I loved last year"s MateBook X. It was thin and light enough to where you could throw it in a bag and not really feel it, but it made surprisingly few compromises. It included a U-series processor but with a fanless design, one of the best fingerprint sensors on the market, a beautiful screen, Dolby Atmos audio, and more.
So naturally, I was excited when Huawei told me that it was going to be announcing a new MateBook at Mobile World Congress. That new PC is the MateBook X Pro, which is a new member of the MateBook family, rather than a replacement for last year"s X.
The new PC is still a clamshell-style laptop, as opposed to a convertible, and it"s still super thin and light at 14.6mm thin and 1.3kg. This one does include a fan though, since it has beefier internals with not just a quad-core eighth-generation processor, but a dedicated Nvidia GeForce MX150 GPU with 2GB GDDR5.
This is still definitely going to be an easy laptop to carry around. It"s a bit bigger than the original MateBook X, and you can feel it, but if you want the additional size and power of the Pro, you"re going to get a bit of extra weight.
The new 13.9-inch 3,000x2,000 display looks beautiful. Indeed, this isn"t surprising at all. Huawei"s products tend to have excellent screens. One improvement that you"ll find in the MateBook X Pro is that it supports touch, although there"s no pen support. Of course, pen input isn"t really natural when you can"t use the device as a convertible, so we"ll let that one slide.
One thing that you"ll notice on the keyboard is that there"s an extra key between F6 and F7, and that"s a hidden camera. Physical camera guards seem to be getting very popular, and this is Huawei"s way of implementing it.
One thing that I found particularly interesting about this mechanism is that when you open the MateBook X Pro, the camera will be in the same state that it was previously. In other words, if you open the camera and close the lid on the laptop, the camera will open again when you open the PC. Huawei tells me that this is by design.
The keys on the keyboard travel 1.22mm, which is the same as on the MateBook X.
This is going to be a matter of preference. I found the keyboard to be really comfortable to use, but if you don"t like shallow keys, you might take issue with it.
And of course, the fingerprint sensor is in the power button. The really cool thing about it is that it scans your fingerprint when you press the button to power it on, rather than having to do it after the device has booted. It"s really convenient and useful, and to be completely honest, Huawei just makes some of the best fingerprint sensors on the market.
I can"t wait to get my hands on one of these to review. I really enjoy Huawei"s approach to building Windows 10 PCs, as the features feel well thought-out. Hopefully the firm decides to launch it in the U.S. sooner rather than later.