11.5-Inch Huawei MatePad Air Unveiled Today

Huawei announced their first MatePad Air tablet today, which is a 11.5-inch tablet weighing just 508 grams. It's taking preorders from 2799 Chinese Yuan the next 24 hours.

The Huawei MatePad Air runs Huawei's own HarmonyOS 3.1, which is growing its user base every month and has most of the major apps onboard. Options are between 8GB of RAM with 128GB/256GB of storage, or 12GB of RAM and 256GB/512GB of storage.

But all models share the 2.84 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor, and there's an option of 4G LTE.

Huawei MatePad Air

It's equipped with a high resolution 2800 x 1840 LCD display, with a 144 Hz refresh rate, and support for the 4096 pressure level sensitive Huawei M-Pencil 2nd gen. So that will prove popular.

The cameras are a 8MP front camera and a 13MP rear camera with 4K recording, and as you would expect, it has quad speakers with Huawei's Histen 8.0. audio. Video calls should be outstanding thanks to as much as 4 mics too.

Despite the high resolution screen, the MatePad Air battery life is 12 hours long from a 8300 mAh battery, with 40W super fast charge support.

Connectivity options are Wi-Fi 6, BT 5.2, the optional cellular choice, and a USB C 3.2 Gen 1 port.

Huawei has packed plenty of sensor inside this tablet too, including GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo, Ambient light sensor, gravity sensor, hall sensor, compass, gyroscope, and a color temperature sensor.

There's a lot of color options, ranging from black and white, to purple, blue, and green. The thickness is just 6.4mm too, which is good but still not the thinnest around.

As you can see there's an optional keyboard for the Huawei MatePad Air too, which is a minimalistic keyboard without a trackpad in line with the light Air theme of the tablet, but with several shortcuts and features nonetheless, including a one-click speech to text button. The color options for the keyboard are either black or white.

So, Huawei's MatePad Air is a little larger than Apple iPad Air, but OS aside, this is the tablet it resembles the most. And it's good to known that Huawei has started a dedicated Air series of tablets with higher end specs.

– Tom Bowen