When Huawei first engaged me for the Mate S, they first gave me the Mate 7, an older model from last year. I liked a lot about the phone but the one thing I didn’t like was the camera. It wasn’t very good.
When I gave my honest feedback to Huawei, to my surprise they took it really well. Their response
“Yep we know.. that’s why we want you to try the old Mate 7 first before we give you the new one so you’ll feel the difference. The new Mate S comes with an awesome camera”.
I did some research about the Mate S’s camera and I found this article I found insightful. Pulling a quote from there.
Huawei’s recent P8 appeared in a number of camera quality comparisons with the top shooters of 2015, and rightly so, as it created competitive results, so I was understandably curious to see what improvements could be made. The Mate S is equipped with a 13MP f/2.0 4-color RGBW sensor, which is meant to improve its ability to capture light in tough situations, along with a dual-tone LED flash. OIS is also included on the rear camera, along with a Sapphire coated glass lens to make sure that scratches don’t accumulate, which I believe more manufacturers should be copying. A pro-mode is available to take full advantage of this hardware, allowing you to change values on the fly for your ISO, shutter speed, metering and more. LG have paved the way with this of course, but the advantage of being able to control the shutter speed to gain far better pictures at night, or just to encourage some nifty effects cannot be over-stressed.
So I was itching to try the Mate S camera and I thought where else better than to wait for my trip to Hong Kong Disneyland. With lots of colors and nice places to take pictures at. I particularly wanted to try out the Pro-mode.
So anyway here are my results.
The first picture of the Maze at Hong Kong Disneyland Hotel.
The hotel lobby. Love how grand it is with the high ceilings and that really tall Christmas tree.
Picture of us at the entrance of Disneyland.
Well shots with lots of light is really easy. The real test comes in a low light environment. So first I tried it on a scene with the sun setting in the background.
The Small World ride. I took it looked great and I loved how it captured all the colorful lights of the building.
Then I decided to take it to another level. Main Street USA at night.
It was a busy street so any picture I took had blurry people moving around. So I decided to play around with the pro-camera feature and adjust some of the settings gradually.
I like how the pro-mode settings automatically adjusts itself unless you manually tinker with it.
And then I went on to take a few more of the hotel lobby when we were back in the hotel.
This one of Fighter standing in the lift lobby. I’m not a pro photographer but I think the Huawei Mate S lets me take pictures than I could have better taken on my own. Even in the busiest scenes. 
Of course there is the selfie camera that I love so much but I’ve already talked about that extensively. Just to remind you why I love it so much. Here’s a picture of me and Penny with the selfie camera.
Of course I saved the best for last. Of all the pictures I took this trip, the one that I was most proud of was one that I took while walking back from dinner in Hong Kong that week. I took a picture of our hotel and a few other buildings at night. This is how it turned out.
Beautiful! I could make a postcard out of this… and I took it with a phone camera with amateur skills.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space