Engadget has posted a hands-on review of the Huawei MateBook X Pro. Head over there to check out their full review.
When Huawei unveiled its first true laptop barely a year ago, it was a slightly more useful MacBook lookalike. While the MateBook X looked a lot like Apple’s device, it offered some minor changes that alleviated common grievances, including the MacBook’s solo USB-C port and its barely-there key travel. At MWC this year, Huawei is unveiling the next generation of the series, called the MateBook X Pro. It’s a larger, more powerful notebook with a better display and impressive audio tech, but one quirky new feature could prevent it from being a good option for professionals.
… The new MateBook feels just as sturdy and premium as its predecessor, once again combining a lightweight build with a sleek profile.
If you can look past the awkward camera placement, or if you don’t intend to use your laptop’s webcam much, there are a few more things to like about the MateBook X Pro. In addition to getting bumped up to the latest eighth-generation Intel Core i5 (or i7) CPUs, the notebook can also be configured with a discrete NVIDIA MX150 graphics chip. This makes it the thinnest laptop of its size to sport discrete graphics, according to Huawei.
The MateBook X Pro has a larger screen than the original — 14 inches — which packs a 13-inch display. It also goes up to 450 nits in brightness over the smaller laptop’s 350 nits. Since I only saw the Pro in a meeting room, I couldn’t tell if the increased luminance would make it easier to see in direct sunlight, but it was certainly clear during our demo. The new model’s screen is now touch-friendly, and got a slight resolution bump to 3,000 x 2,000, maintaining a similar pixel density to the smaller version.
To complement the display during your movies or games, the MateBook X Pro comes with Dolby Atmos 2.0 for crisper and more immersive surround sound. During our demo, Dolby’s sample of nature sounds rang out loud and clear from the laptop’s quad speakers, even when I was facing the back of the device. Huawei also moved the speaker grills from above the keyboard to either side of the keys. The Pro also packs a quad-mic array, two more than before, which should allow for clearer voice quality. A much larger touchpad now sits below the keyboard, making mouse navigation more convenient, too.
Source: Engadget
