When Apple introduced the ungodly huge iPad Pro 12.9-inch, many followed suit because, as it turns out, it is a good size for creatives. Over the years, the largest tablets remained around that size until this year when Lenovo and Samsung took it to the next level with an even ungodlier large tablet with an outrageous screen size of over 14 inches. Soon after, Xiaomi revealed its own huge-ass 14” tablet.
Now, Huawei, too, is offering up a laptop-size tablet. Granted, the Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2 [CH] is about an inch smaller but it is still huge for a tablet. I mean, it is laptop size for the love of god! This is not just a race for large-screen tablets. No. No. It is not that simple.
I think businesses are just starting to realize they could earn extra through the sale of an important piece of a laptop: the keyboard with the built-in trackpad. Imagine they used to include that as a standard but now it seems like people have no qualms about paying extra for it and if so, why add that cost to your production? Why not let people decide if they need the keyboard or not? I could be wrong and perhaps, some people do want a large keyboard-less computing device.
Anyhoo, back to the Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2. It is a HarmonyOS tablet (obviously), and it is the first NearLink tablet, and I believe, the first tablet to use a flexible OLED display. And oh, it comes with a Huawei M-Pencil (third generation) which is a NearLink device.
It may be huge but the Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2 is very much lighter than an iPad Pro 12.9”, coming at about 580g (1.28 lbs) and it is incredibly thin too, measuring just 5.5 mm (0.22 inches). Making the 13.2” 2.8K resolution (2,880 x 1,920 pixels) display even more impressive is the ultra-narrow bezel surrounding it which results in a cool 94% screen-to-body ratio.
This display has a refresh rate of 144 Hz and a peak brightness of 1,000 nits. Under the hood, it is powered by the same chip as the new Mate60 Pro and Mate60 Pro+, which is the Hisilicon Kirin 9000s.
Other key spec sheet details include 12 or 16 GB RAM, 256/512 or 1 TB storage, a dual camera setup (13 MP high-res portrait camera + an 8 MP wide-angle camera) with flash, a 16 MP front-facing camera with dToF, a 10,100 mAh battery good for 8 hours of video consumption, dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.2, support BLE, AAC and LDAC, built-in positioning (GPS/GLONASS/Beidou/Galileo/QZSS), USB-C (USB 3.1 Gen1), 4x microphones, and 6x speakers.
The new Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2 HarmonyOS-powered tablet is available to buy in China with a starting price of 5,199 yuan [CH] (which is around US$712 today).
Images: Huawei [CH].
