Huawei Mate S Press Touch review: Huawei’s force-touch phone falls flat

When the Huawei Mate S was first announced back at the IFA technology trade show in Berlin, it beat Apple to the punch as the first smartphone with a pressure-sensitive screen. However, it’s taken until now (a good three months later) for the “Press Touch” version to touch down in Europe, and it’s set to hit Huawei’s vMall online store any day now.

Despite the delay, Huawei remains the only smartphone manufacturer – apart from Apple – to include such a screen in a smartphone. However, where Apple has clearly spent plenty of time dreaming up a series of practical ways in which its Force Touch display could be put to use, that’s far from the case here.

While Apple’s software builds in quick previews and pop-up menus all through the operating system, Mate S owners are treated to a scant selection of modifications, the majority of which are of dubious worth.

In Huawei’s gallery app, you can use the screen to zoom in and out of photos by pressing the screen. This is mildly useful, but I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve wanted, or needed, to do this. It’s fiddly to use, too, and difficult to keep steady. A two-fingered pinch is far better.

You can also use Press Touch in a few other ways. Bring up the settings and you’ll find that it’s possible to replace the Back, Home and Multitasking soft keys with pressure sensitive zones along the bottom edge of the screen. In the same vein, it’s also possible to set up a couple of extra pressure-sensitive zones in the two top corners.

Once again, though, I found these zones more awkward to use than the standard shortcut keys they replace. It’s also possible to weigh things on the screen using Huawei’s Fun Scale app, but this is too limited to be of any use (you can only weigh small items between 100g and 400g).

Finally, Huawei has promised that there’s a pop-up menu feature in the works, which will add contextual right-click-style menus to homescreen icons. At the time of writing, however, this update had yet to be rolled out. To put it mildly, Huawei’s Press Touch is a shadow of Apple’s Force Touch tech.

One thing the Chinese manufacturer has got right, however, is the physical design of the phone. It’s exceptional.

With rounded glass edges to the 5.5in Full HD AMOLED screen (topped with Gorilla Glass 4), “dual diamond-cut” chamfered edges, a thickness of only 5.7mm at the edges and 7.9mm at its thickest point, plus a curved metal rear and new fingerprint reader, it both looks the part and slips into the pocket rather beautifully.

It’s among the most compact 5.5in phones I’ve handled and feels like a much smaller handset to pick up and use. It’s smartly designed, doesn’t feel overly slippery, and – just like Huawei’s other premium smartphone, the Huawei P8 – it looks fantastic.

Huawei Mate S Press Touch review: Fingerprint reader and Knuckle Sense 2

Fortunately, that isn’t the end of the Mate S’ talents. As with other smartphones in the Huawei range, the Mate S is replete with novelties. There’s a fingerprint reader, mounted just below the camera on the rear, which is both easy to set up and works really quickly.

Being able to unlock your phone in less than a second is genuinely useful, but Huawei being Huawei, it has a couple of extra tricks up its sleeve. Swiping a finger across the reader in a downwards direction launches Android’s notifications menu, while tapping it in the camera app takes a photo.

The Mate S also heralds the next generation of Huawei’s crazy “Knuckle Sense” capability, which debuted on the Huawei P8. You can still double-tap with a knuckle to take a screenshot here, but the Mate S adds the ability to crop screenshots, cut out irregular screenshots, or capture a full web page by dragging your knuckle up the screen.

There’s also a video-recording and live screen-sharing facility via a “two knuckle, double knock” gesture, plus the ability to draw letters with a knuckle to launch the camera and other apps.

A neat feature, to be sure, but I’ll wager that once you’ve tried it, you’ll forget about it altogether – until you activate the feature by accident a couple of months later.

Huawei Mate S Press Touch review: Cameras

The Mate S’ camera looks decent on paper, too. The rear-facing snapper has a resolution of 13 megapixels with a four-colour RGBW subpixel array – just like the Huawei P8 – and the camera is equipped with a dedicated “DSLR-class” image processor chip, optical image stabilisation (OIS) and a sapphire crystal glass covering to protect it from scratches.

Essentially, it’s the same as the Huawei P8’s snapper, so it isn’t surprising to find that image quality is comparable. In other words, the Mate S can take a decent photograph, but the finer details end up being obscured by Huawei’s rather over-aggressive processing and compression. I’ve included a comparison below with the Nexus 6P to show this in action. It’s pretty obvious once you start to zoom in which is the cleaner, crisper image.

In low light, the camera produces rather grainy images and the colours occasionally go awry, but it isn’t a completely dead duck. In fact, Mate S’ effective OIS saves the day here, producing sharp, shake-free images even in dingy rooms.

It’s also nice that Huawei has included a fully fledged Manual mode, giving control over settings such as shutter speed and ISO sensitivity.

Meanwhile, the front-facing camera has a resolution of 8 megapixels and an aperture of f/2.4, plus an improved beauty filter and a front-facing, “soft-light” flash. It’s an excellent camera if you’re into posting pouty pictures of yourself on Instagram. I don’t want to scare anyone by posting sample shots of yours truly here, but take my word for it, the quality is great.

Huawei Mate S Press Touch review: Performance and specifications

In terms of its core specifications, there’s nothing particularly surprising about the Mate S. It has a 64-bit octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 935 SoC with 3GB of RAM to back it up and 128GB of storage.

That’s the same core storage offering as the Huawei P8 and, as expected, the Mate S delivers a very similar set of performance results. Its benchmark scores are strong in Geekbench – not too far behind the fastest smartphones I’ve tested this year – but weak when it comes to delivering smooth, gaming graphics.

Out in the real world, performance is a similarly mixed bag: sometimes smooth and hitch-free; at other times laggy and frustrating. I particularly disliked the slow, laggy keyboard – there’s a palpable delay between tapping a key and text appearing onscreen – which even installing SwiftKey doesn’t fix.

Battery life is a little better, with the Mate S’ 2,700mAh battery lasting for 10hrs 33mins in our video rundown test. That’s three hours longer than the Huawei P8, which is something I suppose, but it isn’t particularly special in the overall scheme of things. I rarely get through a full day without needing to charge.

Likewise, the 1080p screen residing beneath the Mate S’ Press Touch layer isn’t exactly the bees knees when it comes to outright quality. It’s an AMOLED panel, so contrast is perfect, but it isn’t particularly bright, topping out at a lowly 257cd/m².  

Elsewhere, the phone is reasonably well-equipped, with NFC and dual SIM slots, one of which doubles as a microSD card expansion slot. It’s water resistant, too, has support for fast charging, but rather strangely doesn’t support dual-band Wi-Fi.

Huawei Mate S Press Touch review: Software

As for software, the phone runs Android 5.1.1 (Lollipop) with Huawei’s customary Emotion UI 3.1 on top, and this remains very much a “like it or loathe it” affair.

It’s certainly packed with features. New to this version is the ability in the audio recording app to use “directional recording”. The idea here is that, by focussing on individuals huddled around the phone, you can eliminate “side noise”. This works to a point, in that extraneous noise is largely eradicated, but I found it rather garbled the sound, to the extent that I preferred the standard, non-directional mode.

There’s Knuckle Sense 2, of course, and some decent power saving features. The Ultra Power Saver mode works particularly well. This puts the phone into a low power state, allowing you to call and text but not much else, and it got me out of a couple of low-battery scrapes. On one occasion, I turned it on when the battery gauge hit 5% at around 6pm, and it was still on 3% when I went to bed at 11pm.

However, for every great feature, there’s an annoyance to balance it out. The UI looks untidy, whichever fancy theme you choose to apply to it, particularly the notifications pull-down, which for some strange reason never completely fills the screen with messages, leaving half of it empty.

Huawei has removed the app tray, too, forcing you to store your app icons, Apple style, on the home page. You can hide icons, but it’s a faff compared with the way standard Android works.

Huawei Mate S Press Touch review: Verdict

On paper, and in the flesh, the Huawei Mate S looks like a real contender in the flagship smartphone stakes. It’s a fabulous phone to handle and use from a physical perspective, and it’s packed with all the features you could possibly want, plus a few extras to boot.

However, this Press Touch version is pricey, the pressure sensitive features aren’t compelling, and the rest of phone isn’t all that impressive either: battery life is below average and performance is patchy at best. If you’re looking for a large-screened Android phone, this is not the one to buy. I’d choose the Nexus 6P, the OnePlus 2 or the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ over it any day.