Huawei MatePad Paper takes on the Kindle Paperwhite for E Ink tablet supremacy
Huawei has been doing its best to keep its mobile lineup enticing since it was forced to drop Google’s services,thanks to those notorious US sanctions. That hasn’t stopped the company from trying to keep its consumer business afloat, though, and the likes of theP50, P50 Pro, andP50 Pocket(its first clamshell foldable) are recent attempts to sustain its relevance (even as the lack of GMS makes things difficult). Now withMWC 2022officially getting started, Huawei has announced an E Ink tablet that looks perfectly poised to take on a whole new market segment for the company.
The Huawei MatePad Paperis the company’s first e-reader tablet. It’s a fairly large device measuring 10.3 inches, and the grayscale 1872 x 1404 screen has an anti-glare coating to improve low-light use. For input, the tablet supports the Huawei M Pencil with its 26ms latency —not nearly as fastas the 2.8ms on theSamsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, but it should be more than sufficient for scribbling, annotating and editing documents on the matte E Ink surface.
The MatePad Paper is powered by the hexa-core Kirin 820E, paired with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. There’s a 3,625 mAh battery that can charge at up to 22.5W speeds — and considering e-reader power demands, that sounds positively huge. Aesthetic-wise, the Huawei MatePad Paper is as stylish an e-reader as it’s possible to get — it has considerably thinner bezels than the 5th genAmazon Kindle Paperwhite, for example (reportedly a whopping 86.3% screen-to-body ratio here). There’s a book spine to the left, in case you’re wondering how you’ll handle it.
Despite the E Ink display, the MatePad Paper is an Android tablet at heart. As we’ve come to expect, it lacks support for Google’s services. But does it even need them? E Ink devices are typically used for reading and writing and less for launching apps and game, so if there ever were a time to debate the usefulness of the big G’s services, it’s now. That said, Huawei’s shipping the tablet with HarmonyOS 2, complete with HMS (its own alternative to GMS).
The MatePad Paper will start at €499 whenit goes on sale in Europe and comes with an M Pencil and a Folio Case.
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