Mobile World Congress 2019 officially kicked off today, but we’ve seen a few mobile phone companies jump ahead and announce their upcoming devices over the weekend. Most notably, Huawei introduced their upcoming foldable device, dubbed the Mate X. Supporting their headline-grabbing announcement, they also showed off three new devices from their expanding Windows 10 lineup: a refreshed MateBook X Pro, as well as the MateBook 13 and the MateBook 14.
The MateBook X Pro
Is Huawei trying to take on the MacBook Pro with this model? Possibly…
The MateBook X Pro is fitted with a 13.9in 3000 x 2000 pixel multitouch display with a 91% screen-to-body ratio. It’s powered by Intel’s Whiskey Lake 8th-gen processors and users can choose between i5 or i7 variants, alongside Nvidia’s GeForce MX250 with 2GB GDDR5.
It has kept a few features from the previous model, including a fingerprint sensor in the power button, and the pop-up camera that’s hidden beneath the a function row key on the keyboard (and that’s guaranteed to give you the least flattering up-the-nose angle for conference calls). The notebooks all have Huawei Share capabilities now too — which works a lot like ‘Airdrop’ by Apple, except using NFC. Tap your Huawei mobile device to the notebook and you’ll be able to share files instantly.
Your two best mates
Internally, the MateBook 14 is very similar to the MateBook X Pro — with up to a Whiskey Lake processor and a GeForce MX250 — but it drops some of the bells and whistles. There’s no pop-up camera here (instead it’s in the bezel up top… where we’d argue it belongs), the chassis is a little thicker, and the whole laptop is a little heavier. Also, rather than a Thunderbolt 3 port like the X Pro has, this has USB 3.1 Type-C, USB 3.0 Type-A, and USB 2.0 Type-A ports.
The Matebook 13 is powered by the same processor as its siblings, but only has an Nvidia GeForce MX150 GPU running things.
Both the MateBook 13 and 14 feature FullView displays with a 3:2 aspect ratio and minimal bezels, with the option of 10-point multi-touch functionality. Both also feature Huawei Share 3.0, which streamlines cross-platform file sharing.
Ready your wallets
We haven’t heard about local availability for these three devices yet, as well as no definite local pricing. We do, however, know what they’re going for in the EU. And it’s pretty much what we expected from top-of-the-range notebooks.
The Matebook X Pro is priced from €1,600 (around R25,000, converted) to €2,000 (around R31,000), because, well, it’s their top-of-the-ranger. As for the Matebook 14, it’s priced from €1,200 (R19,000) to €1,500 (about R24,000) while the 13in model starts from €1,000 (around R16,000) and goes up to €1,400 (around R22,000).
