Huawei Mate S Pro Reviews

The Huawei Mate S is very nicely made, comes with a useful fingerprint reader and offers a very good range of imaging and camera features, including comprehensive manual control over shooting parameters. However, the camera app feels a little unstructured and images, even in bright light can show very noticeable softness. Video performance cannot quite keep up with the competition and overall, if your focus is on camera performance, you can find better alternatives at similar price levels.

At €649 in Europe and about the same in green through Amazon US, the Huawei Mate S is aimed at the premium market, and it definitely looks the part. Of course, that alone hardly exhausts the list of requirements you bring to the store when you're ready to part with that much cash. Unfortunately, it's impossible for us to recommend the Mate S, and that's actually kind of frustrating — it has the bearing of a competent top-shelfer, but falters in way too many categories to pull off the needed performance. Software, in particular, along with system performance, definitely leave more than a little to be desired, and areas such as the camera and battery life are only kind of close — but not all the way there. The display, too, could use some work, though at least you can tweak the white balance to better the image. So, just a pretty face? No, that's unfair. But perhaps Huawei made a mistake pricing this as steeply — it could have been a darn good product for a hundred less.