Huawei MatePad Pro 12.2 (2024) review - The 12.2-inch tablet with a matte display and powerful features

Huawei's MatePad Pro 12.2 is a powerful tablet. The PaperMatte edition boasts an impressive matte 144-Hz display that allows almost no annoying reflections. Thanks to its tandem OLED display, it also achieves peak brightness levels of over 2000 cd/m², making it one of the brightest tablets you can currently get.

Despite its 12.2-inch size, the superbly crafted MatePad Pro 12.2 is very light, weighing only 512 grams—plus, it is one of the thinnest tablets in its class with a build height of 5.5 millimeters. Conveniently, a docking keyboard is included with the device itself, which has a touchpad and feels nice to type on. Furthermore, it is very intuitive to write and draw on its matte display using the optional M-Pencil.

Unfortunately, there are also a few negative aspects to the tablet. The MatePad Pro 12.2 only uses a mid-range SoC, which is significantly less powerful than similarly priced tablets. In addition, its update supply remains unclear, there is no cellular option and all Google apps are missing straight out of the box. However, these can be installed later on via the Aurora App Store.

In the United States, the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.2 isn't available to purchase directly from the manufacturer, however, you can order it from retailers such as AliExpress, where it is currently on offer for a reduced price of $670.53.

Tablets and anti-glare displays are two things that don't normally go together. Nevertheless, it works on the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.2. The PaperMatte edition is a 12.2-inch tablet with a matte screen consisting of a bright OLED panel that, according to the manufacturer, should shine at a record-breaking 2000 cd/m². But that's not all the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.2 has to offer, as it also comes with input pen support and a refresh rate of up to 144 Hz. Its scope of delivery additionally includes the Glide Keyboard, a docking keyboard with an integrated touchpad.

The Huawei MatePad Pro 12.2 is also attractive due to its price. At just over $1,000 for the only version available, which has 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage, it is still quite a hefty sum to pay—but is fair considering its features. At the time of testing, the optional M-Pencil stylus is available for free if you buy the tablet directly from Huawei.

Weighing in at 512 grams, the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.2 is currently one of the lightest 12.x-inch tablets on the market. At the same time, it boasts a super slim design, only being undercut by a few competitors with its thickness of just 5.5 millimeters. These include, for example, the Apple iPad Pro 13 (2024) with a thickness of 5.1 millimeters and the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra's 5.4 millimeters.

The MatePad Pro 12.2's aluminum-magnesium alloy case is very sturdy despite its slim design and can hardly be twisted or dented even when applying a great deal of force. Our test device is the golden color variant, which looks great thanks to its metallic-matte surface made of fiberglass. It also has a silky feel and is hardly susceptible to fingerprints. Alternatively, Huawei also offers its tablet with a black back cover.

The MatePad Pro 12.2 has a very good display-to-surface ratio of 92 percent thanks to its slim bezels, which are only around 5 millimeters wide on all sides. Despite this, Huawei has still managed to integrate the selfie camera into the frame. The tablet's power button is also space-saving, as it additionally houses the fingerprint sensor. The optional stylus attaches magnetically to the top of the tablet and is also charged there.

Huawei hasn't published much information surrounding the subject of sustainability. The manufacturer hasn't provided any specific information on material extraction, but it emphasizes that it complies with all legal safety requirements in this regard. Huawei also offers a recycling program for electronic waste.

Huawei uses FSC-certified paper (Forest Stewardship Council) for the packaging of its products, thereby guaranteeing that the materials come from responsibly managed forests. The MatePad Pro 12.2's packaging features the FSC Mix logo. This means that it uses materials from FSC-certified forests and/or recycled materials as well as materials from controlled sources.

The MatePad Pro 12.2's WiFi 6 module achieved solid and largely stable transfer rates using our Asus ROG Rapture GT-AXE11000 reference router, with peaks of just over 1000 MBit/s in the 5 GHz band.

However, almost all comparison devices managed even more. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S10+, the OnePlus Pad 2 and the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro can also use the 6 GHz band and are capable of significantly higher data throughputs there.

Under controlled lighting conditions, the main camera showed that it can capture colors precisely. With optimum lighting, there were only very slight deviations from the reference colors (max. Delta-E 11.86) and the test chart was reproduced in full. At 1 lux of residual light, however, the camera simply gave up, as both the test chart and the ColorChecker color chart then disappeared completely in the dark.

One highlight of the MatePad Pro 12.2 is its OLED panel with a resolution of 2,800 x 1,840 pixels. This isn't just because it has a refresh rate of 144 Hz, which not many other tablets can do. Two other features make the 3:2 screen particularly special: a matte surface and high brightness, which the manufacturer claims is up to 2000 cd/m².

A special surface treatment, which adds nanometer-sized irregularities to the OLED panel, ensures that the screen surface diffusely reflects incoming light and therefore hardly shows reflections at all. Only Apple currently offers something similar on the iPad Pro—but charges considerably more for it. There, the matte option bears the name nano-textured glass, but can only be selected for the 1 TB and 2 TB variants, which means you'll pay around $2,000 for such an iPad Pro in the cheapest case.

There isn't just one OLED panel under the glass surface of the MatePad Pro 12.2, but two of them. This gives the tablet screen a brightness that many competitors can only dream of. When displaying a pure white background, the 3:2 display achieved an average of 1,003 cd/m² and increased to up to 2,284 cd/m² when we limited the measurement to a smaller image section (APL18). In HDR mode, its maximum brightness is even a little higher at 2,422 cd/m². The MatePad Pro 12.2 can therefore deliver impressive HDR effects.

The MatePad Pro 12.2 adjusts its display brightness with the help of pulse width modulation (PWM), which makes screen flickering unavoidable. However, at 360 Hz, the PWM frequency is quite high across all brightness levels we measured, so even sensitive users shouldn't be faced with any issues during use.

At the same time, the tablet additionally uses a nominal PWM dimming frequency of 2,880 Hz to further minimize the effects of PWM. We measured and found a dimming frequency of 2,777 Hz (measured at 36% screen brightness), which is very close to the manufacturer's specification.

Huawei seems to be keeping the SoC in the MatePad Pro 12.2 a secret. However, we used apps such as Aida64 and CPU-Z to determine that a 12-core processor runs under the hood. The benchmarks showed that the SoC performs largely the same as the HiSilicon Kirin 9000W, which also has 12 cores. The clock rates are slightly different in the MatePad Pro 12.2, but there are hardly any differences overall.

For its price range, the Huawei tablet doesn't offer a particularly high level of performance. Even so, it still delivers solid mid-range performance and thanks to its many cores, the processor performed particularly well in multi-core benchmarks.

HarmonyOS and the installed apps run super smoothly during everyday use. Nevertheless, competitors such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10+ and the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro have significantly more performance reserves to fall back on.

The HiSilicon Maleoon 910 GPU is already a few years old and, like the SoC, doesn't exceed the mid-range level. As a result, the MatePad Pro 12.2 almost always landed at the back of the pack during the graphics benchmarks.

The MatePad Pro 12.2 lets you surf the web quickly. In the browser benchmarks, however, Huawei's tablet behaved quite inconspicuously, as it neither achieved record results nor did it cross the finish line at the bottom.

The tablet's UFS 3.1 storage ensures short loading times and that apps launch quickly. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S10+ and the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro are even faster, however.

The MatePad Pro 12.2 always remains cool during operation. Even during the extreme scenario, in which the tablet ran the burnout benchmark for an hour and was thus utilized to its maximum capacity, the surface temperatures only reached a maximum of just under 38 °C in the end. As the 3DMark stress tests showed, the tablet didn't lose its cool internally either, as it was able to deliver its maximum performance at practically all times.

The MatePad Pro 12.2 generates stereo sound from its 4 speakers, which can reach a high volume without the sound being distorted. However, you won't hear too much bass, so music and movies don't sound the most powerful.

External audio devices can be connected to the tablet via USB-C or Bluetooth 5.2. The Bluetooth codecs supported by the tablet cannot be read in the developer options, where they are usually found. Huawei only lists standard codecs such as AAC, SBC and LDAC in the specifications.

The MatePad Pro 12.2's dual-cell battery has a capacity of 10,100 mAh and can be charged at up to 100 watts (20V/5A). This is particularly fast via the supplied power adapter, as it supports the SuperCharge fast-charging mode, which must be activated manually. During our test, a charging cycle took around one hour.

In terms of power consumption, the Huawei tablet behaves normally. When idling, it usually only drains the battery a little, but can become power-hungry under load.