Apart from its telecommunication equipment, Huawei is better known globally for its smartphones coming out with increasing innovative features. The Chinese company also has its tentacles spread towards the manufacture of laptops, tablets and other gadgets. At the ongoing CES 2019, the company has unveiled two of its gadgets for the US market. Huawei technically cannot sell its phones in the US so, we are not referring to its latest cool flagship phones but the MateBook 13 laptop as well as the MediaPad M5 Lite tablet.
Both the MateBook 13 laptop and MediaPad M5 Lite tablet were launched no too long ago in China and now the company is making them available in the US. Let’s take a brief look at the features of both gadgets.
Huawei MediaPad M5 Lite
The MediaPad M5 Lite comes with a similar design as the MediaPad M5 but the model is a trimmed down version just as the name suggests. The tablet features an aluminium unibody and a 10.1-inch display but this time around, the orientation of the Huawei logo is changed to a landscape direction while the physical home button is also positioned in the same direction. The display adopts a 16:9 aspect ratio and has a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution. Do note that the M5 Lie resolution is slightly lower than that of the MediaPad M5. The M5 Lite also comes with a less powerful Hisilicon Kirin 659 SoC and is available in two memory variants. There is a 3GB RAM+32GB storage model as well as a 4GB RAM+64GB storage variant. The MediaPad M5 Lite also comes with four speakers crafted by Harman Kardon and they work in sync with Huawei’s Histen 5.0 sound system to deliver 3D surround sound. It is equally bundled with an M-Pen Lite stylus which offers 2,048-levels of pressure compared to the regular M5’s 4,096-levels. The stylus is only available in some region and looks like the US is inclusive.
Furthermore, the tablet packs a mammoth 7500mAh battery which should provide enough juice to power long multimedia and gaming sessions. Providing the interface is the Android 8.0 Oreo-based EMUI 8.0 OS. The tablet also comes with a dedicated “Kids Corner” interface as well as some novel behaviour-focused controls such as the ability to detect when the tablet is too close to a face, the ambient light is below a certain threshold or if the tablet’s being used from an “unhealthy” angle, such as overhead. In such circumstances, it will then pop up a little warning animation in the corner, which expands to the entire screen if not heeded.
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The tablet is available in Champagne Gold and Space Grey colours. The MediaPaad M5 Lite is expected to become available at the end of January and would retail for just $299 in the US. This is a pretty good bargain at that price.
Huawei MateBook 13
Talking about the MateBook 13 laptop, it adopts Huawei’s family-style full-screen design, with narrow bezels around it. The left and right-side bezels are just 4.4 mm while the laptop has a screen ratio of 88%. As the name implies, it packs a 13-inch IPS glossy screen with a resolution of 2160×1440 pixels (3:2). The display has a 178-degree wide-angle view, 1000:1 contrast, typical brightness of 300nits and minimum of 240nit, but the screen does not support touch control. The laptop has a thin 14.9mm metal body and weighs just 1.28kg. The body is manufactured using diamond cutting technology, supplemented by delicate sandblasting technology with well-chamfered edges. 
The Matebook 13 is powered by the latest eighth-generation Intel Core i7-8568U (Whiskey Lake) processor with the lower model utilising an Intel Core i5-8265 chipset. The laptop is also equipped with an NVIDIA MX 150 discrete graphics, 2GB GDDR5 independent graphics memory, thermal design power consumption 25W, with LPDDR3 memory.
On the internals, it has a shark fin fan 2.0 smart cooling system, dual fan separation heat source, seven sensors real-time temperature control. The battery capacity is 41.838Whr (3670mAh/11.4V), the theoretical battery life is about 10 hours, and it can be used for 2.5 hours after charging for 15 minutes. The interface has only two USB-Cs with data transfer and charging on the left side, data transfer and DisplayPort output on the right side, and a 3.5mm headset. Other aspects, it packs a full-size island chocolate keyboard, power button which also doubles as a fingerprint sensor, dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0, 1MP camera, dual speaker, dual microphone, Dolby Atmos sound.
Read Also: Chuwi LapBook Pro: A Huawei MateBook X Pro alternative
The MateBook 13 will be available at the end of January starting at $1,000 with integrated graphics and $1,300 for the model with discrete. Because of the discrete graphics option, the MateBook 13 isn’t fanless like the X models, which makes it thicker, and it scales back to two speakers from four. It will come in Space Gray for a Core i7 or silver for a Core i5 with prices starting at just under $1,000.
For more CES 2019 coverage, check out this link.
