Huawei MediaPad M2 is a big tablet with big sound (hands-on)
With the help of Harman Kardon, the 10-inch tablet offers two speakers on its top edge and two on the bottom.
Just like in life, it's the little things that make the Huawei MediaPad M2 special. In addition to a comfy stylus, the company partnered with Harman Kardon to pack the 10-inch tablet with four speakers -- two on the top edge and two on the bottom. Pricing has yet to be announced and the tablet is expected to hit the US, UK and AU sometime in 2016.
Instead of focusing on a trendy thin design or crazy-high-res HD screen (like most manufacturers), Huawei decided to take the road less traveled and offer a tablet with an immersive audio experience for watching movies and TV shows. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to check out the audio properly because the demo area here at CES 2016 was as loud as a Las Vegas nightclub.
What's got four speakers and a stylus? This Huawei MediaPad M2 tablet (pictures)
See all photos
Most models pack speakers that you could find on an average smartphone. If you use a tablet for watching a lot of video, immersive sound could elevate your experience from good to great. Even if you primarily use headphones, your ears need a break sometime.
On a more productive note, the MediaPad M2 also includes a stylus. There's no way to attach it to the tablet, so if you lose things as frequently as I do, good luck with that. Still, despite its dangerously untethered existence, I really liked it.
Don't call it a Pencil.
When I used the preloaded Notes app, the tablet easily and quickly recognized my handwriting and converted it into text. Writing with the stylus didn't feel weird or unnatural. I enjoyed it as much as writing on a notepad and if I had actually used it for work it would've saved me a lot of transcribing time.
The stylus worked well during my time with it, though a lack of palm rejection resulted in accidentally grazing the buttons on the bottom navigation bar, causing me to exit the app, go to the home screen or open the recent apps screen when I didn't intend to. It was an unfortunate nuisance. The good news is that's the worst thing about the stylus (and it's not really the stylus' fault).
- 10-inch IPS LCD screen
- 1,920x1,200-pixel resolution
- Android 5.1
- 2GHz octa-core Kirin 930 CPU
- 16GB internal storage and 2GB of RAM for silver model
- 64GB internal storage and 3GB of RAM for gold model
- Fingerprint sensor
- microSD card slot expandable up to 128GB
- 13-megapixel rear camera, 5-megapixel front-facing camera
- 6,660mAh battery
- Bluetooth 4.0
- Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n/ac
- Stylus; 2,048 pressure levels
