Huawei MediaPad M6 Review
so I've looked at
Huawei phones in the blog but I haven't actually looked at any of their tablets and it's about time so I've got with me as you can see the huawei media pad m6 this is a promising looking premium tablet from them that runs Android 9 and by default doesn't have Google Play Store installed in fact when I first got this tablet a month ago I couldn't install it there's no way around that you can now get play Google Play services on it to Play Store which is great news so now it is time for my full review so all the specs are right up here just to briefly mention that this has quite a potent chipset for a tablet it's the keren 980 which I was their previous flagship chip so this is what you get here in the box so not a lot you've got some instruction leaflets which are in Chinese L type-c cable 18 watt charger which fully charges the tablet in just under 3 hours and there is a symmetry tool as well now this lone unit has been supplied to make from trading Shin Jin now these guys installed Google Play services for me when I first had it about a month ago I tried every single method and at that time there was no way to install Google Play services but Play Store is now on there and it's all set up ready to go so at the top of the media pad m-6 here we have an 8 megapixel webcam on the right a fingerprint reader which is working about 9 out of 10 times for me but more on that later within this review I'll be testing it out as well as the face unlocking Huawei logo down the bottom reasonable sized bezels and a glass it's all flush with a middle build all around the outside a complete unibody as you can see I roll the builders very good solid but I don't like what they've done with the camera which sticks out over one millimeter this is our 13 megapixel sensor it has an LED flash now the camera itself does support 4k video at 30 frames per second but just like Huawei so mobile phones the keren 980 doesn't maintain a solid 30 frames per second it always has frame dips but let's face it you'll probably be using your mobile and not your tablet here to be recording
video so up top we have quad mics here two antenna lines two of four speakers in total that you can see another two are located on the bottom of the tablet so we have three pogo ports this is for the keyboard which I unfortunately do not have this tablet also supports an optional M pen which is huawei's stylus along the right there's the sim tray takes two nano Sims or nano SIM micro SD card it is metal reinforced type C port metal volume up and down and power button and you'll see the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack in a bit of an awkward location but really where else could they put it on a tablet apart from maybe up on the top the media pad m6 weighs 518 grams it is seven point four millimeters thick with the camera bump that brings it up to nine point three millimeters thickness so this tablet has faced unlocking and fingerprint unlocking so to unlock with a face unlocking simply tap the button first look at it and then you slide up and it has unlocked I think you're getting even get rid of that slide up setting so you can just go straight into it but with the fingerprint reader always on this is a little bit faster so I just touch it now and you can see that took what under a second do it one more time and for me that's actually a little bit slow then so it's not always working a hundred percent at the time which is odd because my fingerprint reader um for example my Hawaii p30 Pro works great and normally these capacitive always-on fingerprint readers are really good there we go that's more like it but for me it's working about nine or eight times out of ten so hopefully with some firmware updates they can't improve upon that just to get it a lot more accurate so we have a screen that has a sixteen by ten aspect ratio the resolution is 2560 by 1600 and that is of course a ten point eight inch diagonal screen now the bezels around the outside are not bad but what I don't particularly like is this black border you get around here now if they do happen to have one with black bezels then you wouldn't notice that as much now the bezels are not as small as the Samsung Galaxy Tab s5 either I reviewed and I don't really mind that they aren't that small because the tab is five II almost had the Basil's like it almost too small because here you're not going to really have too many issues with any miss touches or your palm accidentally touching it when you're gripping and holding it at least in landscape right here so let's take a look at the Gama first which checks out to be quite good I'm just going to lower the brightness here so it's almost 2.2 it's about 2.3 the gamma which is not bad at all 2.2 would be perfect of course maximum brightness is just over 400 Lux and it does have in the settings options to tweak and adjust the white balance your scaling as well and your dpi that's all through the settings here which is great now if I take a look at some real-world images you can see that it does look very good this is a nice IPS panel they have in here it is fully laminated and I think that pretty much everyone out there is going to be very happy with this screen but I have to say my personal favorite still is the Samsung Galaxy Tab s 5e that screen the Super
AMOLED panel is really nice that is a super screen that it has in here but this one still not bad at all that Huawei have selected and used iComfort motors in here as well which removes the blue light a lot of tablets do this now even mobile phones of course screen recorder hotspot and various other modes that you'd expect to find on a premium flagship phone now just like the offerings from Samsung it does have its own desktop mode and you don't need to plug in an external display to run it it's simply from the toggles so you had a very desktop like experience here and as you can see you can bring up the menu so it looks a little bit like we're running Windows something similar very similar in layout and in terms of what you can do just like Samsung dix better life and information and other toggles are displayed here in the Notification Center controlling the brightness is also from there and all and all performs quite well and it's great to have this option so the tablet is running Android 9 we'll take a look at the performance I'm in full screen gestures at the moment because I use my qua way p30 Pro with full screen gestures and for me it's just easier I like the fact that I can take full advantage of this 1440p screen so multitasking very quick to swap between the apps I've had no issues with this I just wanted to first show you that YouTube yes running and 1440p and I'm not having any problems with it all with it at all there but it doesn't have a wide vine level one so here we have the RM info it's not pulling through all the details so I had to go into Netflix and I've got Amazon Prime video here running at the moment and you can tell that oh that's in standard definition so it's not gonna look as sharp does it mean that you cannot enjoy your favorite TV series like mr. robot here no I mean you can still watch it it's fine sounds really great with the speakers it's just not the sharp as it could be which for some people may be a bit of a deal-breaker there so it's mention the performance is good with us we'll take it out to a PDF file here at the moment so this one should have been downloaded and you can see looks very good double tap in here and you can see the ticks nice and clear there and swapping over the pages not as fast as an iPad pro okay even though it does have the Karen Knight 80 in here it is a very fast chip 7 nanometers it still doesn't beat the custom silicon that we have with the Bionic chips from Apple but that isn't too bad so I'll go through my typical sometimes I haven't actually noticed here a little bit of slowdown so swiping up to home not slow down it's like an animation I wouldn't call it a stutter but the icons need to be rearranged for a few seconds and they sort themselves out it actually is only many seconds that that happens so just jump here into gallery and go through some of the benchmarks that I have been running and testing with this so read speed here of the storage it's only using MMC 5.1 which is fine for a tablet I think this is not going to bottleneck bottleneck it at all 205 writes good random 4k reads there GPS working very well okay so we do have a hardware compass on this it locks onto a lot of satellites and sees a lot as you can see 32 accuracy is 4 meters and this will work really well with Google Maps and you could use it as a dedicated GPS and mapping program for that so the camera I don't think too many people going to be bothered by this it's camera2 api limited support so full or level three would be a lot better to use absolute open camera but that really I don't think is too much of an issue so the wireless speeds sorry 4G speeds here that depends on your carrier it's okay it's good to have the dual SIM support and we also have micro SD card support there as well as I showed you in the beginning with the slot and here is the Wireless so we're getting maximum speeds on average around 320 megabits per second which is good not the fastest I have seen and over the other side of the apartment 154 megabits per second which is ideal some tablets struggle to get even a hundred there so that is okay the antutu score and a lot of people would be interested in this one so very fast for a tablet for an Android tablet I know in the channel a lot of the tablets that I review get scores that are half this so this is a high performance tablet and if we take a look now at the free available storage on first boots get fifty two gigabytes free there and the Android security patch level first of August not bad and
it is running a course Android 9 lastly the default apps we get so we've got a few bloatware apps on here as you can see this one here for example they can be uninstalled so do expect a little bit of bloat from quawi now onto audio I wanted to point out the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack as you saw in the start of this video is in a bit of an awkward location now you need it to make voice calls really because if you don't when you're making voice calls it'll go through the speakers and use the mics here on the top which they're good because you've got four mics but the problems that you lose privacy so when you plug in a 3.5 millimeter headset as you can see the location of it's a little bit in the way here so when you're holding it like that you kind of got this problem now that's easily solved a course by simply just rotating the tablet around not an issue right you've got the camera then a bottom but the problem is with Skype calls you need to have the camera on the top that's the only time really that that location of that 3.5 minute here phone jack is an issue for me right there so if I go back and now into this video that I wanted to show you just quickly how do the Harman speakers sound on this so common Harman speakers that has got very four of them so two downwards two top firing and they're very loud they've got some base of them but here's a very quick sample with one of my recent videos [Music] and give you a quick sample of voice for me just talking here in the beginning amazing depth of 100 meters so I have with me now the new release this is a much smaller model it's a lot cheaper it's only about so good bass really good sounding speakers on here I have to say they're probably almost as good as the Samsung Galaxy Tab 5 the e version I reviewed so the s5 II sorry that's got really good speakers on it as well this I would say is almost as good if not probably just as good so I have popped G here with GFX toolset on the highest absolute setting so that's 60 frames per second 1440p and i got really lucky right here and it is so smooth so when i zoom in here with the scope does take a look at now and just how good this is when you zoom around there's no lag running at the 60 frames per second on the highest settings but that guy out of his misery there and shadow gun Legends another popular FPS game that I like to test out because this one has some really demanding graphics as you can see so I've got it set on 60 frames per second it's on the highest possible visuals and it looks really good you get the occasional little stutter but overall really good performance out of the media pad m6 here when it comes to gaming so with the front webcam we do get to an ADP video 30 frames per second and it's even got electronic image stabilization which has a bit of a crop as a result so I'm holding it at arm's length right out here now and I don't really think it's necessary for them to apply the electronic image stabilization with a tablet on mobile phones definitely but with at Albert no not really so the audio you're listening to right now is from the quad mics and I do happen to like it I think they've got decent audio quality especially for a tablet as well as the video quality so in applications that I've been kissing out like Skype video does look good alright so this is a solid offering here from qua way we've got a great screen the bezels are slim they're not super slim like the Samsung Galaxy Ted is 5e but it is good a really good build to a unibody the camera bulge it sticks out a little bit which I don't particularly like but overall the performance of this tablet is what makes it stand out between all the rest of those tablets apart from save course the Samsung Galaxy Tab s 6 with a Snapdragon 855 this one would have to be probably Android second fastest tablet with the keren 980 in it it really is super
smooth fluid multitasks well the task manager is a little bit aggressive this mention so you should lock apps that you want to keep on there now battery life just to mention that that I'm losing nine point seven percent every hour with the screen configured to 200 Lux that is Chrome that is streaming with video services which is good now when you step it up to gaming more demanding you stare then it's about 16% it's actually fifteen point nine or something that I was losing per hour which is actually quite decent you put it on the performance mode and it will crease further so you're probably only then gonna get about five hours of gaming time now along the back here just below the camera it gets warm now haven't broken out my thermal probic is just touching and I know that it's not getting hot enough to be an issue or concern at least not for me now it's got the Pogo port pins on the bottom with an optional keyboard and stylus because this is a lone unit unfortunately I do not have those accessories which would have been great to cover because that would then make it more of a world with the desktop no more of a practical tablet then because it's got koalas of course desktop mode that they have just like Samsung dicks very similar to to that so the main thing is the performance very good screen it's bright fully laminated but here comes the con you can't take advantage of it when you want to watch Amazon Prime video Netflix okay you can install the apps but it's just standard definition which is a real letdown so hopefully there's gonna be a firmware update and over there update that comes through gives us Widevine level 1 cert normally Huawei have it but I guess what the media ped m6 they're just not bothering because they don't expect to sell this overseas I don't even know if they do yet but this is the Chinese ROM version so maybe if there is a global one which probably won't of course have Android Play Google Play on there sorry which you can now install on here has been a seder running Android 9 and yep you can't install it now finally and it's running fine with no glitches or problems which is good or the apps you want you can install which I have done here sorry well that's to have late comes recommended from me because it's got great speakers almost as good as an iPad pro well probably about the same very loud good base to them just like the Samsung Galaxy Tab s5e the screen is not as good as the Samsung Galaxy Tab s5e and that's another recommended tablet from me so if you're in the same sort of price range and you don't care much about gaming performance or having absolute best performance but there's another really good option my review of that ones up here but if you're gaming differently if you're going to game a lot on tablet we're pub G and demanding games the Kirin 980 performs really well the Mele g76 the MP 10 TPU that hasn't here isn't the fastest in the Android ecosystem but it as has to be one of the top five three GPUs at the moment so really good performance here
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