Huawei MateBook X
A brilliant lightweight laptop that’s packed with quality throughout. If you can find it on sale, buy it
SCORE
Range starts at: €833 (€999 inc VAT) Model tested: €833 (€999 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com/fr
The stylish MateBook X is an exercise in how much you can squeeze into a compact space. Two stats in particular stand out: its 1kg weight and 13.6mm height. This makes it not only travel-friendly but house-friendly, as it’s so little effort to grab it and move from kitchen to lounge. Nor has Huawei sacrificed build quality to achieve this, with solid construction throughout; even the super-slim lid feels well protected.
We tested the “Silver Frost” version of the MateBook, but if you’re feeling more autumnal a “Forest Green” version, as pictured here, is also available. Except, it isn’t. Huawei has made the odd choice to put the MateBook X on sale in European countries, such as France, but not to release it in the th UK.
Huawei makes m k use of f every single millim millimetre to ensure the keys k are as large as possible, poss bl so we had no diff difficulty l reaching hig high touch-typing touch-typin speeds. It helps he to have large Backspace and an Enter keys, w with the sole concession b being half-height u up/down cursor keys.
The trackpad is smooth, large and responsive, which makes it ideal for Windows gesture controls, and it has two secret skills. The first is that it offers “vibrational feedback”, so you can control what clicks feel like: set at High, you’d swear it’s a mechanical system. Set it to low, or switch it off, and it’s like sliding your fingers over a highly polished rock. If you own a compatible Huawei or Honor phone, you can also connect the two – your phone screen appears on the laptop, from where you can control it, exchange files or even make calls.
The drawback to the MateBook’s sleek design is an inevitable lack of screen space, and that’s despite Huawei slimming the bezels down to 5mm. It’s a 13in panel, but its 3,000 x 2,000 pixels lead to incredible sharpness. It bleeds quality too: 94% coverage of the sRGB gamut, 0.52 average Delta E, 1,606:1 co ntrast ratio and a peak brightness of 396cd/m2 . You even benefit from touch support.
Where it falters is outright speed. The Core i5-10210U is a fine midrange processor and great in short bursts: s: Geekbench 5 returned ned 1,031 and 2,857 on its first run, which reflects the snappiness appiness we found d in general use. However, this is a fanless anless design, and while that means ns dreamy silence ce it also means s only passive cooling g is available. The CPU typically ran near its base e frequency of 1.6GHz rather than its peak of 4.2GHz when pushed for more than a couple of minutes, and the second run of Geekbench 5 saw its scores plummet to 742 and 2,271.
That passive cooling is also why this laptop performed so poorly in our benchmarks, where it scored
58. Gamers also need to shop elsewhere, with a slovenly 12fps average in Metro: Last Light at 1080p. At native resolution, this shrank to 5fps.
But, to hammer home the point, a low score in benchmarks doesn’t mean a slovenly laptop in everyday use. If anything, the Huawei feels nippy, and that’s reflected in excellent results in our SSD speed tests: 2,768MB/sec
“The Huawei MateBook X feels speedy in general use, and that’s reflected in excellent results in our SSD speed tests”
for sequential reads and 2,680MB/sec for writes. It’s a roomy 512GB too.
There’s one more sacrifice that Huawei makes to keep this machine so light and slender: battery capacity. 42Wh isn’t tiny, and it proved enough for 9hrs 3mins in our video-rundown test. It’s a lightweight benchmark that gives you an idea of the best scenario, so we’d fling the USB-C charger into an overnight bag.
This brings us to the ports – or lack of them. A USB-C 3.1 port sits on either side, and aside from a 3.5mm combo jack that’s it. Time to invest in a USB-C port replicator, and whilst you’re ordering we recommend you buy a dedicated webcam. Quite why Huawei insists on embedding its 720p unit into the keyboard is beyond us: it’s not simply that the low angle is unflattering, but that you can’t type whilst on a call. Your fingers look so large that it will appear to onlookers that they’re being attacked by fleshy aliens. It also means no infrared webcam for seamless Windows Hello logins, although Huawei neatly tucks the fingerprint reader into the power button – which works well.
So, this laptop has its shortcomings, as do all its rivals. We think it’s best suited to highly mobile users, such as university students, who are looking for a great screen and keyboard. Once we’re able to nip abroad again, it might be worth visiting Calais - and perhaps the PC Pro Recommended award will make Huawei rethink its decision not release it in the UK.