Huawei MatePad 11: Price-to-performance champion!
The MatePad 11 features a 10.95-inch IPS screen with a high fresh rate. The tablet is powered by the Snapdragon 865, which is last year’s flagship SoC from Qualcomm. There are only two other Qualcomm SoCs that can outperform it (Snapdragon 870 and 888), both of which were released this year. Moreover, the MatePad 11 comes with 64 or 128 GB of very fast UFS 3.1 memory. Storage space can be expanded with the help of a microSD card as well. The four speakers of the slate sound great, and the USB 3.2 (Gen 1) port is very fast. The cameras are good enough for teleconferencing and scanning documents. What is more, the MatePad 11 looks quite modern.
The MatePad 11 is slightly limited by the lack of Google Services (for instance, Google Pay does not work). The Huawei tablet comes with its own Android-based operating system known as Harmony OS 2.0. Huawei's AppGallery contains a lot of well-known apps, and the applications that it does not have can be easily found via Huawei’s Petal search engine. All in all, the lack of Google Services does not prove particularly limiting in day-to-day use. The slate can also play back DRM-protected content.
In some respects, political restrictions prevent Huawei from delivering the world’s best tablet. For example, many US app developers are banned from publishing their apps in the AppGallery. However, Huawei’s Petal search engine allows users to easily sideload many popular apps. The case of Microsoft is quite curious, though. The Huawei tablet comes with the Microsoft Office suite pre-installed, but there are no Microsoft apps in Huawei’s app store. And Qualcomm is allowed to sell its chips to Huawei, even though it cannot license high-res audio codecs to Huawei.
At the end of the day, the Huawei MatePad 11 is a really good 400-Euro (~$460) tablet. If you want to learn more about it, check out our extensive review.
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