With newer and cheaper phablets coming into the market it is clear that established brands are going to be challenged. When it comes to challengers however, the Huawei Mate S and the OnePlus 2 are some of the best and here is how they fare in a comparison.

Design

There is very little similarity between the two when it comes to design as the Mate S has a metal unibody which gives it a good feel in hand, additionally it is also pretty light and has beveling on its edges. Its fingerprint scanner however, is located on the back but it is still easy to access and very accurate. When it comes to colors, it has three options gold, champagne and gray. As for the OnePlus 2 it only has metal on its frame which is made from an aluminum and magnesium alloy however, its default back panel is made from plastic but it has a nice sandstone layer on top. There are however additional back panels which can be purchased if needed and these come in Kevlar, and several types of wood including bamboo, rosewood and black apricot. Finally it has a fingerprint scanner incorporated into its home button.

Display

Both these devices have similar 5.5 inch displays and each has a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels and density of 401 pixels per inch. However, their display types are different with the Mate S coming with an AMOLED screen and the OnePlus 2 having a LCD version. Additionally the costliest version of the Mate S comes with Force Touch.

Specs

Each of these phablets has the best chipsets produced this year. The Mate S has the HiSilicon Kirin 935 chipset coupled with an octa-core CPU consisting of four cores clocked at 2.2 GHz and four clocked at 1.5 GHz along with a Mali-T628 MP4 GPU. As for the OnePlus 2 it has the latest and greatest chipset from Qualcomm the Snapdragon 810 and it is coupled with an octa-core CPU comprised of four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.56 GHz and four Cortex-A57 cores clocked at 1.82 GHz along with an Adreno 430 GPU .

Memory

The OnePlus 2 lacks a memory slot, while the Mate S has a second SIM slot which can be used to add up to 128 GB of external storage. Coming to RAM, the OnePlus comes with either 3 GB or 4 GB while the Mate S has 3 GB.

Camera

Each of these devices has a 13 megapixel camera with optical image stabilization.

Price

Coming to price, the OnePlus 2 is the cheaper device with its 4 GB RAM version costing $389 unlocked, while the Huawei Mate S has a starting price of $650 in its unlocked form