Hands On With Huawei's New Laptop With A Hidden Camera

Just eight months after Huawei released its first laptop (which I liked quite a bit), the Chinese tech giant already has a sequel. Named the Huawei MateBook X Pro, this laptop was just announced minutes ago at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

I got the chance to test it for a couple of hours earlier this week, and here are the basics that you need to know:

• Huawei has furthered shaved the bezels around that 13.9-inch 3K display, giving the MateBook X Pro a 91% screen-to-body ratio. Last year's already sort of bezel-less laptop had an 84% ratio
• Also new to this second gen Huawei laptop is touchscreen capability. Huawei says the display panel is also protected by Gorilla Glass
• The laptop runs on an 8th generation Intel i7 8550U processor, with 8 or 16GB of RAM and 256 or 512GB of storage. Huawei says it went with the U series instead of the more power-efficient M series because it wanted the most power possible, that it wasn't really concerned about power efficiency because the company has always been great at building products with excellent battery life anyway. I don't think anyone can disagree with that latter claim
• There's a 57.4 Wh battery inside the machine, which Huawei says can pump videos for 12 hours continuously. This means the MateBook X Pro can in theory go even longer if the user is doing less power-hungry task like typing documents. The charging brick, like last year, is also very small for a laptop (it's a slightly larger than a typical phone charger), which makes the whole package very portable
• Last year's Dolby Atmos speaker system is back with an upgrad: it's now Quad speakers with separate channels for treble and bass. I tested the sound briefly, it sounds just as good as last year's laptop, which was the best sounding laptop I've ever used
• The device weighs about 3 pounds (that's 1.34kg to the non-Americans) with dimensions of 11.9-inch x 8.5-inch x 0.57-inch (304mm x 217mm x 14.6mm)
• For ports, you get two USB-Cs (both supports data transfer and power transfer, with one supporting Thunderbolt 3), a traditional USB-A and a headphone jack
• Because the bezels around the display are so slim, Huawei has come up with a new way to house the laptop's front-facing camera: it's hidden within the keyboard

That camera pops-up.

Ben Sin

The laptop has that same metal unibody look found everywhere these days.

Ben Sin

The fingerprint reader embedded into the power button is back.

One press on the camera keyboard button (mapped to the F6 here) pops open the camera. It's just a 1-megapixel shooter, but I had no issue with the video quality

Richard

Ben sin

Richard Yu onstage at the launch event.

Huawei has also announced a new tablet at MWC, named the MediaPad M5. It comes in 8.4-inch or 10.8-inch display sizes, both with 2,560 X 1,600 resolution, and powered by Huawei's own mobile chipset the Kirin 960 with EMUI 8.0 over Android 8.0. Basically it's like a Huawei Mate 10 in tablet form, without the sleek slim bezelled design.

The smaller 8.4-inch MediaPad M5 in my hands.

Battery capacity for the smaller tablet is 5100 mAh and 7500 mAh for the 10.4-incher. The larger tablet also comes in a pro variant that supports Huawei's own stylus, which can support 4,096 levels of pressure.

Huawei's keen to push the MediaPad M5 series as productivity machines, and to that end, the company has brought that useful "desktop mode" (with resizable app windows and proper desktop homescreen set-up) from the Huawei Mate 10 Pro to the tablets. The larger 10.4-inchers also support Huawei's keyboard cover case.

Ben Sin

The stylus in action.

Pricing and release date have not been confirmed at time of this writing. I'll update the piece when I have the information. I'll also test the new laptop more thoroughly in the following weeks.

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