It was a very Apple-like moment for Huawei: At the company’s press briefing in Barcelona, a rep held out the MateBook X Pro, a 13.9-inch laptop with crazy-thin bezels, and asked the journalists where the camera was. No one had any idea, and then the man pressed on a key lodged in the middle of the function keys row, and out popped the camera.
It’s the sort of clever solution we’ve grown accustomed to seeing from Apple, and Huawei managed to get a collective gasp for its engineering smarts, even though the jury is still out on whether this solution is actually any good in real-life use.
The Apple comparison is apt since the MateBook X Pro is a dead-ringer for the MacBook Pro. It’s an extremely thin (4.9mm at its thinnest point), metallic-unibody laptop that essentially takes the MacBook Pro’s design and fixes all that’s wrong with it. It has a multi-touch, 3,000×2,000 screen. It has a (single) USB-A port on one side, while the other hosts two USB-C ports an a headphone jack. It has a 91 percent screen-to-body ratio. It’s got Dolby Atmos-powered sound with quad speakers as well as quad mics on board. The X Pro’s battery will last through 12 hours of video playback and 14 hours of “regular work,” Huawei says.
One click, and the camera pops out.
Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
Typically, at this point, I try to find flaws; little details where this thing doesn’t quite match the MacBook Pro, which I still consider to be among the best biz laptops around (useless Touch Bar aside). But it appears Huawei has thought of everything. The keyboard is backlit, the clickpad is huge and covered with glass, and its charger is tiny — roughly the size of two smartphone chargers. The laptop also has a fingerprint sensor that Huawei claims is very fast — it should only take 1.9 seconds to log-in from sleep, and 7.8 seconds to log-in from a fully powered off state. It weighs 1.33kg — again, less than the 13-inch MacBook Pro, which weighs 1.37kg.
Headphone jack and two USB-C ports on one side (one of them supports Thunderbolt 3). On the other side there’s a single USB-A port.
Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
On the spec side, the MateBook X Pro is a beast. It can be configured with an 8th gen Intel Core i7 8555U processor, a GeForce MX150 graphics chip, 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD.
A 91% screen-to-body ratio is the biggest in the industry, Huawei claims.
Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
Unfortunately, the laptops we got to fondle were locked, so we couldn’t see how well that oddly positioned camera works. There are other burning questions as well; for example, I’d have to spend some time with the device to see whether that huge clickpad is any good at registering accidental touches. But the first impression is that Huawei has managed to out-Apple Apple with this one.
The company also launched three new tablets. The Huawei MediaPad M5 comes in 10.8-inch and 8.4-inch sizes, and sports a metal unibody design, a 2,560×1,600 screen, Harman Kardon-powered sound, a battery that can withstand 12 hours of video playback. The tablets charge fast: in 1.9 / 2.9 hours, respectively.
Huawei MediaPad M5 8.4-inch in black.
Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
There’s also the MediaPad M5 Pro, which is essentially the same device as the 10.8-inch MediaPad, but with added M-pen support, a full-sized keyboard and a desktop mode of operation.
The tablets run Android 8.0 and come with Huawei’s octa-core Kirin 960 processor, 4GB of RAM and 32/64/128GB of storage (the M5 Pro only has the 64 and 128GB storage options). All have a 13-megapixel camera on the back and an 8-megapixel selfie cam on the font.
Huawei MediaPad M5 10.8-inch in white.
Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
The MateBook X Pro starts at 1,499 euros ($1,843) for a configuration with an i5 processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage and ends at 1,899 euros ($2,334) for the top specced variant with the i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. It’ll hit the market in Q2 2018, starting with China, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Germany, Spain, Italy and Nordic countries.
The 8.4-inch MediaPad M5 starts at 349 euros ($429) for the 4G/32GB/Wi-FI variant, and ends at 499 euros ($613) for the 4G/128GB/LTE variant. The 10.8-inch version with those same specs will cost 399 euros ($490) / 549 euros ($675), respectively.
Finally, the MediaPad M5 Pro starts at 499 euros ($613) for the 4G/64GB/Wi-Fi version, and ends at 599 euros ($736) for the 4G/128GB/LTE version. The tablets will become available in March in the U.S. and a number of European countries, including the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain.
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