Huawei

Huawei MateBook 13 – Better than a MacBook?

December 18, 2018

After unveiling the Nova 4 and the Enjoy 9, Huawei announced a laptop too, dubbed the Huawei MateBook 13. A thin, light and bezel-less 13-inch laptop which should counter the likes of MacBooks, Dell XPS, and Asus Zenbooks. Unlike the MateBook X Pro, this one does feature dual fan linkage resulting be better cooling and noise reduction.

Display

The 13-inch display comes with a mere 4mm wide bezels, 2160×1440 (3:2) resolutions, and a glossy finish. It’s based on the IPS display technology with 178-degree wide-angle and a maximum brightness of 300nits. While it isn’t touch sensitive, it does produce 100% of the sRGB color spectrum.

Performance

The Huawei MateBook 13 get’s the 8th Gen i7-8565U or i5-8265U processors based on the 14nm Whiskey Lake process. Both are 15W ultra-low power Quad-Core CPUs. With base frequencies of 1.8GHz & 1.6GHz, and boost frequencies of 4.1GHz & 3.7GHz respectively, they are no slouch.

As a bonus, the Huawei MateBook 13 even comes with the Nvidia MX 150 dedicated GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM. It also gets LPDDR3 memory and NVMe solid state drive. All this packed into a 14.9mm thin metal body that weights just 1.28Kgs.

Cooling

As for cooling, the Shark Fin Fan 2.0 should maintain the laptop’s temperatures. With over 7 sensors and a maximum spinning capacity of 8000rpm, it does seem pretty promising. While the dual fan seperation takes care of noise reduction, the air volume has been increased by 25%.

The Huawei MateBook 13 has a battery capacity of 41Whr which the company claims will last 10 hours. The laptop gets a headphone jack and two USB-Cs. One on the left (charging), and one on the right (display output). Both are capable of data transfers.

Wireless

Wireless connectivity includes 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0 and NFC. The NFC’s sole purpose is to aid Huawei Share3.0 technology. You will need NFC enabled Huawei smartphone, enabling you to transfer files at up to 30MB/s.

A fingerprint recognition module is integrated in to the full-sized island chocolate keyboard. Finally, the laptop comes equipped with a 1MP camera, two speakers, two microphones, and Dolby Atoms sound support. It will be available in three colors, silver, deep gray ash and pink gold.

Pricing

The Huawei MateBook 13 starts at 4999 yuan ($725) for the i5/8GB/256GB model. The same with discrete graphics is priced at 5399 yuan ($785). Bumping the storage to 512GB and you will see yourself spend 5699 yuan ($830). Finally, the top of the line i7/8GB/512GB with discrete graphics will cost you 6399 yuan or $927.