By Will Goodbody, Science & Technology Correspondent
The smartphone maker likely to make the biggest impact on the global market this year is Huawei.
Its market share around the world last year grew 44% according to IDC, driven by high-spec but affordable mid-range handsets.
Phones like the GX8, which has just launched here, and which the company hopes will help it to continue to be the fastest growing handset manufacturer in Ireland.
The GX8 is the similar in everything but name and LTE bands to the G8 released in Asia last year.
Weighing in at 167g and with a 5.5 inch display it’s a solid phone.
Some might find it a little chunky and in truth it certainly feels a handful.
But to be fair that doesn’t detract from what is a good phone.
It’s made from a nice looking 90% aluminium unibody finished with ceramic sand blasting.
Its smooth curved edges make it comfortable to hold, although the bezel is noticeably large.
The Full HD TFT display is bright and responsive – but the third generation Gorilla Glass is quite reflective.
It has an extremely accurate and fast rear mounted finger print sensor, which not only can be used for unlocking the phone but also has other function built in – like a down swipe activating the notifications tray.
Inside it is driven by a 1.5Ghz 64bit Snapdragon 616 Octa-core processor, a Qualcomm Adreno 405 series GPU and 3GB of RAM.
That’s a very respectable engine, which makes the handset perform smoothly in almost every instance.
It’s powered by a 3,000mhA battery, and Huawei claims this coupled with its power saving technology means it easily lasts the day.
The 13MP rear facing camera takes solid quality photos in a range of light conditions.
The 5MP front facing unit has a number of selfie modes, like Make-Up for example, which female colleagues in the office thought was great!
The phone comes with 32GB of memory built in, but also takes a microSD card if more space is needed.
It runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop with the Huawei Emotion 3.1 user interface on top – which won’t be to everyone’s taste.
In summary, the GX8 is a solid, good value handset, with a spec to rival others in the same price bracket.
It sells SIM free for around €360, but is available for less as part of bill pay packages through Eir and Meteor, with Tesco Mobile and Three also adding it this month.
Comments welcome via Twitter to @willgoodbody
