Chinese tech company Huawei competes with leading high-end phone makers Apple and Samsung with the release of its new flagship Mate S. With the unit, Huawei hopes to improve customer perception of its entire line of devices and boost sales.
Mate S is Huawei's counterpart to Apple's iPhone 6S. It is positioned as a premium handset with great design and great internal hardware. The Mate S makes use of touch screen technology and comes with color variants like the iPhone: champagne or silver in regular versions and gold or pink in premium versions.
Although both models are made of the same material, Mate S boasts slimmer antenna lines that blend in with the phone's color scheme. Android Headlines reports about Huawei's recent tweet "#HuaweiMateS in #RoseGold, from head to toe". It references to Apple's iPhone that has white front panels with only the aluminum backing in rose gold. In fact, iPhone's antenna lines were criticized because its white color sticks out from the casing's rose gold tone.
Huawei wants to "move beyond basic touchscreen interactions" according to The Verge. The Mate S uses pressure-sensitive technology dubbed as Knuckle Sense 2.0. Similar to Apple's 3D Touch, Huawei's Knuckle Sense enables switching between apps and zooming in on photos using the knuckles. One can draw a letter with the knuckles to launch an app assigned with that letter.
Huawei even showcased the Mate S' capability to be used as a scale in weighing objects. In the IFA show, an orange placed on top of the smartphone was weighed. Although there are questions on its accuracy, Huawei is confident that this feature is an innovation that can be further enhanced.
CSS Insight's chief of research Ben Wood has this to say about Huawei's Mate S: "It's very reminiscent of Samsung's approach of taking every single bit of technology and packaging it into a single device. It is 'specsmanship' in a market of near identical smartphones from a multitude of different phone makers."
According to CNBC, Huawei might become the next Samsung in places outside China. With the Mate S, the company wants to enter the high-end market of the phone industry to help increase profits and provide a good image for its handsets with the creation of a premium flagship design.
Whether the Mate S will be successful or not in achieving Huawei's goal of dominating the luxury phone industry cannot be currently predicted. The Mate S is considered the company's most costly smartphone up to date with a price of €649 for its 32 GB model and €699 for the 64 GB variant.
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