New variant of Huawei Mate 8 certified by TENAA adds Force Touch?

When the Huawei Mate S was released last September, one of the features it had was Force Touch. If you're unfamiliar with this, it is the technology that allows the display to read how hard the user is pressing down on the screen. The phone can tell if the glass is being lightly tapped, tapped using 'normal' force, or pressed hard. The phone will respond differently to each level of force. You might have seen this on the Apple iPhone 6s or Apple iPhone 6s Plus marketed as 3D Touch.

Three months after the release of the Huawei Mate S, the manufacturer released its flagship model for the year, the Huawei Mate 8. Surprisingly, there was no Force Touch feature on the device. But it appears that Huawei might be producing a new version of the phone with the capability to detect the amount of pressure being put on the screen. China's TENAA regulatory agency has certified a new variant of the Mate 8 and while the specs match the model already released, there is speculation that this new Mate 8 unit will be equipped with Force Touch.

Just to refresh your memory, the Huawei Mate 8 features a 6-inch LCD display with a resolution of 1080 x 1920. The home grown Kirin 950 chipset is under the hood carrying an octa-core 2.3GHz CPU, and the Mali-T880 MP4 GPU. 4GB of RAM is inside with 32GB/64GB/128GB of native storage. A 128GB capacity microSD slot is available for those who need additional storage, and there is a rear-facing fingerprint sensor on board. The 16MP rear-facing camera features OIS and an aperture of f/2.0. The front-facing 8MP camera shoots selfies and handles video chats. A 4000mAh battery keeps the lights on, and Android 6.0.1 is pre-installed with Huawei's Emotion 4.0 UI on top.

Now that TENAA has signed off this new version of the Huawei Mate 8, an announcement from the manufacturer should be close at hand. At that time we should learn if Huawei made up for its previous omission by packing Force Touch into the new variant of its flagship phone.


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source: TENAA (translated) via Mobipicker