According to the statistics agency Canalys’s smartphone statistics for the first quarter of 2021, Huawei’s mobile phone shipments fell by 50% year-on-year, but it still shipped 14.9 million units, stubbornly occupying a 16% market share. In the global market, it was helpless to fall out of the top five.
This situation has left everyone in the throat. If it were not for the well-known external interference, today’s Huawei mobile phones will undoubtedly rise to the top-even before the eventful autumn arrives, Huawei mobile phones have briefly won first place.
In the face of adversity that seems almost inescapable to escape, there are usually two choices-either pessimistic, giving up, having no choice, taking advantage of the trend, and letting it go; there is also a choice of accumulating strength to climb upwards until the wall is broken. A moment. Huawei may choose the latter.
In the darkest moment when Huawei’s mobile phone market share has dropped sharply, the newly born HarmonyOS has torn a hole in the non-PC operating system field dominated by Android and iOS, which makes people shine-to be an independent operating system (mainly The difficulty of forming a relevant ecology is not much easier than that of a chip.
HarmonyOS is different from Android and iOS. It is not only limited to mobile phones but can break the boundaries between multiple screens. It is widely used in tablets, smart screens, smart wearable devices, and even cars. hardware. Under the existing conditions, there will be more stocks of Huawei mobile phones, smart screens, smart wearable devices, and car machines.
This time, Huawei’s new-generation tablet computer, MatePad Pro 12.6-inch, is the first Huawei tablet equipped with HarmonyOS. The adversity and difficulties encountered are no different than those of mobile phones, but it is still released as scheduled after several twists and turns, even in layers. Under pressure, from the perspective of comprehensive innovative configuration and stacking strength, it also made the strongest sound of Huawei’s flat-panel products so far.
In China, only Apple and Huawei are the only tablet players that are eye-catching, and all others are others. On the one hand, this work represents the huge stock and future growth of Huawei tablets, and it is the reserve force that HarmonyOS can rely on to continue to expand its share; on the other hand, this work may also have an exemplary demand for the use of HarmonyOS for wait-and-see users.
In terms of hardware, the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch is equipped with a giant OLED screen with 100% P3 color gamut and Delta E<0.5 extreme color accuracy. The Kirin 9000 series chips will increase the performance to the pinnacle level of the iPad camp; The second-generation M-Pencil supports bureau handwriting, double-click switching, smart forms, and one-stroke forming; the ecology of stylus software and creative software is gradually improved.
Under the blessing of HarmonyOS, the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch opened the flat ceiling and realized many new gameplay and functional experiences that had never been imagined in the Android era, and it has the momentum to fight against iPad OS. Next is our detailed full experience of Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch.
Design & Appearance
Smartphones have entered the era of full screens for a long time, but tablet devices have long maintained a large forehead and wide chin, and the improvement of the screen-to-body ratio has always been an important direction pursued by Huawei’s MatePad Pro series.
This time, Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6 inches is equipped with a 5.6mm isometric micro bezel. While cutting off the traditional “large forehead” and “wide chin”, it further eliminates the front camera punching and shrinks it to the bezel. 90% ultra-high screen-to-body ratio, once again becoming the world’s highest screen-to-body tablet.
Symmetrical frame such as front body
In terms of screen, the excellent-looking MatePad Pro 12.6-inch not only has a high screen-to-body ratio of 90%, but its screen quality has also been greatly upgraded-this is a 12.6-inch OLED screen with a resolution of 2560×1600, 240 PPI, and 100 support. % P3 wide color gamut, 1000000:1 ultra-high contrast ratio, and the ultra-narrow frame is a perfect match.
Huawei MatePad Pro’s 12.6-inch frame is upgraded with aluminum-magnesium alloy material, which can combine the hardness of aluminum alloy with the lightness of magnesium alloy, which is strong and tough while maintaining the lightness and portability of the whole machine.
It is worth noting that this work uses a stealth antenna design. There are 29 logical antennas infiltrated into the fuselage. There are no antenna breakpoints from the middle frame to the back cover, and the whole machine is extremely integrated.
Karman Kardon logo
Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch is available in three colors, namely Summer Populus, Frost Silver, and Obsidian Lime. This summer Populus euphratica version in our hands is made of environmentally friendly plain leather material, with very delicate lychee patterns distributed on it, which is slightly elastic, warm, and skin-friendly.
In addition, considering practicality, the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch made of plain leather is also more scratch-resistant, non-slip, easy to clean, and will not become a fingerprint collector.
In short, this is a rare time when the back material of a tablet device is completely comparable to a flagship phone.
This is Huawei’s first rear three-camera tablet. The Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch has a 13M main camera, 8M sub-camera (120° wide-angle), and 3D in-depth (iTOF) cameras, and the arrangement adheres to an asymmetrical matrix design. The 12.6-inch Huawei MatePad Pro has symmetrically arranged speakers on the top and bottom of the fuselage.
HarmonyOS UI experience
When it comes to the user experience of the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch, it is impossible to avoid its operating system. This is the first smart terminal equipped with HarmonyOS, so what exactly is HarmonyOS? How does it compare to other systems? What is unique on the tablet?
It is not too easy to answer this question particularly accurately, because HarmonyOS is a huge operating system, it is not a hardware module or a function. In other words, the entire Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch is based on HarmonyOS. All your operations on the tablet are actually supported by HarmonyOS.
Of course, HarmonyOS still has its own characteristics. After a period of understanding and experience, there are actually some UIs and functions, and you can clearly feel the difference between HarmonyOS and other operating systems. If you must follow the answer of “Where is HarmonyOS”, I will take you to understand:
HarmonyOS is only at the UI level, which is quite different from Android-based EMUI.
We see that the bottom application bar is divided into two left and right columns. The left is the permanent application bar, which can hold up to 8 frequently used applications, and the right is the recently used APP application bar. The user can also choose to close it in “Settings-Desktop Settings” “Show recent apps”. The bottom application bar can display a total of 11 frequently used and recently visited APPs.
HarmonyOS’s universal cards can personalize and display information that is highly relevant and necessary for users. For example, weather cards can display information about weather changes of the day, memo cards can display notes or to-do information, and sports health cards can display step information. You can view common information on the desktop without entering the APP.
Users can also freely carry out card combinations-such as one-screen work and one-screen entertainment, and HarmonyOS also provides a variety of card size options, including 2×1, 2×2, 2×4, and 4×4.
In the process of use, we can also find that Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch uses a brand-new HarmonyOS font, which supports infinite weight (in layman’s terms, the thickness of the strokes of a word). The traditional font size and weight adjustment can only choose a fixed gear. The HarmonyOS bold font-weight is steplessly variable, and users can adjust the font size and thickness at will.
In the HarmonyOS used by Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch, the control center has made considerable changes.
It includes three modules: broadcast control center, shortcut switch, and hyper terminal. It expands the control center that can only control a single device to the control center of the hyper terminal, allowing users to click and connect when controlling multiple devices.
Among them, the existence of the audio broadcast control center is mainly to unify the interaction and UI when switching between different music APPs and playing audio sources. The minimalist card layout replaces each APP’s own UI.
Open the HyperTerminal in the control center on the tablet, and other device icons are floating around the tablet icon. The user only needs to select one of the device icons and gently pull it inward to attach it to the tablet icon, which means the connection is successful.
Mobile phone users can also use magnetic attraction to open multi-screen collaboration between mobile phones and tablets. They only need to drag the tablet icon to the phone icon to establish a collaboration between the two.
Swipe the desktop left to the negative one to enter the service center of HarmonyOS. The service center can be regarded as the residence center of various atomic services. You can use various services by clicking on the service card, such as checking the itinerary or agent, controlling smart home equipment, one-click taxi or ordering meals, etc. In the service center, users can obtain service cards by swiping, searching, scanning codes, etc., so that they can experience fast applications more conveniently.
Swipe down from the top or top left of the screen to bring up the notification center and get application notifications. Users can set application notification permissions here and clear notifications with one click.
The Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch HarmonyOS-based file manager has also changed considerably. It adopts a brand-new tablet-specific column layout and supports two browsing modes: grid and list, and icons are displayed on the folder, which is convenient for quickly locating what you are looking for. File content, this is a bit of a desktop folder.
HarmonyOS software ecological experience
Application adaptation is the key to reshaping the ecology of the new Huawei MatePad Pro.
After Google gave up the Android tablet system, in fact, manufacturers had to do something different if they wanted to do something different. This may be one of the reasons for the long-term stagnation of the Android tablet camp.
The new Huawei MatePad Pro using HarmonyOS does not have so many constraints and worries. For users with professional needs, Huawei has improved the stylus software ecosystem and creative software ecosystem.
For example, some users’ commonly used cloud notes have integrated the Huawei Pencil Engine report point prediction algorithm, making writing smoother; Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch provides a variety of Huawei-specific brushes and pen effects for Evernote, which can quickly call Huawei The handwriting kit adds hand-drawn content to the notes; Wanxing Meowing has access to Huawei’s multi-screen collaboration capabilities. Users can synchronize photos and videos taken by their phones to the tablet for editing. When editing videos on the PC, they can also use the tablet PC The extended mode of screen collaboration allows the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch to act as a surveillance screen…
For ordinary users, Huawei has improved the horizontal screen adaptation-that is the parallel vision function.
In the single-window state, users can make full use of the blank areas on the left and right sides of the screen to slide up and down without moving their fingers on the window; in the left-right split-window state, the user can make the left and right screens work in parallel with the two windows of the application The operation is as if two same applications are opened on one screen at the same time.
It is worth mentioning that the display logic has changed compared to the past: most applications always maintain the main interface of the application on the left side, and the content of the new window clicked on the left side is displayed in the right window.
Shopping software is another kind of display logic. The two newest windows of the application are always displayed on the screen. The newest window is on the right and the second newest on the left, probably for the convenience of users to compare prices.
The parallel vision function greatly improves user efficiency, enriches and expands user use scenarios on tablet products, brings users a new horizontal screen interactive experience, and solves the problem that most applications under large-size tablets do not support horizontal The issue of screen use can be regarded as a brand-new thinking and innovative model for the tablet market.
Multi-screen collaborative experience
When the multi-screen collaboration was born, it was defined as the best solution based on distributed technology to break equipment and application barriers. The realization of cross-platform and cross-system multi-screen collaboration functions has naturally become one of the important features of HarmonyOS 2 contained in the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch.
Many changes have taken place in the new generation of multi-screens. For example, in the horizontal screen state, when the mobile phone is connected to the tablet, the APP displayed in the collaboration window can become a full screen, and the advantages of the large screen of the tablet are finally fully utilized. In this way, users can read news and browse information on the full screen, and can also make full use of the keyboard to write emails and reply to messages and are no longer limited to small windows.
When the APP clone is displayed in full screen on the tablet, the phone can also operate other application tasks. The tablet avatar continues to display/operate the original application. In this way, the greatest convenience is that users do not need to repeatedly install applications on the tablet and repeat user logins.
This is actually one of the manifestations of HarmonyOS distributed technology-the task stack when the phone is cloned into the full screen is actually drawn on a “virtual device”, and this “virtual device” is set according to the size of the tablet screen. According to the layout of the tablet screen, the task content on the “virtual device” of the mobile phone is finally presented on the tablet.
In the past, there were significant obstacles to transferring files between mobile phones and computers, especially cross-platform restrictions. To transfer files between the two must pass the cumbersome Bluetooth speed, or ensure that the network is available to save files through social software It is very inconvenient to transmit to the local area.
Huawei’s multi-screen collaboration function solves this pain point. Files can be seamlessly dragged and dropped to office software on the mobile phone and Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch terminals, and they can be quickly transferred to each other, and the contents of pictures, files, and text are not limited. , The file size is unlimited, and the speed is extremely fast, which greatly improves the author’s work efficiency in some scenarios.
With the help of Huawei’s multi-screen collaboration, Huawei tablets, and mobile phones can also be mutually peripherals, thoroughly sharing the hardware capabilities of Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch terminals, so that you can operate and use the mobile phone on the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch interface, and keep Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch productivity while interacting with mobile phones:
We can use the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch mouse peripheral to operate the documents or pictures on the mobile phone, and we can also use the full-size physical keyboard to enter text in the mobile chat window, which significantly improves typing speed and efficiency. In addition, you can also use the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch speakers to play music on the phone, expand a larger area of audio coverage, or “cast the screen” of the mobile game to the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch.
Of course, with the help of multi-screen collaboration, we can even receive mobile phone calls and send and receive text messages through the Wi-Fi version of the tablet. Of course, this is achieved entirely through the communication capabilities of the mobile phone, and the tablet itself does not.
In daily use, especially when using mobile phones and Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch screens at the same time, you no longer need to switch between the two device screens repeatedly. You only need to focus on the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch large screen. The mobile app can be browsed on the tablet so that the attention of work and life is no longer distracted, and more focused.
Multi-screen collaboration based on Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch and mobile phones can also realize automatic task connection, which means that information content can follow the screen transfer, seamless natural flow, and efficient collaboration. Documents that have not been processed on the mobile phone, most of the TV series that has just been chased, half of the dramas that have been watched, and chats that have not yet ended will not be interrupted, all can be connected to the tablet to continue to view or process, the whole process is not at all Intermittent, very coherent from beginning to end.
In this way, combined with the multi-screen collaboration of mobile phones and computers to achieve file transfer and data sharing, the multi-screen collaborative interaction provided by Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch has become a must for users who have both Huawei mobile phones and Huawei computers. Excellent exclusive enjoyment.
Accessory experience
Tablets that cannot be used with keyboards and pens can be 100% sure that they are “productivity before buying, iQiyi after buying” giant-screen phones. Since the birth of the Huawei MatePad Pro series, the pen and keyboard have been fully integrated. This time, the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch brings the second-generation Huawei M-Pencil and a new smart magnetic keyboard.
In the tablet market, in China, there are only two players with head size, Apple and Huawei, and all others are others, not to mention the R&D investment and controllable mass production of the stylus.
The previous generation of Huawei’s stylus is out of stock, and one of the more important reasons is that Huawei underestimated consumer demand. When the first generation of Huawei MatePad Pro was launched in the early days, according to relevant data, its pen allocation rate could reach about 60%, which is already a very high number. It can be seen that the demand for a stylus is not small.
Presumably, this is also an important reason why Huawei continues to invest in the research and development of M-Pencil.
Let’s take a look at the second-generation M-Pencil. While it continues the hexagonal shape of the previous generation, it also brings some new ideas, such as the prisms are more rounded; the nib uses a new frosted transparent design and even customized The platinum-coated refills are in line with the material, which is far different from the previous generation.
The most intuitive experience change is that friction and damping are significantly strengthened, and writing is closer to paper and pen writing.
In the experience, we also found that the nib of the second-generation M-Pencil has become a semi-circular electrode. When writing on the side peak, the handwriting finally does not drift. In addition, the new high-precision pressure strain gauge enables it to have a 4096-level active type. Pressure.
The richness of touch interaction is obvious. Users can already switch between eraser and brush by double-clicking. Of course, the “double-click switching” gesture can be customized to other functions in the settings as needed.
In terms of charging and battery life, wireless fast charging can be used for 30 seconds, and you can use it for 10 minutes; it can be fully charged in 60 minutes, and it can be used for about 10 hours when fully charged.
When the user is not using the stylus, just stick it on the long frame of Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch. This magnetic design allows the stylus to be recharged almost all the time when the stylus is idle and can ignore the charging speed and battery life. Situational concern.
The new smart magnetic keyboard still supports magnetic adsorption, Bluetooth connection, plug and play, and naturally also supports wireless, which can achieve 55/65 degrees dual-angle support.
In addition, this full-size keyboard has a 1.3mm long keystroke, newly added Fn and function keys, and supports multiple combination shortcut keys, once again close to the traditional PC keyboard we are familiar with, which can improve input efficiency.
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Verdict
From the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch tablet, which was finally unveiled after several twists and turns for well-known reasons, we can actually see something Huawei’s persistent and advanced investment in the tablet field should have entered a full-blown harvest period long ago:
At the hardware level, the self-developed Kirin chip is so competitive that it far exceeds expectations. The Kirin 9000, which we have evaluated in-depth before, even fought a beautiful turnaround. In particular, the graphics processing capabilities of the consistent shortcomings have piled the number of GPU cores to the design limit. The full release of the 24-core GPU on the Kirin platform is no longer inferior to the Apple A13.
Only as early as August 2020, Yu Chengdong publicly stated at the 2020 summit of the China Information Technology Hundreds that the production of its chips will be stopped on September 15th, and even the number of high-end Kirin chips on the Mate40 series will be relatively comparable. limited. So, it can be guessed that the number of Kirin 9000 chips that can be reserved for the Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6 inches may not be very generous.
At the software level, the biggest bottleneck of the Android camp tablet in the past was software adaptation and ecological constraints. App development based on HarmonyOS can achieve “one-time development, multi-terminal adaptation”, which perfectly solves the problem of App development. At the same time, its Internet of Everything feature has also been maximized on this generation of Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch. Through the steady advancement of differentiated functions such as parallel vision and multi-screen collaboration, productivity, and note-taking applications continue to be promoted online, showing With its strong connection capabilities, it also shows Huawei’s call to build a HarmonyOS ecosystem.
At the accessory level, the touch keyboard and stylus have completed another round of iterations, which makes Huawei the only manufacturer in the tablet market that is still confronting Apple head-on.
At present, I believe everyone has heard about the difficulties that Huawei has encountered in recent years from the external environment. Under such a predicament, Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6-inch is still able to achieve more powerful technology and functions than before. HarmonyOS has begun to take shape. Both software and hardware are presented to users with a very high degree of completion, which is very valuable.