While iPads may currently be dominating the tablet world, that’s not stopping Android manufacturers from releasing tablets of their own. The latest of these is Huawei, which officially unveiled the new Huawei MatePad M5 Lite at CES 2019.
The tablet is aimed at being sleek and stylish, while delivering a powerful and fast experience. It’s also pretty affordable, coming in at $299.
Here’s everything you need to know about the new Huawei MatePad M5 Lite.
Design and display
The first thing you’ll notice about the Huawei MatePad M5 Lite is its design — and it’s a nice-looking tablet. The device features a simple aluminum unibody design with what Huawei says is “diamond-cut edges.” Around the edges of the 10.1-inch device, you’ll get a power button, volume rocker, USB-C port, and, thankfully, a headphone jack.
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The display on the tablet comes in at 10.1-inches with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 pixels. The device also offers ClariVu 5.0, Huawei’s display-enhancement tech aimed at intelligently adjusting contrast and color saturation.
Unlike other devices that might feature single or dual speakers, the MatePad M5 Lite goes a step further with quad speakers, coupled with a “smart power amplifier” and Huawei’s Histen 5.0 audio-enhancement tech. In other words, you should get pretty decent audio in this tablet.
Specs and features
Under the hood, the MatePad M5 Lite features a Kirin 659 octavos-core chipset, coupled with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage — though you can expand upon that storage with a MicroSD card slot. You’ll also get Huawei’s QuickCharge technology, which charges up a big 7,500mAh battery. With the tablet, you’ll also get the Huawei M-Pen lite stylus. Both the front-facing and the rear-facing cameras on the device come in at 8-megapixels, and the device ships with Android 8.0 Oreo.
Specs aside, the tablet offers some interesting tech to make the overall user experience a better one. For example, to protect eyesight, the device uses a distance sensor, “posture detect” sensor, ambient light filter, and Blue Ray filter. When the device detects that it’s less than 9.8 inches from the face of the user, it will provide instructions to increase the distance. The feature is specifically meant for kids, but could come in handy for others too. The “posture detect” sensor can tell when the tablet is being used while lying down and help users get better posture. The Blue Ray filter cuts out blue light, helping with eye strain.
Price and availability
The Huawei MatePad M5 Lite comes in at $299, is available in space gray, and will be on sale in late January on Amazon and Newegg.
