Hail fella!
It’s been a lot of videos of different topics
since the last about your favourite one - the
laptops!
Recently we’ve got to test the summer-born
laptop from Huawei.
Welcome to Tech-Fellas, mine is Bohdan!!
This is HUAWEI MateBook X Pro 2020.
Has the lockdown served as an improvement
for the company or contrary wise?
We dig this for you, so let’s tech into
it!
Before the main meal - a bit about the role
of this laptop in our world.
What you see is now commonly called an ultrabook.
It’s all about fashion, design, lightweight
body but quite a powerful hardware to let
you comfortably deal with all tasks.
I want you to stick with these words through
the whole review as the laptop is NOR cheap,
neither can be called a gaming one.
In my opinion, the purpose of this kind of
laptops is to please the business people,
who are seemingly the only who’s buying
them, and to keep their style away from the
one the rough brutal and chunky gaming laptops
use to have.
So the outer look I’d describe with one
expression - done by beauty standards.
The design is very minimalistic, elegant,
not clumsy and without any gaming RGB gimmicks.
The metal body in our case is finished with
diamond grinding and sandblasting.
By the way, this color version is called Emerald
Green.
It looks really unusual unlike the classic
Gray and Metallic versions, besides, IMHO,
the green one is a better delight to the eye.
The weight of this little guy is just 1.3
kg.
You can take it everywhere you’d like and
I doubt that it will create some pain in the
back.
Of the interesting engineering decisions over
its body, the first and funny one is the location
of the cooling vents: they're literally hidden
at the very rear near the hinges.
The second one are ports: apart of a headphone
jack, the laptop has JUST two USB 3.1 Type-C
both of which can be used for plugging in
power supply, and one USB 3.0 Type-A port.
When I saw that for the first time, I felt
honestly ANGRY for such a cupidity, but then
outta box I found the cure for happiness:
an adapter that bears one Type-C, one Type-A,
HDMI port and VGA.
Apple could really learn how to express empathy
in a correct way…
simply outtabox!
If you take a look at the screen frame, you
won’t see a web-cam, but how’s that in
a business laptop?!
Hold on, what’s that new button between
the F6 and F7 keys?
Exactly pusing it releases a camera unit with
a pop-up motion.
If you question yourself what is this done
for?
First of all, most of the modern trends are
about privacy, so many conspiracy theorists
might be sleeping more quietly knowing that
the web-cam in their laptop opens on demand
and nobody is watching them.
Secondly, such camera location means that
the screen frame is now thinner, and this
is exactly the thing!
Nice job, I think!
Frankly, my laptop camera is not the most
used unit BUT, these days a webcam in a business
notebook is a necessary thing, so it's nice
that Huawei kept it.
As we pushed the first button, let’s talk
about a keyboard.
It’s of a membrane type here, with 3 levels
of backlight brightness.
It is comfortable to use, although I must
admit that the key travel is not the most
prominent.
Perhaps someone will need to get used to it.
The touchpad here is quite a big one.
It’s still far from the size of the chalkboard
that we see in latest MacBooks, but in the
end definitely no complaints about this one.
Another so-to-say feature of the keyboard
is perfectly distracting you from the speaker
holes.
Honestly, they are hard to notice… also
they are LOUD, whole lotta LOUD!
The sound comes with a large amount of high
frequencies, but that’s just my audiophile
madness.
In fact there are four speakers here that
create a really nice sound flow!
But that’s not all - in symmetry, Huawei
engineers included 4 microphones… probably
to compensate the lack of sight spying through
the closed web-cam with nice hearing technology
;-) пшпшпшпш
Actually, this is for clearer voice in video-calls.
Covid is really changing our priorities.
There is a fingerprint reader in the device
- it is located in the power button, works
snappy and flawlessly.
Let’s move on to the screen.
It’s 13.9 inches LTPS LCD with resolution
3000 x 2000 pixels.
The screen-to-body ratio is 91%.
I find this pretty exciting.
SRGB coverage is 100%.
The maximum brightness is 450nits.
It is pleasant to look at.
The picture is sharp, colors are set neatly
that altogether brings only nice emotions
from watching movies, gaming or working with
documents comfortably.
There is no increased refresh rate, but here
you’ll get one of the most useful features
of this laptop - a sensor grid.
It supports Multitouch up to 10 simultaneously
used fingers.
The reason and advantage of having it is Huawei
Share.
To work properly, the device is using NFC
module for that.
In fact, this function allows sharing the
screen of your Huawei smartphone or a tablet
to Huawei’s laptop.
But it’s not JUST sharing or broadcasting
the picture - you get an active screen of
the mobile device that you can control from
the laptop.
Swiping and tapping across the display, you
can flip through menus, launch applications,
control the camera, play games and even arrange
file transfer between a laptop and a smartphone.
In both ways, by the way.
At first, I thought that all this stuff would
barely work.
Shockingly, everything turned out well.
Big thumbs up for such an ecosystem, at least
someone else cares about that like Apple does.
By the way, Huawei Share works with smartphones
and tablets based on Kirin 970, 980 and 990.
In addition to this and other utility tools,
Huawei has equipped the laptop with a 65 W
power supply that is kinda smart and therefore
suitable for charging Huawei laptops, Huawei
tablets, as well as smartphones.
This idea is not a brand new, but is it really
bad that, for instance, a devoted fan of the
brand who has all the possible products for
a happy life feels even more respect for the
company that doesn’t bend under the sanctions,
and also tries to implement a high functionality
stuff as well as paying attention to high
quality ecosystem.
Well, since we touched the charging topic,
a couple of words about the battery ... So,
from the native adapter, the local 56Wh battery
is charged by 50% in half an hour.
The full charge takes 2 hours.
As the manufacturer says, the regular video
playback will last up to 13 hours.
We tested a FHD video at 50% brightness, and
couldn’t squeeze more than 8 out of it.
The hardware in our computer swings around
the 10th generation Intel® Core i7-10510U
processor with 4 cores working on frequency
from 1.8 to 4.9 GHz.
There’s an Intel UHD Graphics, as well as
a discrete NVidia GeForce MX250 with 2 GB
of GDDR5 video memory.
Storage type is NVMe PCIe SSD for 1TB.
As for the RAM, it is 16 gigs of LPDDR3 with
2133 MHz.
I’ll repeat that the laptop is NOT a gaming
one.
But it will fit easily performing even complex
working tasks… aaaaand games from the age
of Diablo 3.
This one spins on the maximum graphics with
the maximum screen resolution.
Some slowdowns may happen once every 10-15
minutes.
For the rest, the game runs highly smoothly.
Also, just for the sake of interest, we launched
World Of Warships - at 3K resolution the game
is giving lags even on medium presets.
This was the end of our experiments.
The bottom line is that you can work on a
laptop in almost any app… just be more picky
with games if you still decide to play between
your business meetings.
Summarizing the stuff.
Does HUAWEI MateBook X Pro 2020 turn out as
a great device?
I’ll say, yes.
It is good looking, compact, with a hefty
battery, nice speakers and an excellent screen.
It is INDEED a disappointment for eager gamers,
but no one promised the opposite.
If it was a regular machine, I’d say CHEERS-good-bye
to you already, but I must mention once again
an ecosystem, or more precisely, the Huawei
Share that brings a decent bond between a
smartphone or tablet and a computer.
