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| Huawei Matebook 16 (2021) Review |
Here is the huawei mate book 16 a godzilla sized laptop
busted some pretty respectable performance with its amd ryzen 5000 series cpu
and a bit dual fan coolant system too now you can snaffle your very own huawei
mate book 16 from 1 100 euros although my review sample slightly more expensive
with its configuration at 1 200 euros i've been putting this thing through its
pieces for the last few days let's see exactly what the huawei mate book 16 is
capable of
Cheers so first up kind of goes without seeing but if you want
a very portable laptop this ain't the one for you the matebook 16 is a bit of a
beast it's quite chunky and it weighs a couple of kilos so you'll struggle to
fit it into most backpacks that aren't absolutely enormous and you'll
definitely feel it when you're calling it around all day
This metal body is a
proper durable law you can basically chuck this thing about absolutely no
worries it'll just soak up any damage and yeah the meatbox 16 is only available
in the singular color the highly exciting space gray but at least the textured
finish means that it does a pretty good job of masking any grubby fingerprints
or anything like that you know you can plow your way through an entire kfc
bargain bucket and then really go to town on this thing with your greasy mitts
and it won't look too bad afterwards quick buffing with a cleaning cloth will
be brand new the port selection isn't exactly comprehensive considering it's a
massive laptop you've got dual usb air ports over on the right edge dual usb c
on the left plus an hdmi connection there's no ethernet port for a wired
networking connection there's no display
portaction and there's no thunderbolt uh support either and those usb c ports
so a bit of a shame overall considering it's not exactly a particularly cheap laptop
and there's certainly plenty of room on that chassis for more now one of the
benefits of having a 16-inch laptop is the fact you got plenty of space for that
lovely large chiclet style keyboard especially as huawei hasn't attempted to cram
in a dedicated number pad here on the right edge although annoyingly despite
the gargantuan size huawei has still crammed the enter key into a single piston
row but overall i did get on really well with the huawei mate book 16's
keyboard
I found it was very comfortable
to type on a little bit spongy towards the center but certainly nothing
dramatically bad keys are well spaced the travel is uh reasonably deep as well
so yeah i found that touch type and i could reach some pretty decent speeds and
the keyboard is naturally fully backlit with a couple of different stages of
backlight and to suit your ambient environment and i was very happy indeed to
see that there was a built-in fingerprint sensor on that power button as well
so just a quick tap of your digit on there and you'll be straight in or messing
around with pins or passwords although i definitely did notice in my time with
the huawei matebook 16 that it was sometimes a little bit lethargic getting
started up from called sometimes you'd have to hit that power button a good
three or four times before it finally decided to boot up it's basically the
laptop equivalent of me on a sunday morning after a previous night of far too
many blue wickeds and i gotta say normally laptop touch pads aren't particularly
great i don't tend to get on well with
them at all but here on the huawei mate book 16 it is one spacious more for me
look at the size of that so absolutely
no problems with that nice and
responsive even the clicky mouse button
bits weren't too terrible unfortunately
one irritation of the huawei matebook 16 is the fact that it's got very skinny bezels surrounding that display and normally that's obviously a good
thing but it means there's no space up top for a webcam and so huawei has had
to resort to its usual trigger that heisen aware the webcam inside of a button
in the keyboard which you might think is pretty bloody clever until you actually
come to do a zoom call or a microsoft teams god forbid and you realize that everyone is basically just staring right up your bloody nostrils not a particularly sexy look i've got to say and i even remembered to trim the hairy
vines that sprout out of both of my nostrils this morning the actual quality of
the webcam is absolutely fine it's a
typical hd affair so the images are quite grainy when blown up and everything
uh but yeah just purely because of the positioning of this thing
I would say definitely you want to get yourself a separate
webcam if you're going to be doing a lot
of online chats and likewise while you do have a dual mic arrangements here and
while we made box 16 for picking up your voice
If you're doing some sort of skyping session or whatever
definitely want to get a headset on the go as well just to keep the quality as
high as possible now if one of your major desires in your new laptop is having
a freaking enormous display well mission accomplished here on the huawei
matebook 16. it's an ips panel 16 inches unsurprisingly given the name almost square
aspect ratio 3x2 and it's a 2520 by 1680 pixel resolution so nice crisp images
again despite the size of this thing it's certainly perfect for multitasking
with lots of different apps at the same time you can have lots of stuff on
screen nice and visible and certainly a decent display for watching a bit of
netflix youtube whatever as well especially youtube something where you don't
have that cinematic aspect ratio of course because otherwise you get some serious letterboxing on the go the
colors are slightly cool on the default display settings though and not entirely
accurate either i did find in my testing
that this panel only covered 97 of the srgb gamut and 72 of the adobe rgb that
display hits almost 400 nits when you max it out as well which is uh nice and
bright but it is also a very reflective panel as you can see there so when you
are outdoors you'll have to do a bit of positioning just to make sure you don't
get any glare from up above or anything like that and it's a dual speaker setup
here on the Huawei matebook 16 and another advantage of that really spacious
chassis is the fact that they are actually upwards firing positions either side
of the keyboard this proves to be just about loud enough for enjoying some
netflix in the kitchen when you're busy cooking up a meal even with kids
wobbling in the background and because they're top firing that audio stays nice
and clear now my review model of the huawei mate book 16 was powered by an amd
ryzen 7 5800 h cpu backed by a generous 16 gigs of ram and this is more than
worthy for multitasking you can literally stream video and music in the background while you're working in google
chrome with other shiz going on as well and if you get all hot and bothered at
benchmarking while on geekbench we've got a single core score of 1309 multicore
6677.
However the huawei
matebook16 doesn't have a dedicated gpu stuffed into that massive chassis it
uses the integrated amd radeon graphics instead that's absolutely fine for
simple creative tasks but a photo editing not a bother but a live video editing
as well absolutely fine i thought i'd really start to push the huawei mate box
16 with a bit of gaming i tried some do maternal and that was basically unplayable
on the recommended graphics settings so i did bump it down to the lowest
settings and then it was a bit more tolerable but certainly not what I would
call fluid that frame rate was just about good enough to make the game playable
but it certainly wasn't particularly enjoyable and i suck enough at these games
when i'm on a gaming machine let alone something that's struggling to run the
bugger the Huawei mate box 16 definitely gets on much better with less demand
and fare like black mazer for instance that ran perfectly well on higher detail
settings
No worries overall it was a lot more fun apart from when my
newly acquired kitten of course decided to try and help me out a bit and my
view was completely obscured by fuzzy cat but seriously mate i love you but
this this is just not conducive to the filming of this video so overall the
matebook 16 will do casual gamers just fine but if you want to run more recent
and demanding titles well you're definitely going to want to look for a more
dedicated gaming machine both ace for an azus for instance do some really solid
ones around this sort of price point and again few benchmark and die hards well
in 3d mark time spice spiffed out a score of 1248 and the huawei mate book 16
did pass the stress test with a 97.3 score
as for city bench 20 well again a respectable score 41.87 now you do have a
dedicated cooling system on this thing as well huawei has packed in a pair of
shark fin fans you've got a dual heat
pipe set up
As well i've certainly found that the huawei mate book 16
stayed nice and cool under pressure definitely helped along with the fact that
it's got no dedicated gpu to cool down and you would kind of hope that the fact
that you've got no dedicated gpu and the fact that this is a bloody massive
laptop you get some pretty respectable battery life out of the thing as well
and that was certainly the case i finally got around seven hours of full-on mixed use from the thing from a full charge before it was completely
drained that involves a bit of media streaming uh plenty of web use and all of
that if you are just gonna be watching video on it non-stop then you get
between nine and ten hours of use so not the greatest result around but certainly
not to be sniffed at either as for the storage well my sample came with a 512
gig nvme ssd but it's not the nippiest around sadly this couldn't quite hit two
gigabits per second read or write speeds and as mentioned before there's no
ethernet port on this thing we do have wi-fi six support so it's fully
future-proofed in that regard and uh no
lte option just yet and if you happen to have lots of other Huawei devices kicking about well the good news is
the matebook 16 fully cross-device compatible as well so for instance say you've
got one of those snazzy new mate pad pro tablets you can actually use that as a
second display if you find that this screen for whatever reason isn't enough
for you already you can also use the tab display as a sketch and pad all kinds
of stuff so it's great to see that while we're still embracing that whole
ecosystem setup that it's been talking about for several years now
So that in a nutshell is the Huawei matebook 16 an epic
godzilla size laptop certainly if you want a big square style display to do
lots of things on at once it will definitely do the job there you've got enough
grunt for like creative tasks and a bit
of uh casual gaming on the side as well although i'd definitely point you in a
direction of a different laptop if you are more serious about the uh the gaming
side of things and if you want to do some proper full-on video editing so
anyway that's what this ball northerner thinks of the huawei mate book 16 as i
say coming soon starting from 1 100 euros i don't have the official uk price at
that time
cheers everyone love you
Thank You
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