Huawei Matebook X Pro
A chip not off the old block
Powerful laptop works and plays hard
LAPTOP ❘ £1,400 from Amazon www.snipca.com/38710
Huawei’s top-of-the-range laptop, the Matebook X Pro, has had a refresh. While it looks the same as the previous version (see our review, Issue 547) from the outside, this new model includes an updated 11th-generation Intel processor (from 10th-generation).
The body, screen and basic specifications are all similar to that previous version. It’s still a slim, light ultra-compact laptop with a 3,000x2,000-pixel 13.9in IPS touchscreen, a 1TB SSD, 16GB of RAM and a strong focus on productivity tasks. The screen’s 3:2 aspect ratio means it’s better for working on documents and reading web pages than watching widescreen videos or playing games.
With a lean design and new processor, this laptop looks good and works hard
The hardware remains impressive. The 1.33kg weight is light for a 13.9in laptop, and the 304x217x14.6mm dimensions keep it conveniently portable. The metal alloy body is as solid as ever, and the virtually bezel-free screen fills 91 per cent of the lid.
Open the lid and you’ll find one of the better keyboards on this type of laptop. Spacious, robust and quiet, it’s great to type on. It has a two-stage backlight, and at the top-right corner of the keyboard there’s a fingerprint scanner that’s both well positioned and perfectly reliable.
The trackpad is large for this size of laptop at 120x75mm. It feels great to the touch, but the click action at the corners is shallow and slightly spongy.
If there’s one thing we don’t like about the design it’s the pop-up 720p webcam that hides between the F6 and F7 buttons (pictured below left). The upward perspective isn’t flattering and mostly provides views of your chin and nose.
On the left edge are two USB-C ports (you’ll need to use one of these to charge) and a 3.5mm audio jack, while on the right is a single USB 3.0 port. It supports Wi-fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 wireless technologies.
We’ve tested a few computers with the Intel Core i7-1165g7 processor now and this configuration provided a similar level of performance to the others in our benchmark tests. Only the Razer Book 13 (see Issue 605) outperformed it.
The laptop relies on Intel’s integrated Iris Xe graphics processor. As we suggested earlier, this isn’t intended to be a gaming computer but it runs games reasonably well at a resolution of 1366x768, but suffered slowdowns when we tried to increase this resolution. The battery life was fine, running for nine hours 43 minutes in our video-playback test.
VERDICT A solid laptop that looks similar to its predecessor but brings it up to speed with current rivals’ performance - shame about the position of that webcam, though.
ALTERNATIVE Razer Book 13 £1,200 A 13in laptop that’ss cheaper and a little faster, but more appropriate for games and entertainment