New Flagship Tablet Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2 With OLED Sets New Records, Introduces Highly Sensitive Pen

Huawei was done teasing their new flagship tablet and finally made a full announcement today of the Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2. This tablet will take reservations until September 28, but the actual release may not take place before October 30, starting in China.

The price starts at 5199 Yuan for the 12GB LPDDR5 RAM / 256GB storage model, all the way up to 8299 Yuan for the 16GB / 1TB model. So with an entry price of around $710 USD, it should have good specs. And it does.

Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2 runs HarmonyOS 4 with access to Huawei's App Gallery, which has become a normal place to be for the big app names by now. App Gallery can also be used on both Android and Windows devices, so that opens up for some ease of use across devices whenever that's beneficial.

Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2 is a tablet that's trying to satisfy people for both work, gaming, entertainment and general use quite well. I order to do that it needs more than a large screen, so it has the in-house 5nm octa-core 3.13 GHz HiSilicon Kirin 9000s processor with the 24-core Mali-G78 GPU on the chipset. So that pushes new ground for Huawei.

As a large tablet, it even shares some aspects in common with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra, which is the OLED display and a notch for the front cameras and sensors.

It also has a magnetically controlled nano-optical anti-reflective coating, which is very beneficial when the screen is large to minimize glare.

10 years ago Huawei had a few tablets with some weak screens, but that belongs to history now, and their choice of screens has been great for the past 8 years, even if their new OLED screen still can't match the new best in class AMOLED screen from Samsung.

The screen resolution is 2880 x 1920, with the display supporting a 144 Hz refresh rate, a very high 1000 nits maximum brightness, and DCI-P3 wide color gamut.

And one thing that's exclusive to Huawei now is the brand new 10,000 levels of pressure sensitivity introduced with the new Huawei M-Pencil 3 which uses StarLight wireless communication.

The new digitizer pen also promises ultra-low latency, in addition to the extra smoothness the sensitivity provides. And the pen is also supported by new AI features for note taking and sketching, which seems like a good area to implement AI.

The front notch house a 16MP camera as well as dToF sensors, while the dual rear cameras are a 13MP camera and an 8MP wide-angle camera with LED. Video recording is limited to FHD with the front cameras, but supports 4K UHD video with the rear camera.

The battery life is rated to 11 hours long, and it has very quick charging times too, with a 65 minute charging time for the 10,100 mAh battery in Turbo mode with an 88W capacity.

And this tablet should be very good for both watching movies and doing video calls too, since it has 6 speakers with HDR Vivid audio, and 4 mics, with noise canceling for the mics, and center framing of people from the front camera during video chats.

Huawei also gave the wireless connectivity a new antenna layout where the antennas are placed in many areas of the tablet to avoid blind spots for the Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2. And it has one USB-C port for other connectivity needs.

As a flagship tablet at this size, it's packed with sensors for all kinds of apps. We've got GPS, Glonass, Beidou, gyroscope, compass, ambient light sensor, hall sensor, and gravity sensor inside the new Huawei tablet.

It's also designed with the optional keyboard in mind, which has a trackpad and also provides the tablet a rear cover with a kickstand to it, with multi angle adjustments.

Color options for the Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2 are green, grey, and white, and it is just 5.5mm thick, which makes it one of just a few tablets under 6mm on the market today.

So that makes it portable even if it has a large screen, and even more son when Huawei broke a new record by making it the lightest tablet in the 13-inch range on the market, with a weight of just 580 grams. That's really incredible.

To put that into perspective, even a 12.9-inch iPad Pro weighs 685 grams. So this we have to check out.

Will the Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2 launch outside of China soon? We don't know yet, but we're very eager to have a look at this tablet, so we'll update all you readers once we know if it will be released in other markets soon too.

– Tom Bowen