Hands-on review: Huawei MateBook 14s

Huawei recently unveiled its MateBook 14s, a 14.2-inch laptop that offers an advanced productivity experience with extended battery life, AI noise cancellation and personal voice enhancement.

We reviewed the MateBook 14s, and here’s our first impression.

Design and performance

For the build quality of this notebook, there’s the metallic finish body on the Matebook 14s, which makes the laptop feel premium. The laptop weighs 1.43kg and measures 16.7mm thick, so it can easily be put into a bag or carried around.

It has a backlit chiclet-style keyboard, which was very responsive and pleasant to type on.

In terms of performance, the MateBook 14s has the 11th Generation Intel CoreTM CPU and Iris Xe graphics card. It also has a performance mode that will boost the CPU TDP to 45W.

It also features 16GB RAM for a more robust multitasking experience and 512GB SSD ROM. In addition, the laptop’s read and write speeds allow it to manage large-file storage and compression requirements.

The Huawei Matebook 14s has 1 USB-C, 1x Thunderbolt 4, USB3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, HDMI, and a 3.5mm audio connector for connectivity. The laptop also has a fingerprint sensor and face recognition feature.

The device comes with a large 60Wh (rated capacity) battery which allows 13 hours of continuous 1080p video playback.

The MateBook 14s comes with a pocketable 90W power adapter that charges the laptop quickly. In just 15 minutes of charging time, it supplied me enough battery for three hours of use.

Display

The MateBook 14s features a 2.5K HD touch screen display with a screen-to-body ratio of 90 per cent and a colour gamut of 100 per cent sRGB (typical). Running mobile apps on the laptop was fun because of the touchscreen display.

The laptop also has improved audio, with an integrated quad tweeter/woofer speaker sound system.

The MateBook 14s also comes with Huawei Sound Personal Voice Enhancement technology, which eliminated noise during my online meetings.

By bluetooth connection, with a pair of Huawei earbuds, I could tune into podcast or listen to my favourite songs when commuting, shopping or chilling out in a café. In addition, it allowed me to quickly check the battery level of the earbuds when connected with a device, which is user-friendly and convenient.

Additional new features

The MateBook 14s also has PC-Tablet multi-screen collaboration features, which include three modes: mirror, extend and collaborate.

As the name implies, mirror mode could mirror the MateBook 14s screen to the tablet display, which allowed me to directly work on files and annotate documents with the Huawei M Pencil of the tablet.

The notebook’s extend mode turns the Huawei MatePad Pro into a second screen, giving an additional screen area to display more material, perfect for online shopping or browsing the internet.

The collaborate mode supports cross-platform communications by dragging and dropping text, photos, and documents between linked devices.

Huawei MateBook 14s in Spruce Green and Space Grey will be available in the UAE from November 25, starting from Dhs5,299, including Huawei MatePad and earphones. UAE residents can pre-order on Huawei’s online store starting November 16-24 and benefit from a special Dhs400 discount.