Most of you probably do not know that Huawei also makes laptops. You may know about the company’s tablets but may never have heard about the company’s laptop. To be fair, the company has a couple of laptops and most of them are sold in the western markets and that is why you may not have heard about them here.
Huawei is slowly but steadily expanding its laptop line and the latest addition is the Huawei MateBook X Pro that it unveiled at Mobile World Congress (MWC 2018) yesterday. The one thing that got people talking about this laptop is the webcam. The webcam is hidden next to the function keys and to use it, you will have to press it and hold and it will pop up. The webcam will be between the F6 and F7 keys. This means that it is hidden when you are not using it and there is no need to cover your webcam with a tape when you are not using it.
When the webcam is retracted, it is completely off and this is good for those who are worried someone may be watching them through the webcam. The company says that the webcam will not scratch the display even when you close the lid when it is popped out. If this happens, the webcam will gently close to protect your display.
The webcam aside, the Huawei MateBook X Pro has some decent specifications. It has very thin bezels that has its 14-inch display fit on a chassis that would normally hold a 12-inch display. This display has a resolution of 3,000 x 2,000 pixels. Huawei says that this laptop has a screen to body ratio of 91%, quite impressive.
There is no support for Windows Hello but the company has included a fingerprint scanner. The reason for this has something to do with the mechanics of the cameras, the company saw the best option is to go with a fingerprint scanner for this.
The display of the MateBook Pro X Pro is touch sensitive and the company says is brighter than its predecessor. It has an anti-fingerprint coating that will keep it protected from smudges if you happen to use its touch capabilities a lot. With this 3K display, you may be wondering how long it will last before you have to recharge the laptop. The company says that users should expect 15 hours of web browsing, 14 hours of Office-style tasks, or 12 hours of 1080p video playback. Of course, these are conservative numbers and you should get lower figures in real world situations.
For the ports, the Huawei MateBook X Pro has two Thunderbolt 3 ports, a headphone jack and a USB Type A port. It is impressive that the company has managed to squeeze all these in this thin device.
Powering the MateBook X Pro is the Intel Core i5 and i7 processors (U Series). These will be paired with at least 8GB of RAM going all the way up to 16GB and NVIDIA GeForce MX150 discrete graphics with 2 GB of dedicated GDDR5 memory. Storage options vary starting from 256GB to 512GB.
For pricing, the MateBook X Pro will start at $1,847 (KES 188,000) for the Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB model. It goes all the way up to $2,340 (KES 238,000) for Core i7, 16GB RAM with 512GB SSD. As you can see, these are not cheap.
