Huawei MatePad Pro Max Test: Amazing Hardware But DON’T Buy It

Huawei built the world’s most advanced tablet. The MatePad Pro Max is the thinnest, lightest 13’’+ tablet on the market, it has a brilliant OLED display with a matte coating and the best tablet speakers we’ve ever tested, so why can’t we recommend it? 

Over the past 2 weeks, I’ve spent hours testing everything from Netflix streaming, gaming, working and even taking photos with the MatePad. And there’s a very, very big flaw that made the entire experience nearly unusable. Let’s get into it. 

Display and Speakers 

With the MatePad Pro Max, most of the budget is clearly going into the display. It’s a huge, 13,2’’ OLED panel with top of the line specs. It has 144Hz refresh rate, a 3k resolution and gets up to 1600 nits bright. It’s easily bright enough for outdoor use.

Another factor contributes massively to the outdoor as well as indoor visibility: the matte surface coating. It’s an optional upgrade you can get for the tablet that basically eliminates all glare and reflections from the display. Even if a bright light is shining on the display, you can still see everything. The only small sacrifice with this setup is that pixels look slightly, but really very slightly less sharp than on a comparable glossy display. But we think the pros outweigh the cons here. Also, this surface provides more friction for the stylus, which we’ll talk about later. 

The MatePad Pro has, in our taste, the best speaker setup of any tablet out at the moment. It has a 6 stereo speaker configuration. These speakers are clear, have plenty of bass and get very loud too. It’s almost miraculous that such spacious sounding speakers can fit inside the thin frame of the MatePad Pro Max. Together with the display, that makes the MatePad especially suitable for watching movies and shows. 

Design and Build

It’s also one of the most optically stunning tablets out there. It’s a unibody aluminium tablet, and it’s razor thin at 4,7mm. Thanks to that slim profile, it’s ridiculously light at just 499 grams despite having a huge display. 

The front of the tablet has thin and even bezels all the way around, even around the webcam in the top bezel. That transitions to smooth, rounded corners and sides with a glossy, metallic finish and the textured metal back. There’s a round camera bump on the top right corner housing the rear camera and LED flash. Holding this tablet in the hand really feels like you’re interacting with something from the future. It’s really quite stunning. 

The USB-C charging port is on the right side. It’s a USB 3.2 port, so you can output an HDMI signal to mirror your screen on a projector or TV. The top-left corner houses the volume rocker and power button. There’s an integrated fingerprint reader on the bottom, which is one of the better tablet biometrics solutions. It works 90% of the time, but occasionally will take a second try before unlocking. Face unlock is supported as well if you prefer that. 

Stylus

The Huawei M-Pencil Pro is, at first sight, clearly an Apple Pencil Pro knockoff. It comes in almost the same packaging, looks and even feels pretty much the same in the hand. It has tilt to shade, double tap and squeeze features too, just like the Apple Pencil. 

The M Pencil Pro comes with 3 distinct pencil tips out the box, varying in hardness and material. You can pick and choose which one you prefer for writing or drawing. Also, writing on the MatePad’s display just feels so much more natural and more paperlike compared to an iPad or Galaxy Tab because of the softer pencil tips and also the matte display texture. It’s really nice. Though there is a tiny bit more delay with the M-Pencil Pro than an Apple Pencil Pro. Also, there is a little bit of inconsistency in how much pressure is actually registered when you tap the display, and diagonal lines aren’t always as smooth as they should be.

Huawei Notes is a solid preinstalled notes app that does pretty much what you’d expect from a premium notetaking app like Samsung Notes, and I didn’t find any missing features so far. And the GoPaint preinstalled drawing app is really one of a kind. There aren’t many great drawing app options on Android, and the Go Paint app is exactly what you’d want for digital art. It’s a really complete app that isn’t too overwhelming for beginners. 

Overall, the Matepad Pro Max is a really great drawing tablet, but there are still some slight inconsistencies with the M Pencil that makes the Apple Pencil and an iPad Air or Pro a better choice for serious artists. 

Specs, Performance and Benchmarks

So far so good. However, as you probably know, Huawei is banned from using Qualcomm or Mediatek chips in their tablets, and also banned from using the newest chip manufacturing technologies, so the Kirin T93 Pro processor that the MatePad comes with isn’t going to compete with the newest Snapdragon or Apple M5 chip. 

The Kirin T93 Pro is a 9-core, 14 thread CPU. So there’s some hyperthreading technology going on here, which you usually only find on desktop chips. That comes coupled with 12GB of fast RAM, and a base 256GB of storage. That’s upgradable to 512GB for a premium.

Overall performance with the Matepad feels fast. Apps launch quickly, multitasking works without hitches and the tablet stays relatively cool even when gaming. Honestly it’s kind of surprising how quick and responsive the tablet is, no doubt thanks to software optimisations from Huawei. 

So let’s compare the Matepad against its competition using benchmark tests. In Geekbench 6, the MatePad is much slower than other premium tablets. The iPad Air M4 is 104% faster in CPU single-core, and 112% faster in multi-core. The Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra is also more powerful; 50% faster in single-core and 40% faster in multi-core. That puts the Huawei MatePad on the level of a midrange Android tablet like the Xiaomi Pad 8.

In 3DMark’s Wildlife Extreme graphics test, this Matepad Pro Max performs alright. The iPad Air is a whole 173% faster, the Tab S11 Ultra 135% faster. The standard iPad 11 performs the same in this benchmark, though. And it’s fast enough for heavy games. 

Gaming

Sadly, the decent benchmark results doesn’t really translate into gaming performance, probably because most developers don’t bother optimising for such a niche processor. In Fortnite, you’re limited to a 30FPS cap no matter what settings. We’re sure the tablet could perform better if there wasn’t an FPS cap. 

Things look a lot better in Delta Force, where we’re able to run the game at a flawless 60FPS with the exquisite preset. Still, there’s no 120FPS mode available like on most Android gaming tablets.

Minecraft has a different issue; here, you can run the game at a consistent 100+ FPS, but the fancy graphics options that are otherwise available to almost all Android tablets aren’t able to be activated here. So clearly, you’re not going to be doing serious, competitive gaming on a Huawei tablet. OnePlus, Xiaomi and Samsung offer much better alternatives for that. 

Software

Obviously, the biggest drawback to having any Huawei tablet is the lack of any Google services without complicated workarounds. It doesn’t matter if you have the best tablet display in the world if you can’t watch YouTube or Netflix on it. That’s the biggest problem. 

Starting up the tablet, you’re immediately greeted by a number of sponsored, preinstalled and suggested apps. Which really shouldn’t be a thing on a flagship device. And you’ll have to navigate directly to the Huawei App Gallery to install MicroG, Aurora Store and GBox. Setting those up are necessary to use Google services and install apps via the play store. And once you’ve done that, there’s still a chance that some apps will require further tweaks or workarounds. For example YouTube is stuck at FHD no matter what we tried, and Netflix doesn’t detect the Widevine L1 certification needed for HD playback. I’m sure there are possible workarounds, but you’re guaranteed to have to experiment a bit to get your apps up and running.

There’s some other software issues like the lack of display extension mode for external monitors and TVs, and also no official software support commitment. In general, the software situation is just a mess, though it’s mostly not Huawei’s fault. 

Keyboard

The Huawei Glide keyboard is basically a better, lighter and higher quality version of the Apple Magic Keyboard with similar strengths and flaws. With it, the Matepad practically becomes a laptop. Of course, the viewing angles are heavily limited, and you can’t disconnect the keyboard from the back cover. But the typing experience is really one of a kind, probably the best of any tablet keyboard. You can actually use it on your lap just like a laptop, too. It doesn’t fall over by itself like an iPad. 

The glide keyboard attaches using 3 magnetic pogo-pins on the back of the tablet, and connects using Huawei nearlink. When closed, it works as a protective case. There’s a pen dock at the back center of the keyboard for a compatible Huawei stylus, which is a nice touch. I actually wrote a good part of this review using the glide keyboard, and it was really enjoyable. I just wish Google workspace apps would work out of the box without additional configuration! Otherwise I could see myself replacing my laptop with this tablet for work.

Battery Life 

The Pro Max comes with a relatively small 9760mAh battery which charges rapidly at 66Watts. Huawei could probably have fit a far larger cell in the Pro Max if they weren’t trying to make the thinnest tablet in the world. 

In terms of battery life, the MatePad lasts 6 hours and 18 minutes streaming a looped YouTube video at full brightness. That’s a pretty weak result, considering that the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra lasts 14 hours in the same test, and it also has a bright OLED display. 

In actual use, the MatePad Pro Max’ battery feels a bit better, since you don’t have the display at max brightness all the time. But there’s definitely a lot of room for improvement. 

Cameras

This usually isn’t a highlight with tablets, but the Matepad’s cameras are really good for its class. It’s got a 50MP rear wide camera and a 12MP selfie cam, and both can record video in 4k 30p. The pictures, especially with the rear camera, are really sharp when the lighting is good. You can even go into the pro camera mode and take RAW images with it if you want to. But selfies are sharp too. Videos have solid quality, are stable and cope well with lighting changes, so it’s perfect for videocalls.

Conclusion

We said this the last time we tested the Huawei MatePad 11.5 S, and we’re saying it again. The MatePad Pro Max is a great tablet, with some really groundbreaking features. It’s razor thin, super light; The 13,2’’ matte OLED display and excellent speakers make it great for streaming movies and TV shows, so it’s such a shame that Netflix only works in 480p, and YouTube is stuck at FHD. Even though it’s mostly not Huawei’s fault, it just makes it hard for us to recommend their tablets.

Besides that, there’s also the question of how long the tablet will receive support. And there’s always a chance that your favourite apps will just straight up refuse to work on here. You really have to make sure you know what you’re getting into.

That doesn’t mean that there’s no market for this device either. If you’re familiar with tech and ready to try to find workarounds for these limitations, or if you’re specifically after the matte OLED screen and the M-Pencil for digital art, the MatePad Pro Max is a very compelling pick. After all, you would have to shell out a lot more for an iPad Pro 13’’ with the nano-texture display. 

If you’re interested in a Huawei tablet that doesn’t completely break the bank, you have to check out our MatePad 11.5S review. It also supports the Huawei M Pencil Pro and has the same papermatte coating like the Pro Max, but costs a lot less.