The HUAWEI MateBook X Pro (2020) is the latest flagship ultrabook from HUAWEI and it’s available to purchase here in Malaysia. This is the third edition of the HUAWEI MateBook X Pro that received a minor upgrade to its internal and added the option for a new colour, Emerald Green.

Design

The same sleek and ultra-slim chassis was retained. The Apple MacBook Pro inspired is weight at only 1.33kg with the thickness point only 14.6mm.

The MateBook X Pro is more compact and lighter compared it to the 13-inch MacBook Pro as well offers more port connectivity. It comes with two USB Type-C which one of it is Thunderbolt 3, along with a standard USB 3.0 port and a 3.5mm audio jack.

There’s also a full sized USB Type-A which is missing on the MacBook Pro.

HUAWEI also bundled a USB Type-C to full sized HDMI port, VGA port and USB Type-C dongle with no extra cost.

The keyboard is a chiclet keyboard type with backlit. The low travel key keyboard is well-spaced, comfortable to type and responsive. The only thing that bothers me is the missing “Home” and ”End” keys that I use the most, (coming from Toshiba and Fujitsu ultrabook). The trackpad is just huge and easy to navigate.

The power button doubled as a fingerprint scanner for quick login and the up-firing stereo speakers are pretty loud.

Display

Meanwhile, the display is a 13.9-inch LTPS touchscreen with a unique screen 3:2 aspect ratio and resolutions of 3,000 x 2,000. The more squarish-looking display brings more vertical space of reading which is ideal for productivity usage like documents.

The over 91% screen-to-body-ratio Pro-grade display is very close to 4K support for 100% of sRGB colour gamut for maximum colour accuracy and generate brightness over 450 nits. This is an excellent ultrabook anyone who demands for colour accurate.

The webcam is not embedded on the display, instead it’s hidden under a key on the keyboard and the webcam is angled upwards awkwardly – not my preferred webcam angle

Performance

The major upgrade of this Ultrabook is internal, it now gets 10th-gen Intel Core i5/i7 treatment with 8GB/16GB of RAM. It also coupled with an ultra-fast 512GB NVMe SSD hard drive from Samsung that offers over 3,500 MB/s read and 3,000 MB/s write speeds.

I have no idea why the company oddly partition the drive to 100GB C:// (System) and leave 900GB on D:// (Data). This is very inconvenience if you install lot of applications aside the Windows Operating System already took up a chunk of the space.

The MateBook X Pro that we have gotten for review is the top-of-the-line, Intel Core i7-10510U with 16GB RAM and Nvidia GeForce MX250 2GB GDDR5 graphic card. The ultrabook runs most of the apps with ease and capable to handle simple 4K video editing on Adobe Premiere Pro. In fact, I edited the HUAWEI MateBook X Pro Unboxing and First Look video with the HUAWEI MateBook X Pro.

During the video editing and rendering I did encounter some high thermal issue which I believe its common for mobile processor but at least it didn’t crash the program or have random restart.

HUAWEI Ecosystem

There are lacking integration of Windows laptops and Android smartphones that can adequately its competitor like iMessage, AirDrop and iCloud that Apple users enjoying now.

HUAWEI added a good feature at its core; HUAWEI Share which currently only works on HUAWEI or HONOR smartphones. By tapping a compatible HUAWEI/HONOR smartphone on the palm reset, you can use your phone on your laptop and even supports phone calls and file transfer from one device to other.

Battery

HUAWEI MateBook X Pro is packed with 56Wh battery that offers up to 13 hours of video playback. Based on our bench test, the MateBook X Pro able to offers around 8 hours of normal usage like web browsing, some light photo editing and movie. When coming to high-performance demands like Premiere Pro video editing, it only gives around 6 hours+ before I need to plug the 65W USB Type-C power adapter.

It would require about an hour 50 minutes to completely charge a flat battery to full.