It was only a few years ago when the tablet—the device that would not only leverage our addiction to our smartphones onto a bigger, much more eye-friendly screen, but also open up a whole new ecosystem in software and hardware—had been all but written off by the tech media as anything but a niche gadget, its raison d’etre largely fueled by the continuing popularity of ebooks and the nascence of digital newspapers and magazines.
Fast-forward to 2023, and the once struggling tablet category seems to have arrived at a renaissance, or at very least gotten a new lease in life, with some of the world’s biggest tech companies even hedging their bets on tablets finding greater utility in everyday life.
Enter the Huawei MatePad 11-inch 2023, as it is officially called by the tech giant, which is now on offer in a bundle priced at P24,999 in official channels, and comes with freebies worth an estimated P18,000-plus: a Huawei Smart Detachable Magnetic Keyboard, Huawei M-Pencil 2nd Gen, PC-level WPS Office, and a three-month subscription to VIU Premium (which is renewable beyond the cited period of course, because who wants to miss out on all those addictive K-dramas and all things K-pop?). Factoring all those freebies, that basically brings the Huawei MatePad 11-inch 2023, the device itself, at P6,000 thereabouts.
That bundle is nothing less than a steal, which we can say not just as conjecture but as fact having been leveraging the device bundle we have been for a month now.
First, let us talk about the detachable keyboard. It has 1.5mm high key travel and 15mm key caps, which means that it offers a comfortable and responsive typing experience—an experience that remains true even after lengthy use. And unlike most detacheable keyboards available in the market, Huawei’s also includes Fn keys and the support of 40 shortcut combinations to allow for improved efficiency, plus the presence of an independent Esc key. Yes, banging away on the Huawei Smart Detachable Magnetic Keyboard to create documents and presentations is not unlike doing the same on a laptop, and we would even wager that it’s easier to navigate through parts of a page on this combo of tablet and smart keyboard.
Furthering ease of use is the fact that keyboard can be used in either Laptop or Split form, making it more flexible to your comfort levels as you go about your work.
Lest we forget, the Huawei Smart Keyboard has built-in magnetic slot for the M-Pencil that not only makes it easy to put away the pencil when you don’t need it, but also makes it readily within reach when you need to scribble notes, or sketch away when a scenery inspires you. By the way, the pencil is automatically charged whenever you tuck it away in the slot.
Still on the subject of productivity, one of the best bundle goodies of the Huawei MatePad 11-inch 2023 is the inclusion of the PC-level WPS Office, whose UI, features and functionalities will be familiar to those who have used the office suite on a PC, including multiple tab display with fast switching. Even better for tablet users is the free window size adjustment, a functionality that allows users to go back and forth, say, two documents for reference.
Of course, none of these bundles bells and whistles would amount to much without the foundation that the Huawei MatePad 11-inch 2023, the tablet itself, provides—and a solid foundation it is.
The Huawei MatePad 11-inch 2023 measures 253.7 x 165.3 x 7.2 mm (9.99 x 6.51 x 0.28 in), and weighs 480 grams. That’s just a hair over a pound, which makes the tablet so infinitely easy to carry around for hours by the young professionals and college students that Huawei seems to targeting the device at (needless to say, while we may be well past being mistaken as young professional, we nonetheless find the tablet greatly useful). Coming in a Graphite Black colorway and a refined ultra-thin rear cover, the Huawei MatePad 11 has what the company touts in press materials as “a Starlight Sand design which is a UV adhesive on the front of the ultra-thin transparent plate. The Starlight Sand layer is matte, delicate and wear resistant, eliminating the chances of fingerprints and providing a tactile experience. With the use of a Color Coagulation layer as a UV transfer printing and nano-scale optical coating process, it increases the light reflection of the ultra-thin transparent plate. Ink coloring is used on the layer to display the rear cover color that brings about a sophisticated and eye-catching look.”
The 120Hz 2.5K Huawei FullView Display is an IPS LCD and the screen-to-body ratio is at 86%, pushing 2560 x 1600 pixel resolution at a 16:10 ratio. All those numbers translate to not only making productivity tasks not unweildy to deal with but, moreover, consuming entertainment on the go is an utterly engrossing delight. Did we already mention that the Huawei bundle come with a free three-month subscription to VIU Premium? Further, the tablet comes with what the company describes as “quad-channel large-amplitude quad-speaker sound system and upgraded Huawei Histen 8.0, which optimizes and fine-tunes sound and adapts to a myriad of scenes, working with Ultra-Bass and sound field extension algorithm optimization.” This means that even without the assistance of headphones, users will enjoy a full-bodied aural experience. Needless to say, courtesy dictates that you use a headphone in public settings.
The Huawei MatePad 11-inch 2023 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 7250 mAh battery with fast charging. It has also been packed with a 13MP rear camera, while the 8MP front camera would serve any user well for those Zoom meetings that nobody can seem to shake off—and why would we? The tablet runs on the latest version Harmony OS, Huawei’s totally robust version of Android.
Of course, the question that may still linger in the minds of some consumers well aware of the US embargo that remains: “But what about Google?” Well, what about it? Huawei’s App Gallery continues to expand at a fast and steady clip, and already has plenty of the apps commonly used by consumers. Facebook? Twitter? WhatsApp? Viber? All these and more are already available on the App Gallery or via Huawei’s Petal Search. Moreover, the company now also touts Gbox, a “multi-platform instrumented application” that makes the Google Play Store and all the Google goodness to be found there available to users. It functions exactly like Gspace, which we have written about previously.
There is much to love about this Huawei MatePad 11-inch 2023 bundle, which is on offer until June 30—a powerful tablet, an excellent smart keyboard, a digital pencil that sends anybody jotting down and drawing for hours, plus all those other great freebies. More information is available at https://tinyurl.com/54mrjc9m, https://tinyurl.com/4vkc2jed, or https://tinyurl.com/3yrd2ay3.
