Huawei MateBook X Pro Review – Intro
One of the things that Huawei announced during the Global Smart Office Launch is their latest wave of Matebook laptops – the Huawei Matebook X Pro, Huawei Matebook 16s and D 16. These devices, being part of their Smart Office lineup, have collaborative features across the products in their ecosystem. As a high-end product, it is now technically playing within the league of other top brands.
Now, before we get to the features of the product, allow me to first talk about the specifications of the Matebook X Pro. Also, while this laptop is not going to be officially sold here in the Philippines, I would like to know in the comments section below if you would be interested in Huawei bringing this to our country.
Huawei MateBook X Pro Specifications
Intel 12th Generation Hybrid Processor Details
As earlier mentioned, the new Huawei Matebook X Pro (2022) features advanced Intel’s 12th Generation hybrid processor that supports Evo certification and 30W Performance mode. The hybrid core architecture is composed of P-Core and E-Core that are tasked with gaming or creative apps and everyday tasks, respectively. To make things easier to remember, you can simply refer to P-Core as “performance core” and E-Core as “efficient core”. With this configuration, the laptop will intelligently switch its settings to the tasks being done, thereby managing its performance, thermals, and power consumption accordingly.
The hybrid processor of the Matebook X Pro is divided into 2 sets of cores: 4 Performance Cores and 8 Efficient Cores. It also has a thermal design power of up to 30W for heavier software tasks like rendering a 1080P video or playing games at the expense of high power consumption. As an added feature, Huawei is using Shark Fin Fan Cooling System (just like last iteration), which keeps the temperature of the laptop at a comfortable level at all times, even when working on heavy tasks.
This is, in my opinion, the best configuration for a thin and light laptop that can pack a punch but can also give its users a long period of time to use from a single charge without sacrificing overall performance.
Laptop Build and I/O
The laptop is made with a full cnc magnesium alloy body. It has a 3.5mm headphone jack, 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports that support 40Gbps transfer on the left side, and another 2 USB-C ports on the right. It also has a fingerprint power button on top of its keyboard with 1.5mm key travel.
When you look at the Huawei Matebook X Pro, you’ll directly notice how thin it is. For reference, we have an old Matebook Pro on the left side and the new Matebook X Pro on the right. It’s barely 16mm thin, 15.5mm to be exact, making it as thin as three stacks of this Huawei MatePad Pro 11 inch. This only weighs less than 1.38 kilograms, which is about 3kgs lighter than the new MacBook Pro 14-inch, making this a viable option to those who wish to get a Windows-powered laptop.
Huawei Real Colour FullView Touch Display
I am amazed at how colorful and vivid the 14.2-inch display of the Huawei Matebook X Pro. They call this Huawei Real Colour FullView Touch Display. I know they have a fancy way of naming the features of their products, but this just means that they have put together the configurations on this laptop for it to achieve this level of display quality. It is VESA Certified and color accurate, making it good on editing photos and videos.
Now, this is particularly helpful for me as someone who produces videos on YouTube. As much as possible I want to accurately play around with color, contrast and saturation (for instance) on my videos so I want my audience to “actually get what I see”. If I want to show more teal and orange colors in my photos and videos, the display should accurately present these colors to me and should look the same across other monitors with the same calibration. There is a wide range of discussion about display technology, but (1) I am honestly not a pro when it comes to it; and (2) I don’t want to bombard you with a lot of information.
Speakers
One of the things that got me to say “whoa” with this laptop is how loud and amazing its speakers are. You know that ding sound that Windows makes when you accidentally tap a wrong tab? When I first heard that, I almost thought that the sound came from my bookshelf speakers. I had to message my friend about it because I’ve never heard such a high level of sound quality from a laptop of this kind. I mean, how is this even possible?
Now, here’s the answer to that question. Huawei MateBook X Pro has six speakers. Back-to-back woofers generate deep bass and eliminate resonance noise. All of this is made possible by Huawei’s Targeted sound field techniques.
Not only that it has 6 loudspeakers, but it also has four microphones with impressive pickup capabilities. Now, I don’t want to explain this like a sound engineer – because I’m certainly not one – the four microphones are governed by AI algorithms. As fancy as it may sound, it just means that it’s smart enough to calculate the distance of the source, pick it up, then play it back but with a better quality. “Better quality” for Huawei means it has enhanced audio playback, has applied noise reduction and clearer voice pickup. Okay, here’s how it works:I’ll be using the microphones of two laptops that cost PhP100,000 each. I will play two recordings, and then tell yourself which one is better. The first audio was recorded with the internal microphone of the ASUS ROG Flow Z13. I used the Matebook X Pro in the second audio.
Smart Office Features
Being part of the Smart Office products of Huawei, they preloaded this laptop with new features. One of the things that I actually like are their new Free Touch Creative Gesture and AI Gesture. I have never seen a laptop that has this level of expanded gestures support that can let you intuitively control the laptop straight from its huge trackpad. I mean if you take a look at this trackpad, it is almost as big as two folded Huawei P50 Pockets. Apart from the usual Windows multi touch gesture support, here are some of the gestures that Huawei added: (1) swiping up and down at the leftmost edge of the trackpad changes the brightness level; (2) doing so on the right side will decrease or increase the volume; (3) swiping from left to right at the upper part allows you to switch tabs on supported applications; (4) swiping in from the left side with two fingers will bring out Huawei Assistant, and; (5) double tapping with one of your knuckles will take a screenshot.
Another feature that is worth mentioning are the benefits that you can get from pre-installed Huawei apps like Huawei PC Manager and App Gallery. Think of it like Apple’s ecosystem, but in Windows. You’ll get to easily connect this laptop to your Huawei devices very easily, and even share screen or files seamlessly. Apart from Windows Subsystem for Android that lets you use some supported Android apps (provided that you’re using the United States region), you can also download Android apps from Huawei AppGallery.
Now, as you can see, the Huawei Matebook X Pro is a lightweight flagship laptop that impressively displays amazing performance and efficiency, thanks to its Intel 12th Gen Processor with EVO certification. Huawei also added a few more smart features that make it far more useful than ever before. It gives you the ability to seamlessly connect or pair this with other Huawei devices as well. It has 6 loudspeakers and 4 smart microphones to get you work and meet up with friends and family wherever you are. It also packs a massive 3.1K color accurate display for photo and video editing needs. These features can easily make it a must-have for “nomadic” entrepreneurs and digital content creators. This will also fit as part of the ecosystem of smart and super devices within an organization.
Benchmarks
Synthetic Benchmark
Super Pi
SuperPI is a single-threaded benchmark application that lets the CPU calculate Pi(π) to the nth digit. In this benchmark, we selected the Pi calculation to 32M, the highest available for the app.
WPrime
wPrime is a benchmark tool similar to SuperPI, but the former takes on finding prime numbers using Newton’s Method. The benchmark is set to calculate 1024 million prime numbers, and the performance is measured according to calculation time.
Corona
Corona Renderer is an unbiased photorealistic render available for Autodesk 3Ds Max, Maxon Cinema 4D, and as a stand-alone application. Its popularity, similar to Blender, led Chaos Group to develop a benchmark version of the app which runs using Corona Renderer 1.3. Workstation systems, especially CPUs, can utilize Corona Benchmark as up to 72 threads can be used in the benchmark, making it very suitable for CPUs with various price segments.
VRay
V-Ray Benchmark is a stand-alone version of V-Ray developed by Chaos Group. It is designed to test the CPU and GPU by rendering sample scenes for a fixed amount of time.
V-Ray is a plug-in mostly utilized by 3D computer graphics software applications mainly for industrial design, product design, architecture, film, and video game production. V-Ray is not limited to 64-threads as it supports multi and mega-threading.
Geekbench 5
Geekbench is a multi-platform benchmark that’s used to gauge CPU performance and compare them across Windows, Mac, and Mobile.
Geekbench 5 is the latest version and doesn’t rely on memory as much compared to the previous Geekbench 4, making it a great tool to measure both single-core and multi-core CPU performance.
Blender
Blender is a widely used, free, open-source 3D creation suite. It supports the whole 3D pipeline process from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, and even motion tracking.
Blender has become a standard for CPU benchmarks with the BMW27 and Classroom scene most used. This prompted the company to release Blender Open Data Benchmark in 2018, a benchmark-specific version that allows users to run a preset benchmark and share the results online similar to 3D Mark.
Verdict
Like most devices, it isn’t perfect either. It lacks USB Type A peripherals, which means you need to buy a dongle or USB hub so you can use other accessories like keyboards, ethernet cable and even SD or micro SD cards.
While this is a very attractive laptop, it is unfortunate that Huawei won’t be bringing this to the country, at least for now. I’d love to know in the comments section if you’d be interested to get one for yourself should Huawei start selling this in the Philippines.
Giancarlo Viterbo is a Filipino Technology Journalist, blogger and Editor of gadgetpilipinas.net, He is also a Geek, Dad and a Husband. He knows a lot about washing the dishes, doing some errands and following instructions from his boss on his day job. Follow him on twitter: @gianviterbo and @gadgetpilipinas.
