Not everyone necessarily needs an iPad Pro or a Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, premium-end tablets equipped with a thousand features, cutting-edge specifications, a wide range of accessories but also a price tag that for most is decidedly prohibitive. Huawei understands that, for most people, the tablet is just a convenient window to the world who must know how to replace the smartphone for a few simple tasks that are more comfortable to perform on a large screen.
This is where it comes into play Huawei MatePad SEwhich in its 2022 version aims to become the tablet to recommend to those on a tight budget but still wants in his hands a product capable of satisfying his desire for multimedia.
You will never get tired of using it
No, we are not speaking in a metaphorical/philosophical sense. The MatePad SE is a tablet light and thin designed to be used by all family members in a way comfortable for long periods of time. With a thickness of only 7.85mm and a weight of 440g it is lighter than its main competitors such as Samsung Galaxy A8 and Lenovo M10 Plus.
The rear shell with dual-tone finish is pleasant to both the eye and the touch. The largest part is made in metal and embraces three of Huawei’s four tablet bezels, for a feeling of solidity and robustness which until a few years ago was found only in the top end of the market. The thinner strip is made of plastic and allows the powerful antennas to transmit its signal uninterruptedly.
The back is matte but the coloring is black still retains several fingerprints. If it annoys you to see fingerprints on the back of your devices with this tablet you will definitely need a cover. Cover which however is not necessarily necessary to safeguard the life of MatePad SE, built in a solid way and able to surely withstand small domestic accidents like a fall off the couch.
The bezels surrounding the display are thin enough to flatter the MatePad SE a modern look but still wide enough to allow a firm grip during use. The keys are all located on the top side of the tablet (using it horizontally) where they are easy to reach.
We would have liked to find a fingerprint reader but it is missing, even if it must be said that in this price range this “optional” is practically non-existent. This means that if you want to set an unlock password, it will have to be entered every time you want to use the device.
Made to entertain you
The most important part of a tablet is definitely the display. This is the reason why you decide to use this kind of product as an alternative to your more uncomfortable PC or your smartphone with a much smaller diagonal display.
In this case, Huawei has done an excellent job by mounting on this MatePad SE a display with certainly interesting features that will never make you regret the purchase of the tablet. It is a 10.4″ panelbig enough but not so much as to be uncomfortable, kind of IPS-LCD. Technology guarantees great viewing angles and bright colors but accurate, with blacks that are not absolute like those of an AMOLED but still very deep. In addition, it is a panel with a touch sensitive layer laminatewhich reduces the distance between the glass and the actual display for a visual quality far superior to that of a base 2022 iPad.
The resolution is of 2000×1200 pixelstherefore superior to FullHD, which on this diagonal translates into a pixel density of 225ppi, definitely good for a tablet especially in this price range. THE 4096 levels of brightness allow for brightness adjustment of the very granular panel.
If there is a strong point to be underlined for this tablet it is definitely the display. Viewing photos, videos, online shopping, browsing social media and more generally all the common “sofa” activities are really pleasant and we have never felt the lack of something extra if not perhaps an update frequency higher than the 60Hz, which however it is certainly not fundamental for the target user of this product.
To complete the immersive viewing experience they are present two powerful stereo speakers, although it must be said that the arrangement of the grilles would suggest that the number of speakers is actually four. Not bad because the MatePad SE still reproduces sounds very clearly, with a decent power (definitely more than plenty for home use) and with powerful bass for an excellent cinematic experience. The personalization of the listening experience through Huawei Histen 8.0 improves the already more than sufficient audio performance of this tablet which, thanks to its peculiarities it seems anything but cheap when you use it.
Dedicated more to passive entertainment than active
In order to present users with an excellent tablet for entertainment at a decidedly low price, Huawei had to make choices and compromise on the hardware installed in this MatePad SE 2022. So don’t expect a powerful processor or a lot of memory, the tablet has what it takes to make it pleasant to use for simple daily activities and little more.
The Snapdragon 680 it is a medium-low-end chip designed mainly to allow sufficiently fluid navigation in the system, the pleasant use of web browsing and social applications and is more than capable of decoding video streams even in high resolution for streaming multimedia content from the most popular services or from your personal NAS.
However, it’s not a chip made to break performance records in benchmarks or let you play the most complex games competitively. It’s obviously powerful enough for most of the games featured on the Huawei AppGallery, but heavier titles are off-limits. For a quick game with a puzzle game to pass the time or for interactive games dedicated to the little ones, it is enough and can’t complain.
It is a tablet that aims at a very broad range of the market and that has a small spending budget, a slice of users who only need the tablet to be able to play multimedia content in high quality and ensure smooth navigation on a large screen. And for this MatePad SE it is certainly more than suitable.
The memory RAM from 4GB it’s more than enough to hold everything the device is capable of doing while there 64GB internal memory it’s small if you want to keep a large collection of movies offline but more than enough if most of your activity takes place in the browser or via streaming.
| Smartphones | Geekbench 6 | AnTuTu | AiTuTu | 3DMark | PCMark Work 3.0 | ||||
| Single-core | Multi-core | – | – | Wild Life Extreme | Wild Life Extreme Stress Test | wild life | wild life Stress testing |
Performance | |
| Huawei MatePad SE | 409 | 1085 | 203675 | 61832 | 120 (0.70fps) | 123 – 120 (97.6%) | 442 (2.60fps) | 444 – 443 (99.8%) | 5449 |
There 5100mAh battery with this kind of hardware it is sufficient. With moderate use, several days of battery life can be obtained, obviously it all depends on the brightness of the display which is the most energy-intensive element of the MatePad SE. There 10W charging it’s fast enough that you don’t have to wait hours to resume using the tablet after a full discharge, with half an hour of charging you get several hours of use.
A single camera is placed on the back 5MP f/2.2 and focus, useful for scanning quick QRcodes or documents but nothing more. The front camera from 2MP it is sufficient to be recognized during video calls and is positioned on the long side (which is very convenient!).
HarmonyOS on tablet gives its best
We have already said it in the past, the limitations that Huawei smartphones have, when using a tablet are not so obvious. In a tablet designed for home entertainment like this, having a mail manager where you can read your mail, a photo gallery and a browser for everything else is more than enough. HarmonyOS 3.0 offers much more.
Multitasking on the 10.4″ display is comfortable, to be able side by side two apps it certainly comes in handy for most users. Some applications can run in floating windowanother function that at least once in a while comes in handy for anyone.
Connecting to other devices with the feature Super Devices it is immediate and intuitive, even if to exploit it properly there is obviously the need to have smartphones, earphones or laptops from the Huawei ecosystem.
The new version of HarmonyOS it does not differ much from the previous one from an aesthetic or functional point of view, but builds on a solid foundation by expanding its capabilities. New ways to interact with widgets and the ability to run two side-by-side instances of a single app they are certainly additions that are appreciated.
Google services are obviously missing but from a tablet it is much more convenient to use the browser and web apps to access everything we need rather than from a smartphone. Parents can then safeguard the health of children using the tablet and keep them under control thanks to Kids Corner and all the useful functions it integrates such as for example Posture Alerts, Bumpy Road Alerts hey usage timers.
