Huawei Mate 8 is official, features powerful Kirin 950 processor, full HD display and metal body

After weeks of speculation and rumors, Huawei finally announced the Mate 8 in Shanghai this morning. It’s being targeted at the Chinese market, but the company is expected to shed more light on the device’s international launch at CES in January next year. Sadly, a lot of details are being left out of today’s press release. The spec-hungry among you will be upset to read that — despite it being official — Huawei has been vague on a number of features…

From what we do know about it, the Mate 8 looks like another great piece of hardware from the growing Chinese manufacturer.

Like a lot of its phones, the Mate 8 is built primarily from aerospace-grade aluminum and features a gently rounded soft, anodized back. Here you’ll find the fingerprint sensor which — if it’s anything like the Mate S or Honor 7‘s — will be really fast and accurate. The fingerprint scanner is joined by a camera of unknown resolution and a dual-tone LED flash.

Huawei boasts that the screen-to-body ratio is a whopping 83%, although, like most of Huawei’s recent phones, we expect that’s because the company opted to show the black gap around the edges of the display panel, rather than covering it with external bezel. The screen itself is a full HD resolution 6-inch panel which covers 95% of NTSC gamut (its colors should be awesome), and is covered by 2.5D curved diamond-cut glass.

Perhaps the most exciting feature is the inclusion of Huawei’s brand-new Kirin 950 processor. The manufacturer only recently announced the new chip, and early benchmarks suggest it will give the Snapdragon 820 and Samsung Exynos 8890 chips a run for their money. It uses TSMCs 16nm FinFET process and combines a quad-core A72 2.3GHz processor with a 4 x A53 1.8GHz processor along with Huawei’s i5 intelligent coprocessor for dealing with sensor information.

We don’t know whether there’s going to be a QHD version of the phone, if it will feature the pressure sensitive ‘Force Touch’ technology, how much RAM or storage it has, how good the camera is or what version of Android it runs. But we will find out at CES in a couple of months, at which point we’ll discover all of the nitty-gritty details as well as pricing and availability outside of China. It’s going to be available in four colors: Space Gray, Moonlight Silver, Mocha Brown and Champagne Gold.