Analysis

See the gallery

11 pictures

GALLERY REVIEW HUAWEI MATEBOOK 14S

(11 images)

Huawei MateBook 14s Analysis Sections:

Aluminum body with a proposal of almost the entire screen

We will start with the design, because we always start our analyzes with it, but also because it is one of the best arguments of this model.

We have a very high-quality body that combines glass and aluminum. The whole case is made of aluminum, which, in addition to being useful for heat dissipation, makes the touch more refined and the body more resistant.

On the cover we have the name Huawei in a typical Chinese company font, and the only dispersion slots we have in view are the ones at the bottom, next to the two speakers.

On the right, we have USB-A Gen 1, and on the left, all the other connectors: two USB-C that can be used both for data transfer and for charging a laptop, a 3.5 mm jack for headphones or micro and HDMI.

In the more basic model, I wouldn't say anything, but here I miss the card reader and there is something I didn't like too much.

And if we choose a very specific model (i7 + 16 GB + 1 TB + Fir Green version) we are dealing with one of the Thunderbolt 4 ports. If not ... it seems not.

I think it's okay that this is a specific RAM or memory configuration, other companies do this, but I don't understand that they are forcing you to choose a specific color for a hardware feature.

But hey, apart from that, we have a kit that is incredibly elegant on the table and that is easy to transport thanks to its fairly compact dimensions and a weight of just 1.44 grams.

We can open the screen with one hand, the hinge seems quite durable, and what I liked is that the frames of the screen, apart from being very small, are made of glass.

The LTPS touch panel, which shines with its resolution of 2.5K and has 90 Hz

The fact that the frames are made of glass makes the kit more exclusive, but that usually also means a "glossy" or glossy finish.

Here we are in this situation and it means that if we have the light source falling on the screen behind us, we will have quite annoying reflections.

This finish has a fairly pronounced mirror effect, but at least it is offset by a gloss, which is not bad for interiors. Huawei tells us about 400 nits, and in our tests we achieved an average of 609 lux.

For its price range it is not bad and in practice means that the display is very good in practically any situation. On the train with sunrise around 45º I missed more or less brightness, but that was the only situation so I found myself.

Of course, I think that although the maximum brightness is appropriate, the intensity sections are not well measured. 50% is not enough for interior, more interesting 70%.

The problem is that there is a spike between 10% and 60% which is not very gradual and should be better adjusted. In fact, the brightness is exactly 10% than 30% or 50%.

For the rest, we have a well calibrated screen that even offers us different color profiles as if it were a cell phone which is really good but you don't have to play with that as the colors we get from the factory are suitable for most applications.

We have good contrast and viewing angles that aren't like the IPS panel, but that's not bad for a laptop that we'll almost always look at straight ahead.

Where I have no problem it's in resolution and refresh. We have a 60Hz and 90Hz mode which I like as everything is a bit smoother but I haven't used it every day as I prefer 60Hz and more autonomy But hey if you want it is.

Meanwhile, the resolution is 2560 x 1680 pixels, which gives a density of 213 pixels per inch in these 14 ”and after translation we will not see individual pixels.

It's in the office that automation isn't the most important thing, but when it comes to photo editing ... it shows. Plus, it's a touchpad that responds well to gestures and touch, but I haven't used much for a very simple reason: with this glossy finish, fingerprints remain very, very sticky.

On the other hand, we have a set of four speakers, which are not bad in their segment, they provide relatively high volume and without distortion, although bass is not their strong point either.

To listen to video or music while working are compatible, but if we have both wired and wireless headphones, of course the experience is better.

A processor for a gaming laptop with an attached SSD

But let's go inside, as Huawei introduced a gaming laptop chip - such as the TUF Dash F15 - in the Ultrabook. This year, we see Intel processors for this range of notebooks have gone up, and the 11370H's performance, despite being quad-core, is excellent.

To play it's true that at this point we can fail in a gaming PC, but in a laptop like this MateBook 14s it allows us to do everything at the office level and heavier tasks like video editing without too much filtering or photo retouching.

The i7-11370H is an 8-thread quad-core chip that has a frequency of 3.30GHz and a gain of 4.8GHz. The TDP is not the one from the Ultrabook as it draws around 35W, but we'll talk about it, and it comes with 16GB of LPDDR4x memory.

Its GPU is Intel Iris Xe and here are the test results:

In synthetic performance tests, we see that this laptop surpasses both the popular Huawei MateBook D15 and this year's MateBook X 2021 top model thanks to this processor.

In core tests, the result is fairly consistent, but multi-core and those pulling on the integrated GPU experience higher CPU usage and power.

And the truth is, you feel the speed all the time, thanks to both the CPU and the memory module: this is a 512GB SSD, which has a read speed of 3,146MB / s and a reading of 2,625MB / s.

All in all, it offers a very good everyday office automation experience, and I had no problem working with multiple Chrome tabs, Capture One editing heavy photos, and even playing some simple PC Game Pass titles.

Needless to say, although they cannot mount Android on mobile phones with GMS, laptops have Windows 10 perfectly… "normal" with all the features of the Microsoft operating system.

However, and although I have updated everything that needs to be updated, Windows 11 does not download me other than the pre-release beta. Huawei points out on its website that the laptop will be upgraded to Windows 11 at some point, so it meets the system requirements, but I failed to update.

In any case, Windows 10 is doing very well and we have Huawei Share as usual. It is this feature, similar to Apple's Airdrop, that allows you to quickly "transfer" files between a Huawei mobile phone / tablet and a Huawei PC.

In addition, we also have the ability to view phone folders from a computer and using a mobile remote control by placing the screen in the desktop window.

The laptop's NFC sensor is located on the touchpad, so all you have to do is bring your phone close to the touchpad, wait for it to vibrate, and we'll start to see the phone's screen on the computer. This, of course, is only with Huawei phones.

And something I love about Huaweiu is the speed of the fingerprint sensor. It works very, very well, it's fast, accurate, and when you turn on the computer, it already "captures" the fingerprint data and automatically accesses our session.

This is one of the best laptop fingerprint sensors, including Apple ones, right now.

An almost perfect writing set for hours

Something fundamental in such a laptop is a combination of a keyboard and a touchpad, because we will spend many hours typing and as usual Huawei adheres to, and learns from mistakes.

The first thing I want to say is that as you have already seen, the webcam is in the top frame, which means we no longer have it in the middle key of the function row.

This camera caught our attention early on when it started rolling out because it was a good way to guarantee privacy, but the truth is it didn't bring out the most flattering side of us and if we were writing notes while we had the camera active, only our fingers were sticking out.

The last one Huawei (both the X and D15 and 14 from last year) had this system, and Huawei has changed this year. We'll see if for sure.

But hey, continuing with the keyboard, we have a few keys that make pretty good use of the available space and I liked both the sound and the touch although yes they are a bit elevated and have a long journey so if you come with laptops like Apple you will have to get used to it.

The trackpad is a good size and I find it precise, with a bit of a "dough" feel to it, but I have no complaints. In the weeks I've worked with this laptop, I haven't felt uncomfortable creating content.

You can see that the Intel chip is greedy, but the battery is holding up

This new generation has a 60Wh battery and autonomy, according to our office automation tests written in the web CMS, with a few tabs in Chrome, specific photo editing in Capture One and Spotify in the app, it's a few seconds and a half hours with a brightness level of 70%.

This is in the intermediate efficiency profile, so we can extend the service life even more if we use a more "economizer" profile.

According to our synthetic tests at PC Mark, in the "office work" profile we have 12 hours 51 hours at 50% brightness and 11 hours 13 minutes at 70% brightness. In a video test with 70% brightness, we have 10 hours 45 minutes.

It seems the brightness level of 50% takes a long time, but in fact, as we mentioned, the brightness level is quite low and unrealistic on a daily basis.

When it comes to charging, we do it via USB-C and the power supply it contains is 90W, so we'll be able to travel with just that charger to quickly charge our devices (of course, those that support this charging).

In 30 minutes we have 37% of the battery and it takes 1 hour 40 minutes to fill 100%.

It's not called "Pro," but it's a portable beast

We come to the end of the Huawei MateBook 14s review and find a good update for the laptop that we already fell in love with last year.

There is not much difference in CPU power compared to the Ryzen we analyzed, although the GPU shows the power of Intel Iris Xe, which makes full use of the platform.

The design is practically the same, the screen is still spectacular, and the portability and battery performance are very similar as well.

Now details such as the charger now more powerful, USB-A eliminated but two USB-C implemented (as requested a year ago) and the webcam key eliminated.

Matebook 14s

With a 2.5K screen, 90W fast charge and an 11th Gen Intel Core i7 processor, it is undoubtedly one of the best laptops at the moment, competing with the MacBook Pro.

After all, we love seeing companies receive and act upon feedback I miss something more screen brightness despite 400 nits or a surface that reflects less, but other than that I think this is one of the best laptops of the year, if you are not looking for graphical performance.

And yes, it is continuous, but we really loved last year's model and in this they added or changed most of the negative points that we "took out" back then. The truth is that Huawei is doing a spectacular job in this segment.