Huawei MatePad Pro 10.8 inch WiFi 128GB gray 5G price and review

Should you buy Huawei MatePad Pro 10.8 inch WiFi 128GB gray? Does Huawei MatePad Pro 10.8 inch WiFi 128GB gray support 5G? The MatePad Pro features a sleek and lightweight form factor, a beautiful 10.8-inch display with a punch-hole selfie snapper, a flash supported camera on the back and all the other trappings you’d expect to find on a premium slate. That means Huawei’s top of the line Kirin 990 chipset with a 5G modem for high-speed mobile data and ample RAM to keep things chugging along smoothly. Find more about Huawei MatePad Pro 10.8 inch WiFi 128GB gray Huawei MatePad Pro 10.8 inch WiFi 128GB gray 5G price and review.

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Huawei MatePad Pro 10.8 inch WiFi 128GB gray 5G price and review

Pros & Cons – Huawei MatePad Pro 10.8 inch WiFi 128GB gray 5G

Pros

Fantastic build quality
Great display
Useful multitasking features
Quick performance
Solid battery life + charging options

Cons

No Google services
App support not even close to matching iPad
No U.S. availability
Weak haptics
Off-putting hole-punch camera

Package content

Tablet (built-in battery)
Charger
Type-C to 3.5 mm audio adapter
Type-C data line
Retrieve card pin
Quick Guide
Warranty Card

Huawei MatePad Pro 10.8 inch WiFi 128GB gray 5G specs

General

Brand: Huawei
Model Number: MRX-AL09
Model: Matepad Pro
Classification: Tablet PC
OS: Android 10.0
CPU: Hisilicon Kirin 990
Core: 2.86GHz, Octa-Core
GPU: Mali G76

Dimensions

Product Weight: 0.37kg
Package Weight: 0.87kg
Product Size(L x W x H): 246 x 159 x 7.2mm
Package Size(L x W x H): 25.10 x 21.00 x 5.30cm

Display

Screen Type: IPS Capacitive Screen
Screen Size: 10.8 inch
Screen Resolution: 2560 x 1600

Processor

CPU:
HUAWEI Kirin 990
Eight core
2 x Cortex-A76 Based 2.86 GHz + 2 x Cortex-A76 Based 2.09 GHz + 4 x Cortex-A55 1.86 GHz

GPU:
16-Core Mali-G76 600 MHz

NPU:
Dual NPU (neural network processing unit)

Camera

Rear camera
13 megapixel, f/1.8 aperture, auto focus; support flash
Focus mode:
Phase focusing

Photo resolution:
Up to 4160 × 3120 pixels
*There may be differences in the pixels of different photo modes, please take the actual as the standard

Camera resolution:
Up to 3840 x 2160 pixels
*The video pixels of different shooting modes may be different, please take the actual situation as the standard

Front camera
8 megapixel, f/2.0 aperture, fixed focal length

Photo resolution:
Up to 3264 x 2448 pixels
*The video pixels of different shooting modes may be different, please take the actual situation as the standard

Camera resolution:
Up to 1920 x 1080 pixels*
*The video pixels of different shooting modes may be different, please take the actual situation as the standard

Shooting function:
Support professional mode, slow motion, night view, panorama, streamer shutter, HDR, delay photography, dynamic photo, watermark, document correction and other shooting modes; support beauty, timing photography, voice control photography, smiling face capture, target tracking and other functional settings

Network

Support Network:
TD-LTE: B34/B38/B39/B40/B41
LTE FDD: B1/B2/B3/B4/B5/B7/B8/B18/B19/B20/B26
WCDMA: B1/B2/B4/B5/B6/B8/B19
GSM: B2/B3/B5/B8
WIFI: 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac(2.4GHz&5GHz)
GPS: Yes
Bluetooth: 5.1

Storage

RAM: 6GB
ROM: 128GB
External Memory: TF card up to 256GB (not included)

Other

Connectivity	SIM Card Slot: 1 SD Card Port: 1 Type-C: 1
Power	Battery Capacity(mAh): 7250mAh
Other Features	G-sensor: Supported Speaker: Supported OTG: Supported Languages: Multi-language

Huawei MatePad Pro 10.8 inch WiFi 128GB gray 5G price

The price starts at £499.99 (around $630, AU$900) in the UK, which is the variant with 6GB of RAM and 128GB variant. There’s also an 8GB version, but that’s not available in the UK.

Huawei MatePad Pro (Wi-Fi only)
- 6GB RAM + 128GB storage — £499/€549
- 8GB RAM + 256GB storage — €649
- Vegan Leather Edition with M-Pencil, 8GB RAM + 256GB storage — €749
Huawei MatePad Pro (LTE)
- 6GB RAM + 128GB storage — €599
- 8GB RAM + 256GB storage — €699
Huawei MatePad Pro (5G) price
- 8GB RAM + 256GB storage — €799
- 8GB RAM + 512GB storage — €949

The Huawei MatePad Pro undercuts the Galaxy Tab S6 by around £120 and the iPad Pro by a whopping £270. Huawei is also offering a promotional deal for the base Wi-Fi model that comes with the M-Pencil and keyboard cover all for £499.

Who is this for – Huawei MatePad Pro 10.8 inch WiFi 128GB gray 5G

It is good for

Long battery life

The MatePad Pro’s sizable battery and efficient power management systems can eke out an impressive two days of moderate to heavy usage. It’s got built in fast charging that get the slate back up and running in 90 minutes and the ability to charge other compatible devices on it back – handy for charging your smartphone when you’re out and about.

Powerhouse for game and movie

With its gorgeous 10.8-inch display and great sound output, the MatePad Pro is a joy to watch films or play games with. It’s lightweight build and curved edges give it a comfy in-hand feel for longer sessions making it ideal for reading, watching videos or a bout of gaming.

You like snappy performance and want 5G

Powered by Huawei’s top of the line chipset and 6GB RAM, the MatePad Pro is zippy and is able to handle most demanding apps with relative ease. It’s also one of the first tablets to pack in 5G. Regardless of whether 5G is useful to you right now, it’s a great tech to have in the long run.

It is not good for if are expecting –

Google apps

Lack of Google Play Store isn’t too much a big deal for the MatePad Pro as workarounds in the form of third party app stores are available. However, certain apps and games rely on Google Services to function properly especially Google’s own apps. So, even if you manage to load these apps on the MatePad Pro, there’s always a chance they won’t work perfectly or an update might break them.

A mobile workstation

While you can leverage the MatePad Pro’s premium hardware to run web apps from the browser and do meagre content editing, it’s still limited in what it can do. Even if you get access to the apps you’re looking for, Android optimization leaves a lot to be desired. The folio keyboard case also isn’t ideal for lengthy work sessions.

You’re not invested in the Huawei ecosystem

Huawei’s devices work together in a unique way to support additional functionality. Pairing Huawei devices is as simple as pointing and tapping a device at the NFC point and you get access to a slew of features such as sharing screens, transferring files with a simple drag and drop and more.

Compare Huawei MatePad Pro vs Fire HD 10 Tablet


	Huawei MatePad Pro WiFi 10.8-inches 2K Display 128GB 6GB RAM (Gray)	Fire HD 10 Tablet (10.1″ 1080p full HD display, 32 GB) – Black#1 Best Seller	VANKYO MatrixPad S30 10 inch Octa-Core Tablet
Screen Size	10.8 inches	10 inches	10.00 inches
Flash Memory Installed Size	128.0 GB	32.0 GB	32.0 GB
Hardware Platform	Android	—	Android
Item Dimensions	7.00 x 3.00 x 2.50 inches	10.31 x 6.28 x 0.39 inches	9.49 x 6.10 x 0.38 inches
Item Weight	0.99 lbs	1.11 lbs	—
Wireless Communication Technology	Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS	Wi-Fi	Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, FM

Huawei MatePad Pro 10.8 inch WiFi 128GB gray review

Build and bezel

The tablet looks and feels premium with a sturdy build, narrow bezels and micro-curved edges that let the slate sit in comfy in your hands. Excellent palm rejection means you can grip the edges of the tablet without having to worry about unintended input. And the tablet is super portable, fitting easily into backpacks plus it also includes reverse wireless charging to top up two phones conveniently when you’re out and about.

Design

The 10-inch display takes up the majority of the tablet’s front, with just a minimal bezel giving your fingers somewhere to rest. This might not be the most practical design, but it gives you the biggest screen possible in this body size. Huawei’s palm rejection software is excellent, so you won’t find yourself accidentally pressing the display when you don’t mean to.

Screen

Covering the front of the MatePad Pro is a 10.8-inch LCD display. Even though it lacks new tech like a faster 90Hz refresh rate or the use of an OLED panel, it’s still a great display. It is 7.2mm thick, and weighs 460 grams.

It displays a supremely sharp image thanks to the high 2560 x 1600 resolution, which is great for looking at photos or supported video. Colour reproduction is good and considering it is LCD rather than OLED black levels are nice and deep. It’s bright too, with Huawei’s claim of 540 nits of peak brightness sounding about right.

The keyboard case

Huawei will sell you a keyboard case for the MatePad Pro, in the event you want to do some light work, but it’s no Magic Keyboard. Instead, think of it as Huawei’s equivalent of Apple’s Smart Keyboard. It’s a wraparound case that covers the tablet’s body and screen, and then opens out to reveal a keyboard and offer a handy way to prop the tablet up for easy viewing and typing.

Google G Suite

There’s no direct support for Google’s G Suite, and Huawei’s browser isn’t supported by the web-based version. However, it works without a problem in Firefox — provided you activate the desktop view. Huawei preinstalls WPS Office, and Microsoft Office Mobile is available through the Huawei App Gallery. Both scale to the MatePad Pro’s screen, but Office requires a subscription to save and share documents.

Ports

Huawei’s packed in a quad speaker setup tuned by Harmon Kardon with two speaker grilles on the top and bottom. There’s a lone USB-C port at the bottom and no headphone jack, which is unfortunate for a “Pro” tablet.

Camera

Huawei knows a thing or two about cameras. The Huawei P40 Pro has just about the best Android camera available, after all. Tablets don’t require such robust camera systems, however, as they are primarily used indoors. The MatePad Pro has a single 13-megapixel camera on the back with an f/1.8 aperture, autofocus, and a flash. On the front is a single 8-megapixel fixed-focus camera.

Battery life

With its generous 7,250mAh battery capacity in the MatePad Pro can last up to two days with heavy use. Meaning with occasional use, you can get away with charging the slate once or twice a week.

Heavy use involved streaming video for a couple of hours, a few bouts of gaming, using web apps through the browser and social media surfing here and there. The tablet kept up with our usage throughout without us having to worry about draining the battery too much.

Huawei MatePad Pro 10.8 inch WiFi 128GB gray Performance review

Huawei has announced a 5G version. The battery has a 7,250mAh capacity and is charged using a USB Type-C wired connection or wireless charging. At its heart, the MatePad Pro is the same as the Huawei Mate 30 Pro and P40 Pro smartphone. It uses the Kirin 990 chipset. It’s matched to 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage space, with room for a proprietary Huawei memory card. MicroSD cards do not fit inside.

Benchmark apps must be downloaded as APK files, but Geekbench 5 refused to install through the APKPure store, leaving me with 3DMark only.

3DMark Sling Shot Extreme: 4,785 Vulkan

This is comparable to the score reached by the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6, which has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset inside. I never experienced any performance problems with the MatePad Pro, with apps opening quickly and no lag in the operating system.

Battery performance is decent. It lasted a full day and a half during my in-depth testing, involving hours of watching video, some gaming, general browsing and light work, plus some photography. Used more normally, the battery will last for four or five days before needing a recharge.

However, I have not used it like this. With wireless charging, it’s easy to just place it on a charging plinth when it’s not in use, keeping the battery constantly topped up. This is a real benefit. It means the tablet was always on hand, always charged, and I didn’t need to remember to plug it in overnight.

Does it support multitasking like iPad?

While the MatePad’s software is definitely a mixed bag, as we’ll get to shortly, there are some genuinely useful features built into the latest version of EMUI 10.1. The most notable addition is the new multitasking menu. A swipe inwards from the vertical bezel (or swipe and hold if you’re using gesture navigation) will fire up a menu from which you can select one of a handful of favorite apps to be loaded in windowed mode. Essentially any Android app can be loaded in a floating phone-sized window, and from there you can maximize apps to view them full-screen, or drag to the edge of the screen to activate split-screen mode.

Huawei MatePad Pro 10.8 inch WiFi 128GB gray 5G customer review

The Next-Gen Android Tablet for the truly adventurous

The pandemic may have stuck us all at home, but it didn’t stifle curiosity about what Huawei was doing with their next-gen Kirin 990 processor. Given that every major outlet save for eBay and Aliexpress has nixed the product from it’s digital shelves, it took quite a long time to travel to my home, so much longer than if I had just bought the similarly specced (and fully Google-enabled) 10.8″ Samsung Tab 7, priced at about $900. I managed to snag the LTE/4G version (128GB/6GB RAM) in grey for just shy of $600USD,. including free shipping. After more than 2 months of waiting for it shipped via Singapore from Aliexpress standard shipping, I was determined to figure out how to Google-ify it, and I did with the sole exception of Google’s Widevine L1 certification, which it should have had completed, prior to the US/EU Huawei embargo. but that’s another story unrelated to the MatePad Pro…

Ergonomics: There are a lot of things to love about this tablet, the weight and balance of the device is really good for single-handed use and the clear silicone skin I bought from Ali makes it less vulnerable and more grippy (it came with a very useful plastic adjustable stand). Even so, the bezels are so thin that you need a bumper just to prevent the tips of your fingers from interfering with your screen taps and gestures. Some things I don’t love (coming from both 8″ Mediapads M5 and M3) is the lack of fingerprint sensor/gestures and the corner holepunch placement of the front-facing camera, which makes Skype/Duo more awkward to hold than it should be. Why couldn’t they simply angle the camera towards the center and correct it in software? I guess we’ll never know so I did take off one half star for the selfie camera angle. The image quality though and low light response is SO much better than the M5 though, just a killer front-facing camera. The rear camera now includes a flash so there’s that, but really who uses it?

Instead of fingerprint sensor gestures, they did incorporate the nav gestures into the various screen swipes, but I am not a big fan of that approach, esp. when playing games full screen, it will activate when you least expect it.

UI Features:

There are FAR too many Huawei UI software features to mention like multi-screen collaboration, the special M-Pen, and the Huawei phone mirror app, but none of these were reasons to buy the tablet for me (plus, I don’t use them). There is also a LOT of Huawei bloatware to delete and the China version I have forces a lot of defaults into Mandarin or Pinyin keyboard layouts, making entering passwords and navigating menus more difficult initially. Once you get Microsoft SwftKey installed and the Amazon App store to supplement the vacuous Huawei App Gallery and many more apps from the APK Pure store, things will start to make more sense.

The tablet runs EMUI 10.1 and while it is a HUGE improvement over earlier EMUI versions, so much better organizing apps and folders, it also prevents you from defaulting to your own Home screen apps like Nova Prime. You can run Nova, I just can’t get it to stick around very long. It would be nice to be able to unlock the EMUI default in the developer settings or even in the Settings pages, where it belongs. With the China version I have, you will find the full suite of dialer and SMS messaging apps available, so adding your nano SIM card will now mean you can take all calls, texts, and accurate GPS locations wherever you are. That’s esp. handy for road trips in the car.

Google Setup:

So here’s the elephant in the room and while I am not here to give you a tutorial on HOW to do it, it can be done with just a USB C cable to your PC and some APK and backup files downloaded on your computer and copied to the Matepad once. What I will tell you here, is that it took 3 nights of trial and error, mostly trying different video guides and finally finding the youtuber whose process works successfully (look up the youtuber called System Hacks) adding Google to their Huawei phone. The process involves things like changing the date/time install dates for each Google component in exact order and repeating steps when they do not work as described. Take heart that it will eventually work, even if you mess up one step and have to start over from the beginning, there is somewhat of a learning curve. This might scare some people off, but I feel it was worth the time I spent into it. Once you get those first few Google apps back, it will make you a pro at sideloading APKs of your favorite apps.

Battery life: Just amazing, you literally can run this all day and night and not run out of power. I’ve played Legends of Runeterra and Ticket to Ride for an hour and the battery only drained about 3% from full power. Huawei has come a LONG way since the M3 optimizing drain rate and power. You will notice that the USB charger is slightly taller than the standard M3 and M5 charger and will get warm as it recharges.

Wifi Network and BT: Having the 4G LTE (I run Google Fi as my carrier) version of the tablet with 6GB at under $600 was one of the reasons I purchased this tablet over the competition and the network performance in both modes is flawless, with the big draw for me being it can double as my phone when you need it to. I can play Youtubes on my Fluance A160 speakers from the BT controls and the sound is terrific without lag or interference. Clearly, they have solved the BT/Wifi antenna issues with earlier models.

Screen and Brightness: Just beautiful, bright and fast, really no complaints. They even fixed their silly auto brightness controls by not putting it on a ridiculously dark default, probably because they solved their power issues and didn’t need such aggressive power management.

Sound, Music, and Video quality: The Harmon Kardon tuned speakers are very rich and detailed, you’ll be really surprised in the bass response, esp. coming from the already excellent M3/M5 HK sound. The four stereo speakers do a great job building a sound stage for any movie you’d want to watch. I will warn you that without Google Widevine L1 (level one) certification, you will only be able to watch SD content on Netflix (I recommend APK sideloading version 3.x or lower), and I have yet to figure out how to get the HBO Max App to play HD content, thought it will run through Prime video, which does not have any restrictions.

Summary: For the price of $600, really, it is a steal as the best Android 10″ tablet around with GSM/LTE and 6G of fast RAM. Sure, the Google services initial setup and bloatware in Mandarin will be something to wrangle with but if you are a dedicated Huawei tablet fan, it is well worth the effort!
By Ivan Singer, Amazon Reviewer

Alternate of Huawei MatePad Pro 10.8 inch WiFi 128GB gray

If you’re after a high-end Android tablet, the main alternatives to the Huawei MatePad Pro come from Samsung. The Galaxy Tab S6 offers many of the same features as the Huawei tablet, including an optional keyboard attachment.

If that’s too rich for your blood, the more moderately-priced Galaxy Tab S5e runs a lower-powered Snapdragon 670 SoC with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, and sells for £379. While the specs aren’t earth-shattering, it sports a high-quality AMOLED panel with a 10.5-inch display diagonal. You’ll obviously miss out on 5G connectivity, though, and there’s nowhere near as much raw horsepower on offer as in the Huawei tab.

It’s also powered by a high-end Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor, meaning it comes close to the power of the MatePad. There’s a 5G variant available, too. But it comes with the added benefit of full GMS certifications, bringing users the familiar suite of Google apps, most of which are reasonably well optimized for tablet use. The Tab S6 is considerably more expensive though, priced at £679 in the UK.