Huawei Mate S: Apple’s 3D touch technology competitor?

The Huawei Mate S is the world’s first non-iPhone to sport the 3D touch technology. While 3D touch is its selling point, it’s also the smartphone’s biggest flaw.

Apple’s pressure-sensitive display is one of the key new features of the iPhone 6, according to Mac World. It allows people to press harder on the screen to access extra functions. The amount of pressure exerted by a user’s finger is recorded by the 3D touch technology and in a way, it promises better and newer applications from adding advanced texture and sounds to screens to create a more life-like gaming experience.

Much of the market growth of smartphones comes from the fact that people use them for playing games. Gaming Realms, proprietor of several titles hosted on Pocket Fruity, says that games account for 50% of smartphone app usage, which is the biggest function that people use on their smartphones. 3D touch is useful for gaming since smartphones have limited buttons for control. An on-screen joystick proved to be difficult to manage compared to physical controllers that users can actually touch. With 3D touch, users can execute moves and commands just by using different levels of pressure.

There aren’t a lot of gaming apps on the Android market that support the technology so as of now, it can only be used on some of the built-in apps of the Huawei Mate S. For example, when looking at a photo on the gallery, users can hold down on an area to see it magnified. The more pressure a user puts on a specific location of the photo, the more magnified the area becomes.

While the 3D Touch’s function runs perfectly on iPhones, the same cannot be said for the Huawei Mate S. This is because a significant amount of pressure needs to be applied on the screen before it can register a user’s request. In the long run, this can be detrimental to the durability of the actual unit. It can be quite frustrating when putting a lot of pressure on the screen just to execute a command when smartphone users are used to tapping lightly on the screen to zoom in and out of photos. Perhaps the 3D touch technology will be seen in a more positive light when more apps for it become available on the Android market. Right now, the new technology for the Huawei Mate S certainly has its flaws.

Huawei should’ve just focused on the Mate S’s other features as they’re quite competitive. The physical design is actually good, with a slender 7.2 mm all-metal frame that’s curved to fit nicely in the hands of the user. The specs are also solid, with the device sporting a HD 5.5-inch screen, 13 MP camera, a quad-core 2.2 GHz chipset, and a long-lasting 3000 mAh battery pack. Huawei should’ve perfected the technology first and waited for more apps to support it because as of now, the device isn’t worth buying for the 3D Touch technology alone.

March 10, 2016 at 7:31 pm | Uncategorized