Huawei MediaPad M3 Specifications, Features and Comparison

The Huawei MediaPad M3 is an 8.4-inch Android tablet that was introduced in summer 2016. While it is fairly affordable, it packs very powerful hardware. Its highlights are a full metal body, an excellent screen and premium features like a fingerprint reader. With its size, it is a direct competitor to tablets like the iPad Mini. Let’s take a closer look at it.

Huawei MediaPad M3 Highlights

• Full metal body, very good built quality
• Excellent performance
• High resolution display
• Fairly inexpensive

Read now: Our Huawei MediaPad M3 Review

The Basics

Yes, even though the Huawei MediaPad M3 usually costs under 300 dollars, it is considered a premium tablet. It has a full metal body and feels very high end in your hands. With 7.3 millimeters, it is not the thinnest tablet though. It comes with a couple of premium features like a fingerprint reader on the front, AKG speakers on the sides and a very high-resolution display. Its 8.4-inch screen has a resolution of massive 2560 x 1600 pixel.

Underneath the screen sits powerful hardware. Huawei is shipping this tablet with their own HiSilicon Kirin 950 octa core processor. It’s a chip with eight cores in total. Four Cortex A72 cores are clocked at 2.3GHz and the other four Cortex A53 cores are clocked at 1.8GHz. In addition to that, we’re getting 4GB of RAM and a 32GB internal storage.

In case you’ve never heard of the Kirin 950, it is a very fast chip. In fact, in my benchmark tests it got better results than most tablets. The only competitor with higher results is the much more expensive Samsung Galaxy Tab S3.

Other features included two cameras with a resolution of 8 megapixel. There’s a microSD card slot as well and you can get it with 4G LTE if you like.

Huawei is shipping the MediaPad M3 with Android 6.0 Marshmallow. On top of that runs their own interface called Emotion UI. It customizes Android quite heavily, but you can customize it yourself to your liking. Even though Huawei did send a beta of Android 7.0 Nougat to a couple of testers, there hasn’t been an official update yet.

Full Specifications

Availability and Price

The Huawei MediaPad M3 was released in September 2016 in most countries. In fact, you can get it in the United States, Europe and most Asian countries. Obviously, prices differ from market to market a bit, but usually not by much. In the United States, you can usually get it for 299 US Dollars. In European countries like Germany it’s on sale for 299 Euros.

In case you want to get it with 64GB or LTE, you’ll have to pay roughly 50 US Dollars more.

Huawei MediaPad M3 Alternatives

Even though I’m writing this in 2017, I still think the Huawei MediaPad M3 is the best 8-inch Android tablet out there. But, obviously, there are a couple of alternatives you could look at. First of, there is the new Lenovo Tab 4 8 Plus. While its internal hardware is not as powerful, it offers a great battery life and usually is a bit cheaper. If you want to spend as little money as possible, the Amazon Fire HD 8 is a nice alternative.

There are a couple of other competitors. An interesting one is the ASUS ZenPad 3S 8.0. While it is not out yet, it does offer great hardware with a similar good built quality. It is lacking a fingerprint reader but is shipping with Android Nougat directly.

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Huawei MediaPad M3

Read now: Our Huawei MediaPad M3 Review

The Huawei MediaPad M3 is one of the best 8-inch tablets out there. It offers great performance at an affordable price, a very high resolution display and a good built quality. If you want as much value for your money as possible, this is the tablet to get.

Positive

• Full metal body
• Powerful hardware
• Very nice high-resolution display
• Fingerprint reader
• Fairly inexpensive

Negative

• Future updates unclear

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