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Honor Magic tucks Huawei's latest smarts into a slab of glass
Huawei is probably best known for its Leica-branded smartphones aimed at high-end users, but its e-commerce brand Honor has also been busy entertaining affordable markets with some surprisingly nice devices -- namely the 8 and the Note 8. To wrap up the year, today the company announced the Honor Magic to showcase some of its latest goodies. "This is an experimental product of ours," said Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei's Consumer Business Group. "This concept phone will help us pre-evaluate uncertain future technologies." In a nutshell, the Magic is a mix of fresh design, faster charging tech, smarter assistant and interesting improvements on other aspects of user experience.
Huawei still thinks 6-inch phablets is the way to go
It's been well over a year since Huawei launched its premium Mate 7 phablet, and as of August, over five million units have been sold worldwide. That's far more impressive than the original goal of just one million phones. While the smaller Mate S has since been released, the company still believes in sticking to the masculine roots of the Mate series, which brings us to the Mate 8. Like before, this model sports the same 6-inch 1080p display spec but now also covers 95 percent of NTSC gamut. As a bonus, there's a piece of 2.5D glass on top of that. Of course, the biggest selling point this time is the new octa-core Kirin 950 chipset which promises much higher performance and efficiency at the same time, mainly thanks to the new 16nm FinFET+ process, some more powerful CPUs (4 x Cortex-A72 and 4 x Cortex-A53), ARM's flagship Mali-T880 GPU and integrated LTE Cat 6 modem.
Huawei's next chipset may give competitors a run for their money
Huawei is now Europe's second largest Android brand, according to Kantar, but there's just no time for celebration. Not too long after launching the Huawei Mate S and the Nexus 6P, the Chinese telecom giant is already teasing the launch of the Mate 8 on November 26. Little is known about this new smartphone so far, but it'll likely be using Huawei's upcoming Kirin 950 chipset announced today, which joins the Apple A9 chip to be one of the first to use TSMC's 16nm FinFET Plus process for improved efficiency. Like its predecessor, the Kirin 950 has an octa-core processor but with much improved performance: 4 x Cortex-A72 and 4 x Cortex-A53 instead of the old mid-range offering of just eight Cortex-A53 cores. It also uses ARM's flagship Mali-T880 GPU so gaming should be blast on the phone.
