Right By Your Side: Ananda Everingham on the Huawei Mate 8
The superstar actor, film producer, businessman and all-round nice guy explains why the Huawei Mate 8 is a social luminary’s best friend.
Brought to you by Huawei
8 years ago
The man whose face has graced a thousand billboards and ensured sell-out screening for some of Thailand’s biggest ever movies, Ananda Everingham, recently switched to the Mate 8 while shooting a remake of a Korean romantic comedy TV series called Princess Hours.
He’s been using Huawei’s sleek new beacon of power, clever design and spangly gold-ness for a couple of weeks now—half in Bangkok at his production agency, and half at his Chiang Mai family home, where he also now runs the rustic-cool Hotel Yayee boutique hotel—and reckons it’s about as good as phones get for guys who spend as much time on the road as he does.
“When I’m traveling is the best opportunity I have to get to grips with new technology,” he explains. “I’ve had the time to get used to Mate 8 and the Huawei operating system, especially on long trips. The overall impression is fast, flexible power. It’s a great tool, for travel, for work and for multitasking.”
The North is Ananda’s natural stomping ground, and provides him with a space to escape the pressures that come from Bangkok’s film industry. “Chiang Mai’s become a bit of a hub for me,” he says. “I work there on projects for my production company and travel directly to Vietnam and KL for directorial meetings. My travel upcountry has given me more time to enjoy the phone in the ways Huawei intended.”
Why’s that?
“I’m not a slave to technology, but I spend a lot of time with the phone screen and laptop screen; a lot of film and TV scripts, a lot of emails to respond to. Anything that makes my tasks easier is something I appreciate, as time is always limited for anything that involves TV production. And this thing has a processor called Kirin 950 which is why this thing is so fast.”
Kirin 950 is the name of a chipset, the heart of this slick beast. Combined with a gorgeous six-inch screen and a kick-ass camera with full HD recording, Mate 8 is both a business platform and a pro creative tool, offering inspired ways to capture stuff when out and about. Its battery also provides a mammoth 17 hours’ worth of HD video playback, so forget about toting around an annoying power bar.
If you want a taste of what the camera’s capable of, check out Ananda’s flawlessly cool Instagram (@anandeveringham), where perfectly framed snaps of the socialite lifestyle sit side by side with cool scenes of upcountry exploits.
“I love photography so Instagram is a big part of my life; more so than Facebook. I focus on the things that make me happy. For people who are expressive and enjoy the freedom to try new technologies, I can honestly say this is the new benchmark, the new smartphone gold standard. You don’t need to be a tech-head to benefit from it; its performance is there for everyone to enjoy, especially the camera.”
That camera is a 16-megapixel whopper boasting a proper Sony F2.0 lens, slow-motion capture, image stabilization and low-light shooting. The results speak for themselves, but thanks to the Android platform, creatives like Mr Everingham can also get a little help from savvy app developers.
“The top-end of the smartphone market is populated by brand-chasers. I love Android because it attracts flexible developers, and it doesn’t tie users to a particular ecosystem. This is really important for shooting video—for set design inspiration, for location scouting, prepping a light design in pre-production. It’s all available on Mate 8, like a pre-visualization tool; a creative palette to save time on the actual production that follows. That feeling of not being locked down makes the latest gen of Android feel very open, and on this phone it runs like an utter dream. All you notice is the power, and the snappiness of how it responds.”
All this sounds strange coming from a guy whose life sometimes seems like the perfect embodiment of slow living.
“I’m not a techie, and was actually a fairly late adopter to the whole smartphone addiction thing. But I’m becoming more tech-savvy as I get older because my time is more valuable, and so the way I use it becomes more efficient. That simply gives me more free time to enjoy doing the things I want.”
And that, for now, is running one of the sexiest little hotels in Chiang Mai—an affordable slice of point-perfect local design in the trendy Nimman area. “Having the hotel is fun, and I enjoy the design and management aspects of it,” he explains. “It’s something I always wanted to do, and gives me another reason to be upcountry. The weather’s amazing right now so it’s a good time to enjoy outdoor sports; my family; my home.”
Killer Looks
Just feel that gorgeous metallic unibody design with chamfered edges and a luxurious sandblasted finish. It all makes for an incredibly slim phone with 7.9mm edges despite the high-capacity battery and bleeding-edge camera. Now you just need to decide if you want it in Champagne Gold, Moonlight Silver, Space Gray or Mocha Brown.
All Screen
The unique 2.5D Diamong Cut Glass screen takes up 85% of the phone’s surface, making the Mate 8 Huawei’s most compact phone ever. And with a 6-inch diagonal, the high resolution (1080 x 1920 pixels) adds up to a superlative 368 points per inch density.
On and On
The Mate 8’s 4000mAh battery can play high-definition video for 17 hours straight, and navigate the web for 20. That means heavy users will get two days of use, while regular users could go three days without a charge.
Shoot to Thrill
Like what you see? The Mate 8 features Sony’s latest 16 MP IMX298 sensor. With a wide f/2.0 aperture, a large 1/2.8-inch sensor
and optical stabilization, results are consistently beyond expectations, even in low-light conditions.
Take the Fast Track
The Mate 8’s new Kirin 950 chipset makes it the first smartphone to feature TSMC’s 16 nm FinFET Plus chip technology. The octa-core processor consists of four A72 2.3 GHz cores and four A53 1.8 GHz cores, making it 30 percent faster than its predecessor.
At Your Fingertips
Tap into your phone with the completely redesigned fingerprint sensor or switch to split-screen mode with a quick swipe of your knuckle.
Always Connected
With support for more frequency bands than any other dual-SIM phone, the Mate 8 is the perfect travel companion for those who expect lightning fast connectivity wherever they go.
Brought to you by Huawei
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