Huawei upgrades the Matebook X Pro for 2019

When I used it late last year I was impressed, the Huawei Matebook X took some time to make it to Australia and when it did it sold out pretty fast.

Shipments of PCs globally were up four times on 2017 for Huawei last year and devices like the Matebook X are the reason why.

In 2019 the device gets a refresh and while it’s not a huge change externally it’s a feature packed set of upgrades.

Coming in two colours (Space Grey and Mystic Silver), it still weighs 1.33kg and is 14.6mm thick when closed.

That same recessed camera in the function key row remains for those concerned about camera hacking, and that placement is what allows for the 3000×2000 resolution 450 nits brightness screen to have a 91% screen to body ratio.

The main upgrades for 2019 are improved WiFi with AC9560 on board offering a 1733Mbps peak rate, the USB-C ports are upgraded to double the data speeds there to 40Gbps as full thunderbolt 3 ports, and of course it’s rocking the latest 8th Gen Intel processor and a 3.5x faster integrated graphics card.

Huawei have created a new three-finger swipe down gesture on the touch screen to allow screenshots to be initiated, once you swipe down you then select the area of screen to capture, and the software even includes Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to read the text on screen and convert to a clipboard note for you.

Perhaps the biggest advance though is Huawei Share OneHop.

OneHop is the pairing of a Huawei Mate 20 Pro to the Matebook X Pro through an NFC pairing. Tap your Mate 20 Pro on the right side of the device near the trackpad and you can instantly share text, documents and photos.

You can even shake the Mate 20 Pro and tap to initiate a screen mirroring which also allows you to record the PC screen for 60 seconds on your smartphone for sharing.

It’s pretty bloody impressive, and works super fast, though we’re unsure how it will cope with larger files as the demonstrations we saw were with files of 3MB and under. That said, if you’ve got a Mate 20 Pro – it’s like Apple’s Airdrop, but with a tap, and anyone that’s lived in the Apple Ecosystem and used Airdrop will know how convenient it can be (when it works).

There are also updates to the 13 inch and 14 inch Matebook laptops, but we’ll wait to see which models are coming to Australia and when before we delve into the detail there.

EFTM’s coverage of Mobile World Congress 2019 is supported by Vodafone, Oppo and Huawei