Huawei was one of the first to unveil its new products in the run up to MWC yesterday. The Chinese electronics and communications giant has chosen to major upon a laptop computer and a tablet for its first publicity burst, these are the Huawei MateBook X Pro and Huawei MediaPad M5 Series respectively.
Huawei MateBook X Pro
This is an attractive looking thin and light laptop that balances those very appealing physical properties with good portable CPU and discrete GPU power, an alluring screen, punchy audio, great battery life, and premium construction materials. Huawei boasts that the MateBook X Pro is housed within a stylish metallic body, crafted with diamond cutting and sandblasting finishing technologies and available in Space Grey or Mystic Silver.
Looking at the Huawei MateBook X Pro powered up, one of the first things you will notice is the expansive screen area with really small bezels. Huawei claims a 91 per cent screen to body ratio for the 13.9-inch LTPS 3K panel (3000 x 2000 pixels). While on the topic of the screen, this panel is a 10-point touch screen (anti-fingerprint coated Corning Gorilla glass) with 260ppi, 100 per cent sRGB gamut, 450 nits maximum brightness, and 1500:1 contrast ratio.
Continuing the description centred upon the physical presence of this machine, it earns its thin and light status by being 304 x 217 x 14.6mm and weighing in at 1.33Kg. Not bad for a 13.9-inch screen device. Sitting between the F6 and F7 function keys on the backlit chiclet keyboard is a pop-up webcam. What might have been a forced decision due to the minimum screen bezels is a neat solution - your visual privacy is assured when recessed and it is quick and easy to pop up the camera when you need it. The keyboard is spill proof too.
Looking around the outside of the laptop you can see Huawei has chosen to equip this machine with a pair of USB Type-C ports (both support device charging, one supports Thunderbolt 3), a USB 3.0 Type A port with 5V/2A output, and a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack. The power button includes a fingerprint sensor and startup time is quoted as 7.8 seconds to desktop when new.
Delving under the bonnet, Huawei has chosen the following key performance components:
- 8th Generation Intel Core i7-8550U processor or 8th Generation Intel Core i5-8250U processor
- Nvidia GeForce MX150 with 2GB GDDR5 / Intel UHD Graphics 620
- 8GB / 16GB LPDDR3 2133 MHz
- 256GB / 512GB NVMe PCIe SSD
- 57.4Wh Li-Po battery (65W charger in the box) said to last for up to 12 hours of 1080p video playback
- Quad speaker system with Dolby Atmos 3D audio
- Quad microphone system
- Huawei Share Wi-Fi transfer system (20Mbps)
Huawei MediaPad M5 Series
This is Huawei's latest Android (EMUI 8.0) tablet family, available in 8.4- and 10.8-inch sizes with 2.5D screen tech. The in-house designed Kirin 960 Series processor is leveraged as the powerplant inside these tablets. Batteries of 5,100mAh for 8.4-inch, and 7,500mAh for 10.8-inch, support QuickCharge tech. Both tablets sport 2K ClariView displays, and up to quad-speaker configuration. The 10.8-inch tablet can be paired with the Huawei M-Pen featuring 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity.
Pricing and availability details for the above devices were sadly lacking at the Huawei MWC 2018 press event.
