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While the likes of Samsung and Apple play it out on the tablet battlefield, there are companies like Huawei that are slowly climbing the high-end tablet ladder. A comparatively late entrant to the field of consumer technology, Huawei had launched only a couple of basic handsets till last year. The last couple of months, however, has seen the company launch a couple of feature-packed phones and it's first tablet. In CES this year, it was announced that their tablet, the Huawei MediaPad, would be one of the first to get an Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade. The one that landed on my desk was awaiting the upgrade but here's how it fared on our tests.
Design details
When it comes to first impressions, the Huawei MediaPad might not make a lasting impression – the fascia could pass off as another run-of-the-mill Android tablet. However, what strikes one later is that the tablet has been designed without the need for a physical or touch-sensitive buttons. The black bezel doesn't even have a brand name imprinted on it, which is a subtle yet smart idea because gadgets that auto-orient to landscape/portrait can easily do without the weird looking brand name flipped at an 90 or 180 degree. The SIM card (3G) and the SD card slots are enclosed in one removable section of the back panel. A neat design overall.
App appeal
At 390g, the MediaPad weighs half as much the Apple iPad 2. It's a real plus for people who need to carry the tablet to work and for official trips. I found the 7-incher's form factor really convenient to read e-books on. I downloaded ‘Wattpad', a staff-choice app on the Android Market. The app lists hundreds of books under genres like Adventure, Science Fiction, Historical Fiction etc for you to choose and download from. The IPS panel display is said to support 217 pixels per inch and has pretty wide viewing angles. Augmenting the multimedia experience is a display that supports 1080P full HD and a surround sound stereo. I streamed a couple of high-def videos of the spy-sitcom Archer and the video played back quite decently on the screen. You'll find the default Android music player on the tablet, one which doesn't support the Mp3 format. You can download Winamp or Poweramp Music Player as an alternate to load your music files on to.
Power talk
The MediaPad is driven by Qualcomm's dual-core 1.2GHz processor and comes with 512MB of RAM. I ran the Quadrant Standard Edition benchmarking test on the MediaPad and it scored about 2,260 on the test, a notch below the Samsung Galaxy Tab. The model that I tested was running Android 3.2 Honeycomb but the Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade was announced at CES, Las Vegas earlier this year. So, if you plan to go for this you are relatively future proof as of now.
The tablet comes with a 5-meg camera at the rear and 1.2-meg for video-conferencing. The snaps I took were not brilliant by any measure. A little bit of compromise in lighting and the image quality would drop drastically. It was mostly the colours that the camera lost out on coupled with the fact that unless you shot in bright sunlight the images had more than their fair share of noise.
The rear clicker comes with HD video recording capabilities and the results in terms of image quality were quite similar to the still shots.
The MediaPad comes with a whopping 4,100 mAh battery delivering over 6 hours of playtime. I used it for a couple of days and it never disappointed with its runtime. On a full charge, I could stretch the usage to last a working day, while only checking mails and using various apps. On days that I watched movies on it, I had to plug it in twice a day.
Although I didn't notice any sustained delays or lags during the general use of the tablet, there were times when typing on a third-party app would be severely delayed. This could be due to a couple of apps running in the background because it didn't happen too often.
Our verdict
The Huawei MediaPad has its moments – it has a nice interface, delivers decent performance and lives up to its promise of a fairly long battery life. However, the overall package might not be good ahead for those who've already been sold by the idea of owing an iPad or a Sony Tablet P. The rest can go for this if they are feeling adventurous and are in for something new.
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