Review: Huawei MatePad 2021

Huawei has continuously offered tablets (known as the MatePad) to the Philippine market despite the shrinking preference towards tablets themselves. With a lot of laptops becoming thinner, lighter and more portable, and phones having bigger screens as well, tablets may seem to struggle under other gadgets’ shadows. Keep reading to know how Huawei’s MatePad competes against other devices.

Design and build

The newest MatePad tablet from Huawei contains a FullView display with an impressive 84% screen-to-body ratio. It’s pretty much identical to its predecessor. This slimness also means a lightweight 460g form factor, made possible due to the ultra-narrow 7.9mm bezels. To add to this, a micro-arc middle frame allows for ergonomic handling. A maximum resolution of 2000×1200 and a TÜV Rheinland Low Blue Light certification means that viewing is not only expansive but safe. Further features of the MatePad’s Full HD panel include Huawei’s ClariVu Display Enhancement Technology which uses an advanced algorithm to enhance image and video quality in real time. The Huawei MatePad comes in a simple but classic Midnight Gray color, which is the model we have on hand.

Despite the MatePad’s lightweight package, it still has premium features contained within it such as the Harmon Kardon quad-channel speaker system. These speakers support Huawei’s Histen 6.1, which has a bass booster and equalizer which together greatly enrich the audio.

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Camera

The MatePad sports an 8MP camera for both the front and the back. To my surprise, it actually captures pictures better even in an indoor setting or unfavorable lighting. This makes it more suitable for video conferencing.

Performance

Powered by a 7nm Kirin 820 processor, the octa-core CPU (1 large and 3 mid-sized Cortex-A76 cores running at a frequency up to 2.36GHz) and custom GPU (Mali-G57) allow the MatePad to handle almost any graphically demanding app and multi-tasking. Working together with its admirable 7250mAh battery, the MatePad can keep power for up to 12.5 hours (with casual web browsing or playing of 1080p local video). However, the tablet only allows 10V/2.25A fast charging which gives it a long 2.5 hours to reach a full charge.

On top of all the aforementioned internal features, the Kirin 820 also comes with a Da Vinci-based NPU that is 73% more powerful than the previous generation. This NPU offers an immersive on-device AI experience for everything from collage generation, object recognition, scene recognition, calorie counting and more. Further intuitive solutions include smart features such as HUAWEI Share (for quick pairing and file transfers), App Multiplier/Multi-Window (for dual window app usage or multitasking), and exclusive FollowCam features that optimize the self-facing camera for video calls and more. FollowCam also includes Smart View for tracing objects and cropping/resizing with regard to the number of objects on the screen, Spotlight Mode (activated by raising your hand) which tracks your movement and gives you the ‘spotlight treatment’, and Camera Gestures which pan your camera based upon your hand controls.

Last but not least, prospective MatePad users can download large files and stream HD videos with ease due to the tablet’s Wi-Fi 6 compatibility, which supports 160MHz channel bandwidth. This in turn allows an impressively quick maximum speed of 2,400Mbps for high speed downloads.

The App Gallery

As we all know by now, Huawei hasn’t had Google Mobile Services since May 2019 and it was quite an adjustment to work around its App Gallery in the beginning. However, Huawei has definitely invested their time on providing users a smoother way to download all the apps users could possibly need and this makes the experience with the MatePad 2021 much better especially with its powerful processor.

Verdict

The MatePad 2021 is priced at P20,990. It may be a bit expensive but good features always come at a cost. This 10.4-inch screen paired with a powerful processor, long battery life, impressive speakers, M-Pencil support and a not-so-bad camera, it really makes itself known.

In the box: