The brand new Huawei Mate 8 has an ultrapowerful processor

The Chinese manufacturer Huawei has unveiled its new flagship phone, the Mate 8, a phablet with a groundbreaking powerful chipset. It will go on sale in the first quarter of 2016.

This phablet has a 6-inch (1920 x 1080 pixels) screen with "Force Touch" which enables it to analyze various degrees of finger pressure. It is powered by a brand new octa-core Kirin 950 processor, meaning four 2.3GHz ARM Cortex A72 chips and four 1.8GHz 4 Cortex A53 chips. As a result, on paper, the Mate 8 looks like the most powerful smartphone around, ahead of the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy Note 4.

The design of this 4G compatible device is a continuation of the Huawei Mate 7. It also has a digital fingerprint sensor and an NFC chip. It combines a main 16-megapixel camera and a front 8-megapixel camera. In storage terms, this Huawei model is expected to offer between 32GB and 128GB of memory, expandable with a microSD card, along with 3-4GB of RAM depending on the version purchased.

Huawei Mate 8 will run Android Marshmallow (6.0), with Huawei's own EMUI skin on top. When it's launched, a choice of 4 colors (gray, black, gold or bronze) will be offered.

Although it has been unveiled now, the Huawei Mate 8 will not be available before the beginning of 2016, initially in China then in the rest of the world. It will also be demonstrated at CES in Las Vegas (from January 6 to January 9, 2016).

According to Gartner data, Huawei was the third biggest seller of smartphones in the world in the third quarter of 2015 with 27.2 million units sold, behind Samsung (83.5m) and Apple (46m).