We go hands-on with Huawei’s top of the line notebook

Huawei isn’t the name you’d normally associate with notebooks, but the brand has been churning out beautiful and powerful Windows 10-powered laptops for a few years now. Their 2020 refresh of their Matebook X Pro is the best they’ve ever made, offering a sleek design with powerful internals for people on the go. Here’s our Huawei Matebook X Pro (2020) Hands-On Review:

Packaging and contents:

The MateBook X Pro (2020) comes in a sleek, white cardboard box that has its name printed on the front.

Inside sits the notebook itself, as well as its fast charger and the USB Type-C cable.

As gorgeous as ever

Huawei has a knack for building good-looking smartphones with beefy specs, and they’ve managed to translate that manufacturing prowess to making notebooks. The MateBook X Pro (2020) has a very elegant and understated design, utilizing quite a lot of aluminum in its construction.

The chassis is milled from a single block of aluminum, which helps immensely when it comes to rigidity and durability. The overall weight is at 1.33 kilos which is just right for a notebook like this.

There are certainly comparisons to be made with Apple’s MacBook in terms of the overall look, but the design isn’t a complete facsimile of Apple’s notebook offering. For one thing, it’s smaller than a typical 14 -inch notebook, thanks to the insanely small bezels on the display. And while our review unit came in a more traditional grey colorway, there’s also an Emerald Green color variant of the notebook, which looks amazing in photos. We just hope that Huawei offers this color here.

The display on the MateBook X Pro is a 14-inch deal, with a resolution of 3,000 x 2,000. The display looks amazing – it’s touch-enabled, is incredibly bright and covers 100% of the sRGB color gamut – especially important for people who require a color-accurate display for video and photo editing.

There are three ports on the sides of the MateBook X Pro 2020: two USB-C on the left side (with one doubling as the power port for charging and for ThunderBolt 3) with a lone USB-A port on the right side. If you need more than that, you’re going to have to use a dongle, unfortunately.

The MateBook X Pro 2020 still retains many of Huawei’s innovations that made their lineup unique – it still has that pop-up webcam in the chassis, neatly hidden away between function keys, as well as the integrated fingerprint scanner on the power button that makes for more secure log-ins to the notebook.

The keyboard feels nice to type on and has plenty of travel for what it is. And while I’m yet to encounter a trackpad on a notebook that I like, but the one on the MateBook X Pro feels really good.

As for internals, the notebook comes in two distinct flavors: either a 10th generation Intel Core I5-10210U processor or a more powerful Core i7-10510U processor. Memory options range from 8 to 16GB of LDPDDR3 memory, and storage options vary from 512GB to 1TB of NVMe PCIe SSD storage.

You can also get the notebook with an NVIDIA GeForce MX250 discrete graphics for more number-crunching when you’re rendering videos (or playing really old games).

Huawei’s proud of the EMUI desktop app that’s available on the MateBoox X Pro, which allows you to share your phone’s display on the MateBook Pro. Unfortunately, this feature is only available on phones running EMUI, limiting you to Huawei and Honor phones only.

That’s it for this quick hands-on. The Huawei MateBook X Pro 2020 is a gorgeous, solid notebook though we still have to finish our full review to see how it stacks up to its competitors this 2020.

The Huawei MateBook X Pro 2020 is priced at Php 119,990.