Mate 7 is big, but not too big. Now that phones are that bit thinner, bezels that bit smaller, we’re at last finding 6-inch phones that we don’t wish we could shrink down.
Huawei has also put the soft keys towards the centre of the screen to make them easier to reach, and it works. Obviously, the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 remains a handful, but this is among the most accessible 6-inch phones to date.
It also feels good. About 85 per cent of the back is anodised aluminium, with just a couple of plastic bungs on the end to house the antennas, which would have trouble transmitting through metal. Build quality isn’t quite Apple-grade on closer inspection – in our sample the ‘volume up’ key lost its clickiness after a few days of use, but we assume this is an unfortunate fault with our sample (it is labelled an Engineering Sample, so this seems likely).
Much like the soft keys, the power button is placed within reach of your digit (right thumb in this case), and the phone’s super-slim 7.9mm body adds to how breezy this phone feels to use. Yes, we’ve complained about Huawei’s obsession with slimness in the past, but in a 6-inch phone, cuts to every dimension are appreciated.
HUAWEI ASCEND MATE 7: FINGERPRINT SCANNER
After first noticing the similarities with the HTC One Max, we were worried about the Huawei Ascend Mate 7’s fingerprint scanner. The HTC’s was so particular it became a nightmare to use.
In another unexpected win for Huawei, the Mate 7’s fingerprint scanner is, as of October 2014, the best you’ll find in a phone outside of the Apple Touch ID sensor. It’s miles better than HTC’s fingerprint scanner and far better than the Samsung one used in phones like the Note 4 and Galaxy S5.
First, the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 does not make you move a finger over the scanner, just place it on there. And it scans your entire fingerprint when calibrating, rather than just the central part.
As such it’s able to be much more forgiving of fingerprints placed at an angle or non-centrally. I still experienced plenty of ‘non-recognised fingerprint’ messages, but it automatically rescans without any extra interaction required within a fraction of a second. It easily achieves the main fingerprint scanner goal of outpacing a typed-in passcode, which the HTC One Max and Samsung Galaxy S5 fail at, in our experience.
The scanner also sits in just about the perfect position for your forefinger, and is recessed by a full millimetre or so, making blind operation a doddle. It works without getting near the power button too. Huawei rarely shows the big players of Android how things are done, but it certainly has with the Ascend Mate 7’s fingerprint scanner.
Other less interesting aspects of the phone still worth noting include that it uses dual pop-out trays for microSIM and microSD cards on the left edge. You get a reasonable 16GB of storage in the phone, but a memory card slot boosts up its media cred several notches.
The scanner also sits in just about the perfect position for your forefinger, and is recessed by a full millimetre or so, making blind operation a doddle. It works without getting near the power button too. Huawei rarely shows the big players of Android how things are done, but it certainly has with the Ascend Mate 7’s fingerprint scanner.
Other less interesting aspects of the phone still worth noting include that it uses dual pop-out trays for microSIM and microSD cards on the left edge. You get a reasonable 16GB of storage in the phone, but a memory card slot boosts up its media cred several notches.
While this resolution has been surpassed by a small handful of phones including the LG G3, the 368ppi pixel density this affords the Huawei Ascend Mate is easily enough to appear very sharp indeed.
The IPS LCD screen type used here gives a fairly similar screen character to LG’s best too. You get pretty decent colour accuracy, enough to convince the eye if not a professional colour calibration tool. There’s some control over the colour too. You can choose how warm or cool it looks using an easy slider in the Settings menu, giving the display a yellower (warm) or bluer (cool) character.
Viewing angles are great as well, with more-than-acceptable brightness loss from an off-angle perspective. There’s a bit of backlight bleed in the top millimetre of the screen, which may be a result of cutting down the area above the screen, but it’s minor and not too distracting.
The potential elephant in the room here is the Galaxy Note 4. Its display offers better blacks and far greater pixel density thanks to its QHD-resolution panel. We also expect it to bring slightly better colour accuracy in the right mode. But with an RRP £230 higher, these comparisons breeze past the Mate 7 without denting our opinion of it.
It is a fantastic canvas for games and video, better than 5-inch phones by virtue of its size. An extra inch may not sound like a lot on paper, but it’s a big difference in person.
Party like it's 1994: Games new and old look great on the Mate 7
We can’t give this praise without emphasising that we’re happy to dole it out because the phone hardware isn’t a pain in the backside to use, unlike so many earlier giant-screen phones. Finally, 6-inch phones are starting to make sense.
Huawei supplies the Ascend Mate 7 with a plastic screen protector attached, one that’s guaranteed to be bubble-free unlike the one you might try to apply yourself. It’s rather good as it doesn’t have the mottling effect so many screen protectors can burden your phone with. But it’s arguably a bit unnecessary.
The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 uses Gorilla Glass 3, the same scratch-resistant layer used in many (or even most) high-end phones. It’s less likely to get scratched than the phone’s aluminium back.
As the protector appears to cause zero image quality compromise, you might as well leave it on until it starts looking tatty. We’d given it a few little nicks within a week, mind.
Add fairly good outdoors visibility to the Huawei Ascend Mate 7’s good image quality and you have a great little media phone. One of the best at the price.
HUAWEI ASCEND MATE 7: SPEAKER
Speaker quality is also surprisingly decent given the phone only has a single mono speaker outlet on the back. It tries much more than most to provide a bit of mid-range body, avoiding the quite reedy sound that often comes out of single-speaker phones.
We put the Ascend Mate 7 up against the Samsung Galaxy S5, which has a similar single, rear-mounted speaker and found Huawei’s phone to be beefier-sounding, less tinny and better-equipped to deal with ambient noise.
The Mate 7 speaker looks like it'll be rubbish, but isn't
A good deal of this seems to be down to Digital Sound Processing (DSP). There’s clear evidence of compression in quieter bits of audio – to be clear we’re talking about a ‘studio’ compression effect, not the kind of compression that turns a CD into a 64kbps MP3. It’s can be used to alter the perception of loudness of audio to good effect, especially when dealing with cruddy speaker drivers, as it is here.
It’s loud enough, but the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 falls down a bit when you switch it to silent mode. The vibrate function is unusually weak, meaning you’ll need to manually check your phone to ensure you don’t miss anything if you turn the volume down.
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