Huawei Matebook 13
Simply great, relatively speaking
Einstein said you should make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. Well, he didn’t quite say that, but someone else came up with it as an accurate summary of what Einstein had said at greater length. In other words, they made it as simple as possible, but no simpler. This maxim must have been in the minds of Huawei’s engineers when they designed the Matebook 13, which whittles down the laptop form to a point where it can go no further without losing something.
Makes the right decisions on screen and performance – just lacks enough ports
We’ve seen rival slim laptops, for example, that waste i7 chip performance due to thermal throttling. But in our most demanding tasks, Intel’s new i7-10510u processor sustained Turbo Boost speeds over 4GHZ for several minutes at a stretch, rather than falling back in order to stay cool. The internal fans did get audible, but only when really pushed.
There’s an Nvidia Geforce MX250 GPU shoehorned in here too, and we got most 3D games running smoothly in Full HD. The screen is actually sharper than that, with a 2160x1440-pixel resolution that gives it a taller shape than usual – reducing the need for scrolling down – and a dot pitch of 200ppi, enough to make the pixels almost invisible.
We found just over 90 per cent of the SRGB colour space covered with perfect accuracy, which is adequate for photo and video editing. It’s a touchscreen, so you can interact with Windows 10 directly or via the large gesture- sensing trackpad. Battery life of 8 hours 15 minutes in our video-playback test suggested this wasn’t wasting power.
With a 13in diagonal measure rather than the more common 13.3in, the screen and its narrow border make the laptop just big enough to fit a full-size backlit keyboard, which has little travel but is at least quiet. The solid aluminium case, in dark grey, keeps everything pretty rigid.
The Matebook 13’s one notable compromise is that it’s limited to two external ports, both USB-C and supporting only the USB 3.0 Gen1 speed of 5Gbps. That means there’s no way to add external storage as fast as the included 512GB NVME SSD, although it’ll do justice to basic SATA- class drives. An adapter is provided to convert either port to HDMI, VGA and standard USB, saving you around £30, but only the left one can be used for charging. You do get a headphone/mic jack as well as decent built-in speakers. The webcam doesn’t support Windows Hello face recognition, but the power button has a fingerprint reader.
With a less powerful i5-10210u processor and 8GB of memory, the price falls to £900. This version doesn’t have a touchscreen, but the screen is otherwise identical. You can save more by opting for the 2019 model (£753 from Amazon www.snipca.com/35084), which has a comparable i5-8265u chip and MX150 graphics. An even cheaper option uses AMD’S slower Ryzen 5 3500U processor with integrated graphics (£649 from www.snipca.com/35082).