Huawei Mate 8 price, specs, release date & news: find out why this 6-inch new Android phablet will give Samsung Galaxy Note 5 a run for its money

Huawei, the Chinese multinational company headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong, a coastal province south of China, is recently making a big push deep into the mobile devices territory where the more popular smartphone makers like Samsung and Apple already have a strong hold of. But, if you are currently the largest telecom equipment manufacturer in the world, it won't be so much of a hard sell to try to make a name for yourself.

Now, it has upped its ante with their latest announcement of its flagship smartphone device, the 6-inch phablet Huawei Mate 8.

The new device will run Huawei's own octa-core processor, the Kirin 950, which is a 16-nm based chip with four 2.3 GHz cores and four 1.8 GHz cores, along with the Mali-T880 graphics chip and the LTE 4G modem, wrote Forbes. The hardware will also include 3GB of RAM.

The Mate 8 is already equipped with the latest version of Google's Android operating system, the 6.0 Marshmallow. And just like with most Android manufacturers, Huawei has added its personal touch by incorporating its own software and fourth-generation user interface called the EmotionUI.

When it comes to the display, Mate 8's six-inch screen lags a little bit behind the competition giving up some pixels with only an HD 1080×1920 resolution or a resolution of 367 pixels per inch. It is by no means inadequate but not comparable to that of the 5.7-inch Samsung Galaxy Note 5.

The saving grace, though, is that it is going to give a substantial gain in the battery department. Speaking of which, the Mate 8 will be sporting a 4,000mAh of battery, which is also capable of quick charging, according to CNET.

Although, the Mate 8 would have to go up against some of the more well-known Android devices, the Huawei phablet will be pitted directly against its counterpart from Samsung, the Galaxy Note 5 and the Galaxy S6 Edge+.

The Samsung phablets have gained a significant head start resulting from brand recognition, especially in most Western countries, but these devices were also criticized for not including microSD card support recently and for reworking the designs to use sealed batteries, Forbes added. The Mate 8, which has microSD card support, will have this as a selling point advantage over the Samsung devices.

As for the pricing, the Mate 8 will be available for about $500 for the variant with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage and up to $690 for the more premium model with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Buyers of this new Huawei phone can choose from different colors such as champagne gold, moonlight silver, space gray and mocha brown. For the meantime, the phone will only be launched in the Chinese market, but could be expected in the US after the CES in January.