Huawei beats iPhone to Force Touch tech

Like most phones in the market, the Mate S is running Android 5.1 Lollipop customised with Huawei’s own Emotion UI 3.1.

Huawei’s selfie mode with its ability to soften and morph your face has always been a joy to play with, but the Mate S takes it up a notch, offering not only an 8-megapixel camera and the requisite software but a forward-facing flash that will bathe your visage in soft, flattering light. They pulled it off a week before Apple’s much anticipated – iPhone 6s and 6s release, which is likely to have the same feature.

The demonstration was intended to show off Huawei’s new Force Touch technology, which can detect how hard you are pressing on the screen, and could be used as a new form of input – to trigger extra menus and screens for example.

Huawei has made a lot of progress globally this year, and the Huawei Mate S is one of their latest.

Just like the HTC and Samsung devices, the Mate S isn’t cheap with a price tag at around €650 including sales tax for the standard version. Nearly rather silently, it also revealed the Huawei G8, which seems to bear many characteristics of both the Honor 7 and the new Mate S. The difference? Pricing for the Force Touch enabled configuration has yet to be announced. The battery in the cheaper phone, which is expected to cost less than £300, is also bigger and it retains the same 13MP rear camera.

There are some more unusual ideas here as well, such as the “Knuckle Sense” technology that lets you use your knuckles to perform various actions (like cutting out a photo) rather than your fingertips – it sounds a bit freaky, and it probably is. The Huawei G8 will be available in silver, gold and white color options from September at the company’s new store in London, which was recently inaugurated along with the launch of the Honor 7 smartphone. Fast charge capabilities also allow the device to provide 2 hours of talk time after just 10 minutes of charging.

Mate S is also introducing Knuckle Sense 2.0. The camera also comes with optical image stabilization, capable of correcting for up to 1.2 degrees of shake. In 2015 they changed their mobile as more flexible.Huawei Hi-silicon Kirin 935 octal-core processor and additional future is 3GB RAM, 32GB of onboard storage.

The Mate S phone will retail for 649 Euros (Rs 48,000) – comparable to the iPhone 6 – with a premium version for 748 Euros (Rs 55,000).