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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