Huawei MediaPad M2 10 review: A mid-range tablet that struggles to find its purpose

Huawei is a company enjoying something of a purple patch. Not only does the Chinese firm make the handset that tops our list of 2016’s best smartphones, teaming up with Google to make the Nexus 6P, but it has also leapt into third place in the race for global smartphone sales behind Samsung and Apple.

Good time to push the tablet market a bit harder, then, and Huawei is doing just that with the MediaPad M2 10. It’s a 10in Android tablet that comes in two flavours: a £250 standard version, and a £330 premium version, the latter of which was sent to us for the purpose of this review.

Is this too much for an Android tablet in 2016? Let’s find out.

Huawei MediaPad M2 10: Design

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In terms of design, Huawei is playing it very safe with the MediaPad M2 10, but it’s hard to see how radical you can be with tablet design without losing the “tablet” description. It’s a 10.1in device, with a polished glass front and metal trim. The device is clearly more at home in landscape mode, as the Huawei logo, front-facing camera and fingerprint scanner are along the longer sides, which also include a wider bezel.

The inclusion of a fingerprint scanner, although welcome, is considerably less appealing than on a mobile phone; getting your finger in position is an annoying act of contortion with something designed for two-handed use. For the most part I ended up just tapping in my Android PIN.

Still, the whole thing feels pretty thin and light for a tablet. It’s a mere 7.35mm thick, and weighs 490g, meaning you can toss it in your bag and forget about it. Better still, Huawei has included a faux-leather smart cover in the box that doubles as a stand, albeit one that’s a little more awkward to use than others I’ve come across.[gallery:1]

The case itself looks stylish, garnering its fair share of admiring comments while I was testing the device, and crucially it doesn’t add a great deal of bulk to the tablet. In fact, taking it out of the case makes the whole device feel oddly naked, and I’m hard pushed to think of another tablet that’s quite so wedded to the design of the case, aside from the Microsoft Surface and Apple iPad Pro.

If you opt for the premium version, Huawei also provides a stylus in the box, with a holder that can be attached to the case in a position of your choice. The stylus is chunky and pleasing to hold, and the handwriting recognition built into Huawei’s onscreen keyboard panel is surprisingly effective and elegantly implemented. To activate it, all you need to do is tap the screen with the stylus where you’d normally type, and scrawl your words in the panel at the bottom of the screen.

Palm rejection, too, seems pretty decent. As long as you approach the screen of the tablet stylus tip first, instances of accidental onscreen button presses are kept to a merciful minimum.

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Huawei MediaPad M2 10: Screen

The screen on the Huawei MediaPad M2 10 boasts a 1,200 x 1,920 resolution, meaning a pixel density of around 224ppi and an aspect ratio of 16:10. For comparison, the 9.7in iPads give you higher 264ppi, but there’s little visual difference. The MediaPad’s screen is plenty sharp enough.

It’s also a good, solid screen in terms of general quality. The tablet uses IPS technology, not AMOLED, so brightness is pretty good, reaching 382cd/m2. That compares well with other tablets: the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 9.7 is slightly dimmer at 359cm/m2, while the iPad Air 2 is a little ahead at 390cd/m2. In the real world, without specialist tools, you’re unlikely to notice the difference – at least in terms of brightness.

Things fall down a bit when it comes to colour accuracy. The Huawei MediaPad M2 10 covered only 86.2% of the sRGB gamut. That’s not disastrous, and we’ve seen tablets with worse scores, but it’s lower than the Samsung Tab S2’s 9.7’s 100% and the Apple iPad Air 2’s 90.1%. Contrast, however, is a very good 1,272:1. In short, it isn’t quite the very best screen on a tablet we’ve seen, but it’s still very good.

Huawei MediaPad M2 10: Performance

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As mentioned before, the MediaPad M2 comes in two flavours: a standard edition and a premium version, but the raw differences in specification aren’t too dramatic. Both devices include a HiSilicon Kirin 930 octa-core chipset, which comprises two quad-core CPUs running at 2GHz and 1.5GHz.

The premium version gets an extra gigabyte of RAM, taking it up to 3GB, and comes with 64GB of storage compared with the stingy 16GB in the base model. Other than that, the only difference is the stylus packed in the box.

In use, the MediaPad M2 is as slick and smooth as you’d hope for. That’s exactly what you’d expect from a fresh install of Android, however, which is why we always dig deeper into the benchmarks.

Geekbench 3 is the first test we put all tablets and phones through, and it spits out two scores: one for single-core tests and another for multi-core, giving you an idea how it will perform when you’re doing loads of things at once – downloading a film, installing an app and playing a game, for instance.[gallery:2]

In the former, the MediaPad M2 achieved a low 882. That’s only slightly higher than the £170 Amazon Fire HD 10’s 773 but well short of the Google Pixel C’s 1,347 or Sony Xperia Tablet Z4’s 1,261, and a world away from the Apple iPad Pro’s 3,299.

Its multi-core result was far more respectable, at 3,716. That crushes the Amazon Fire HD 10’s 1,512 and isn’t too far off the Pixel C’s 3,976. It’s still some way short of the Xperia Z4’s 4,226 and the iPad Pro’s 5,484, mind.

It all falls down with gaming, however. GFXBench exposed gaming performance that is, to put it charitably, pretty poor. In the Manhattan test, the MediaPad M2 returned an average frame rate of 8.6fps at native resolution and 8.7fps at 1080p. The test is pretty intensive, but for comparison’s sake the Pixel C managed 28fps and 54fps; the Sony Xperia Tablet Z4 achieved 25fps and 25fps; and the iPad Pro scored a whopping 80fps and 34fps.

In the MediaPad M2’s defence, it’s clearly not aimed at gamers, and again, these tests are super intensive, but the premium version’s £325 price tag puts it within touching distance of the Pixel C’s £399 – and the metrics suggest that it simply isn’t in the same ballpark.

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Huawei MediaPad M2 10: Cameras and battery life

The MediaPad M2 has a 13-megapixel camera with autofocus and flash at the rear and a 5-megapixel snapper facing the front, specifications that don’t look bad on paper.

As with most tablets, however, the MediaPad M2 makes an impractical camera. The case, which for the most part is like a second skin for the device, either covers the lens or is left dangling as you take the picture. It’s just as well, then, that the results aren’t strong enough to make you bother with the camera functions, except as a last resort.

It struggles with low-light conditions, and even when a scene is well lit, details are blurry up close. Browsing images taken on the device includes bizarre detail “pop-in” on pictures in the gallery as image quality catches up.[gallery:7]

The selfie function is fine, with plenty of options for “beautifying” your images, and tips for getting the perfect picture. After image touch-ups let you make your face thinner and paler – and even enlarge your eyes, should you want to see what you’d look like if you were the alien stuff of human nightmares.

To end on a positive, however, battery life is pretty good. True, the 10hrs 6mins delivered by the Huawei MediaPad M2 isn’t up there with the phenomenal endurance offered by the Google Pixel C (14hrs 33mins), the Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet (19hrs 48mins), or the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 9.7in (12hrs 9mins), but it’s no worse than most tablets. The 12.9in iPad Pro achieved 9hrs 8mins in the same test, and the 9.7in iPad Pro lasted 8hrs 56mins.

Huawei MediaPad M2 10: Verdict

I’m slightly torn as to how to judge the Huawei MediaPad M2 10. On one hand, I think it’s a genuinely beautiful device, with a case that enhances the look, rather than being thrown in as an ugly afterthought. I even find the stylus a handy tool for note-taking and text recognition. When I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 back in 2012, this is the kind of thing I had in mind. Samsung didn’t quite live up to the promise for me back then, but this, four years on, most definitely does.[gallery:3]

On the other hand, it’s in a difficult no man’s land in terms of pricing. At £325, the MediaPad M2 is within touching distance of the Pixel C, which offers better performance and battery life, plus all the added bonuses of being Google’s own product when it comes to features and patching. It’s also around the same price as the superior Samsung Galaxy Tab S2, although you get less storage and no stylus or case there.

True, you could drop to £250 for the standard model if you don’t value the stylus and 64GB storage, but with the reduction of RAM you’ll lose a little more performance, which isn’t the MediaPad’s strongest suit anyway.

There’s plenty to like about the Huawei MediaPad M2 10, but at a time when Android tablets are struggling to give people a reason to be passionate about them, Huawei isn’t providing a compelling answer here.