BARCELONA—Huawei has ascended very quickly to the top of the smartphone heap. Now it's come gunning for your laptop. The Matebook, introduced here at Mobile World Congress, is Huawei's first laptop, a $699, convertible Windows 10 Professional tablet with a classy case and some excellent accessories. I got some time with it here in Barcelona.
The Matebook is a slim, all-metal tablet, only 6.9mm thick and weighing 22 ounces. Its basic specs land it somewhere in the middle of the mob of Surfaces, Lenovos, and whatnot currently flinging 2-in-1s at us. The 12-inch, 2,160-by-1,440 IPS LCD screen is razor sharp, although it falls short of the Microsoft Surface Pro 4's 2,736-by-1,824 resolution. The 1.1GHz Intel Core m3 processor in the model I saw exceeds the low-end Surface Pro 4 model's speed, although it won't match more expensive laptops.
The Matebook will come in Intel Core m3, m5 and m7 configurations, with 4GB or 8GB of RAM and 128 to 512GB of SSD storage. Those will cost $699 to $1,599. There's no expandable storage—or expandable anything, really. The keyboard costs $129, the dock $89, and the pen $59.
On the side, between the volume buttons, there's a fingerprint scanner. Huawei says it's super-fast and even recognizes the sides of fingers, which seems very important given how you'd grip it. There are dual stereo speakers on top.
The Matebook's strength is in the look of its accessories. Start with the keyboard: it's a wraparound fake leather case that still feels more like leather than plastic; it's warm, soft, and not sticky. It doesn't feel like it would attract lint or dirt. Open it up, and the case has big, white keys with 1.5mm of throw. It's comfortable on the lap, if a bit wobbly, but more stable than the Apple iPad Pro.
A separate, matching case contains a pressure-sensitive pen and a USB-C dock. The dock expands the laptop's single USB-C port to offer two USB 3 ports, a USB-C passthrough for charging, Ethernet, HDMI, and VGA. The stylus functions as a pen when it's close to the screen, but when you pull it away from the laptop it becomes a laser pointer and slideshow controller. Yes, that's a gimmick, but it's a very useful one.
The Wacom-based pen was extremely responsive when I tried it, with excellent pressure sensitivity. As it uses Wacom technology, it should work with Windows apps that support pressure sensitivity.
Huawei claims 10 hours of office work or 9 hours of video playback on one battery charge, and says the battery charges to max in two hours.
If only Huawei had included the keyboard in the base price, it would have a killer response to the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 and Lenovo Miix. As it is, the dressed-up low-end model with keyboard and dock costs $917, which makes it about $100 less than a base model Surface Pro 4 with keyboard. That's still compelling, considering how good-looking this laptop/tablet is, and how the fake leather cover looks better than the Surface's Type Cover. We're looking forward to getting this one into the labs.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.