The Huawei Mate 8 is undoubtedly one of the best phones I have reviewed, no doubt it still looks pretty much like its predecessor, Huawei has upgraded its internals to be a very competent product in its class. Now, let’s talk about it as a device for the extreme users or road warriors, the Mate 8 has a huge screen and decent specs sheet to satisfy, so naturally most users of this category will intend to treat it as their sole device for entertainment and productivity, and we hereby list down the reasons to own the Huawei Mate 8 should you fall into this user category.

Kirin 950 Octa Core processor + 4000mAh battery + Quick Charge = The Perfect Combo

There’s hardly a smartphone with such a great combination of performance and battery life, the Mate 8 certainly tends to deliver that with the combination of the sophisticated Kirin 950 Octa Core processor and a huge 4000mAh battery. Why so you may ask? Firstly, the processor is built on an extremely efficient 16nm FinFET process that delivers great performance with two groups of quad- core processors, the quad set of Cortex-A72 high performance cores in particular is a much improved chipset with a fast 2.3GHz clock speed, while it still retains the power efficient Cortex-A53 low powered quad-core chips to ensure battery life is conserved properly when idle.

Therefore, the 4000mAh battery comes in as a compliment to Huawei’s own powerful and efficient chip to offer great battery life, and in my tests, the phone managed to last a full working day despite a whooping 5 hour on screen time, which some of its competition will not be able to achieve. In fact, you might even forget to charge the phone due to its great performance, but thankfully the phone supports quick charge that juices the huge battery in two hours if fully exhausted, so make sure you keep that quick charger handy if you are on a road trip.

Insert a second SIM or expand your storage

Road warriors will certainly not be able to do without a dual SIM and storage expansion on a smartphone, the Huawei Mate 8 offers the best of both worlds with its hybrid SIM tray, which will allow you to either insert a second SIM or MicroSD card. One thing to note about the second SIM slot is that it will support switching to 4G networks, which eliminates the need to swap SIM cards should you want to have it connect to 4G networks, while the other SIM slot will be connected to 2G for standby.

If you really need to expand the Mate 8’s storage while having a second SIM inserted at the same time, don’t forget that the phone supports USB on-the-go, which you will be able connect external hard drives and flash drive, which works just like a computer.

A powerful camera to substitute your point and shoot camera

DSLR’s aren’t the most compact gadgets, action cameras lack of a proper display while point and shoot cameras are just, simply put, point and shoots. The Huawei Mate 8 will certainly serve well as a great on-the-go point and shoot camera with its optical stabilized 16-megapixel camera, pictures will look great while you get to have a larger display to enjoy your shots, there are also various camera modes on the Mate 8 to suit most photography scenes. If you ever want to take a selfie, this couldn’t be a better device to replace your heavy DSLR, as it features a really high resolution 8- megapixel front camera with beautify features to make your pimples and acne go away.

And before I forget, the fingerprint scanner on the back will serve well as a shutter key for the front camera.

Huawei’s Premium Service with 1-to-1 device exchange and screen crack protection

The Huawei Mate 8 may not be the most affordable device out there, but it certainly comes with great value that not many premium smartphone makers are able to offer, the company offers a six months 1-to-1 device exchange program that will certainly benefit road warriors should they encounter major hardware defects on their devices. Otherwise, you could also top up RM150 upon purchasing from Vmall.my for a one year screen protection warranty to avoid paying for expensive damages should you accidentally crack the phone’s display.