[Mate 8 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] CitizenM:
Living in China for many years now, the first thing I will tell you about buying from an online store is DON'T DO IT...unless you somehow consider it to be very reputable and/or it has excellent word of mouth from people you trust. Even then I would be cautious, although official Huawei store should be no problem. Generally speaking though, even the Chinese themselves are commonly weary about various online purchasing. (For that matter, they're often worried about buying common household items online from the biggest e-retailers here for fear that they may be fake.) I read a report a few months back that some ridiculous percentage (i.e., vast vast majority) of mobile phones sold online in China are counterfeit using counterfeit components. So I would tend to agree that the best method is to have a friend in China buy it for you through an official channel or highly trusted brick and mortar store (i.e., a place they can go to for recourse) and just have them ship it to you (although I just re-read and realized that you said you were planning to come to China, so that would solve the need to re-ship). Note, that in typical Chinese fashion, if you buy from an actual store (still, one you trust), you should be able to negotiate. I did. And even if they don't want to give much up on price then you can ask them what gifts they will include. For me, they offered to throw in some gifts, which added up, probably retailed for about RMB200-300. Since I didn't want the gifts though, I told them that and asked again to just take some money off, so they ultimately agreed. When all was said and done, I was rather happy with the price I got (given it was from such a well-known reputable place) and think it was even significantly less than the price I saw on some of the big name e-retailers here (e.g., Amazon China, JD.com, etc.). So remember (and your contact probably knows this if he/she lives here or is a local), shops here expect to negotiate, or at least be asked. If they offer gifts, try telling them to just keep the gifts and reduce they price, but even if they ultimately refuse, oftentimes the gifts are okay too. Even if they will only give gifts, you may be able to negotiate about which gifts too.

I just bought one a few days ago (xmas gift for a family member here, although will probably pick one up for myself) from a very reputable long-time international store and walked through with them exactly what they would be doing with the phone upon purchase (they said they were required by their company and Huawei for warranty purposes to open the package and perform a review with me and some initial set-up and information taking). Even after they broke open the package with me, made sure it worked, showed me the on-phone system stats and components (i.e., "About the phone") and the warranty info--taking the phone's details to activate warranty from their end--I probably even again asked if the phone was real. By then I was already confident it was (and it was already bought and paid for anyway), but you just get so used to the belt-and-suspenders approach to things here that I couldn't help myself. Not to stereotype an entire country, but it's a land filled with scammers, liars and cheaters, so you absolutely must do what you can to protect yourself, and even then, something might still happen that wasn't anticipated. Anyway, not to get too deep into any cultural statements here and to bring it back to the original question, just err on the side of caution.

About the rooting and Titanium, I would agree with this (Titanium Pro has much more functionality than just backing up, although it does an excellent job of that too), except that there's recently been some questions about rooting the Mate 8, which I've been digging deeper into as well (I consider rooting to be essential, but this is a completely personal opinion). As it turns out, Huawei locks the bootloader of its phones, and you must actually contact Huawei either via email or by going onto their Huawei Club website and setting up a free account, then under the Downloads tab, apply for a bootloader unlock key with your phone's specific information. I'm just going through this process myself now, which I've been discussing with some others on one of the other Mate 8 forums (the "FAQs" forum). Once this bootloader unlock key is provided, then presumably it should be possible to root (e.g., through standard rooting methods), but I have yet to see anyone say they've actually gone through this process successfully with the Mate 8 yet (but am eagerly awaiting it, and seems to be a proven process with prior models). Of course, if there is some other proven/confirmed way to root the Mate 8, I and I'm sure many others would love to hear about it.

Good luck! :good: