“Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens, it is possible in some pictures to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento, because the painter ‘repented,’ changed his mind.”
So begins Lillian Hellman in Pentimento: A Book of Portraits, the legendary playwright’s acclaimed—and later on controversial—1973 follow-up to her National Book Award-winning first volume of memoirs, An Unfinished Woman.
The quote also opens Julia, director Fred Zinnemann’s Academy Award-winning 1977 film based on the contentious chapter of the same name in Pentimento. The film starred Jane Fonda as the young Lillian Hellman and Vanessa Redgrave as the title character, an anti-Nazi activist in pre-World War II Vienna. It scored a leading 11 nominations at the 50th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, ultimately collecting three Oscars: Best Supporting Actress (for Redgrave), Best Supporting Actor (for Jason Robards as Dashiell Hammett, another legendary writer) and Best Adapted Screenplay.
It may seem odd to be opening a review about the MediaPad M5 Lite, Huawei’s new tablet offering, with that preceding bit of rumination on Julia, but it could not be helped. That period film—with its exquisite costumes, moody cinematography, meditative pacing and bravura performances—provided fuel to fervid literary dreams. Who could forget, or resist, the birthing pains of that tour de force of theater The Children’s Hour as portrayed in the film, with Fonda’s Hellmann struggling through crippling self-doubt, withering critiques from Hammett, and a temperamental typewriter that, in one magnificent scene she throws out of a window with a supremely satisfying shriek of frustration.
The MediaPad M5 Lite will no doubt make for a far more dependable writer’s tool, especially if paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, and given the solid hardware Huawei has shoehorned into its compact frame: generous screen real estate, more than decent processing power to handle a variety of tasks simultaneously, plus Wi-Fi connectivity that allows for spurts of research as the need arises.
Huawei’s latest entry in the tablet landscape comes amid media reports of a market that has stagnated, whether you are a tech company bearing the name of a fruit or among the plethora of players leveraging Google’s dominant Android operating system. According to a report filed by Felix Richter in Statista last November, “As smartphones grew larger and tablet innovation faded away, the market’s growth came to a screeching halt by the end of 2014, and worldwide tablet sales have been shrinking ever since.”
Will Huawei be able to reverse the trend with the MediaPad M5 Lite? It certainly makes for a compelling case. Just hitting the local stores, the MediaPad M5 Lite is the more affordable version of the trifecta of tablets Huawei launched at last year’s annual Mobile World Congress, but do not mistake this for a budget iteration. Nobody will anyway: with dimensions measuring 9.58 x 6.39 x 0.30 inches, the tablet, running on Android 8.0 (Oreo), is wrapped in a full-metal body with a matte finish that gives it a very premium look and feel. The corners have been gently rounded, and the sides are discreetly softened besides getting chamfered at the top and bottom to highlight one of the outstanding features of the M5 Lite—quad
stereo speakers that bear the imprimatur of sound specialist Harman Kardon, providing a solid audio experience that is punchy with bass, and with minimal distortion even with the volume set high. And, yes, it does have a 3.5mm jack for those premium wired headphones you bought not so long ago, allowing you to enjoy your Spotify playlist without annoying everybody else around you.
Elsewhere, the left side plays host to the USB Type-C 1.0 reversible connector and the microSD slot that can take as much as a 256GB card, while on the right are the volume controls and the power button. The back of the MediaPad M5 Lite has been pretty much left unencumbered by unnecessary flourishes, with little else but the Huawei and Harman Kardon branding, plus the 8MP camera that is raised only ever so slightly. At the top center of the tablet’s front is the selfie camera that is also an 8MP affair, and across it, just below the screen, is the fingerprint scanner—a feature you won’t typically find in a tablet at this price range (P18,990 with a free Bluetooth speaker thrown in for good measure), certainly not on a branded tablet. Yes, both shooters are not something anybody will write home about, but the pictures they yield are more than decent enough, the snaps will surely fit in nicely with the rest in your Instagram feed.
And then there is the MediaPad M5 Lite’s screen, framed by bezels that Huawei has slimmed down considerably. As with other tablets, you can peruse the M5 Lite in either portrait or horizontal orientation, but the central placement of the front-facing camera and the fingerprint scanner more than implies the horizontal orientation to be the most optimal. And with good reason.
Measuring 10.1 inches diagonally, with 1920 x 1200 resolution and a 224 PPI density, the MediaPad M5 Lite’s IPS screen may not jam as many pixels per inch as premium-priced tablets, but it is a full HD display that will serve well all sorts of media consumption and those intermittent bursts of productivity. The blacks are deep and the color reproduction is vibrant, making the tablet an excellent platform for those increasingly frequent Netflix binges and YouTube obsessions. Pair it with a Bluetooth keyboard and the M5 Lite—with its screen real estate, processing power, and that 7500 mAh battery that provides juice for 12 hours—is the perfect option to carry around on days when you do not want to be weighed down by a laptop.
Of course, instead of typing away, one could simply scribble down notes and even draw, as the MediaPad M5 Lite comes with the battery-powered Huawei M-Pen Lite stylus. We must confess, however, that given our hideous penmanship, this is something we will never warm up to.
Reportedly, there will be an upgrade path to Android 9 (Pie) for the Oreo-packing M5 Lite, but nobody hold their breath over such a report. Besides, Oreo is a solid version of the operating system which, on top of the efficient HiSilicon Kirin 659 octa-core processor, the Mali T830 MP2 GPU and the 4GB RAM, makes the tablet run so efficiently and smoothly that it could very well become our favorite tool to churn out the stories that need to be written and the copies that need to be edited in Google Docs (Microsoft Word is preinstalled). We may even get to finally write that long-gestating novel on this.
Then again, maybe not. It would be quite costly if, in a moment of literary frustration, we channel our inner Jane Fonda doing Lillian Hellman, let out a shriek and….
- More information on the specifications of the Huawei MediaPad M5 Lite is available at bit.ly/2CpWrfQ.