It’s only been less than a week since we received the Huawei Matebook 14 2020 from Huawei Philippines and it almost feels like we’re ready to write a full review. We will, however, reserve some of our thoughts once we get to take the device for a further spin and do further benchmarks with this device.
We gotta say, though – this device is definitely going to be a champ!
For today though, we bring you our first impressions and a quick hands on and unboxing of the Huawei Mate 14 2020. Let’s begin.
Packaging and Contents
The laptop came in a sealed plastic that protected the outerbox from dirt and scratches. It’s a nice touch as many other laptops, even premium ones – are exposed to their environments and transportation and logistics can easily dirty them or damage them. Ofcourse, some premium models have inner boxes to compensate for the outer box exposure and given there was a sealed plastic for the Matebook 14, we already assumed there wasn’t going to be any inner box.
After removing the seal of the plastic and the plastic itself, we further had to remove 2 seals from the box itself. Pretty commendable of Huawei to secure customers that the unit is totally brand new and has not been opened in anyway or tampered with.
After those 2 seals, there were no further surprises.
Upon opening the box, you will be greeted by the documentation in a rather premium plastic case, as is the case with the cable. The charging brick however was vacuum sealed in regular plastic. There was nothing else to see in the unit aside from those and the unit itself. For further accessories information, there’s nothing special about them except that the charger is a 65W brick and the cable is a typeC to typeC cable. Given that the laptop is powered by an H series processor from AMD, we did expect no less. It would have been nice to get a 90W adapter though for faster charging speeds. Hopefully, the battery is long enough to not ned multiple charges.
Hands on with the Laptop
The laptop itself is quite unassuming.
It looks like any traditional ultrathin in the market and no one will ever think that this super sleek laptop actually houses a very powerful Ryzen H series CPU. Further, we loved every bit of the design of the Matebook 14 as it felt premium in every corner. It’s also quite clean, having a Ryzen sticker at the bottom left corner of the device. Every other sticker is found a the bottom of the device.
The laptop is adorned in aluminum everywhere including the bottom case and even the backlit keys and large trackpad felt solid. There’s also a fnger print scanner located at the powerbutton itself, saving you the trouble of logging in twice.
Ports wise, it’s pretty minimalistic but it will do if your purpose is to travel light.
On the left you get a USB C port that doubles as the charging port, a 3.5mm audio jack and a full sized HDMI port (something most modern ultrabooks omit these days). On the right, it’s pretty bare with only 2 usb A ports, to be used mainly for hooking up a mouse or an external storage device.
It would’ve been great to see an additional typeC port though as you do lose the ability to expand via TypeC if you’re using that for charging. Unless ofcourse your adapter or hub supports pass through charging, i.e.
Underneath, you’ll see plenty of ventilation – a nice touch from Huawei – given that this device is targeted as a workhorse ultrathin. Let’s see if it can keep up with with our workload for the next few days and not get too hot.
Last but not the least, and definitely our favourite part of the device though is the panel.
The Huawei Matebook 14 2020 sports really thin bezels all around and this is what helps keep it’s compact nature despite being a full 14″ laptop. What makes this even better is that it’s a 2160×1440 resolution IPS panel with 100% sRGB coverage making it ideal for content creation!
It’s a really wonderfull aspect ratio too at 3:2 and this makes it perfect for browsing websites and articles. While weird for wide resolution media though, we still did enjoy a lot of netflix and a lot of youtube on this device.
Performance wise, we’ll keep those information and thoughts for our full review but we expect this laptop to be no slouch. On paper, it’s already an absolute beast and if Huawei got their formula right – this is definitely a laptop to beat this 2020 and even 2021.
Here are the full specifcations:
Processor: AMD Ryzen 6 4600H
Graphics: AMD Radeon RX Vega 7
Memory 16GB DDR4-2666
Display 14″inch 3:2, 2160 x 1440 pixels, 100% sRGB
Storage 512GB SSD
Ports: 2 USB 3.0 / 3.1 Gen1, 1 HDMI, 3.5mm Audio , 1 Fingerprint Reader, NFC, USB-C
Networking Wifi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0
Size 15.9 x 308 x 224mm
Battery 56 Wh Lithium-Polymer
Webcam: HD 720p
Weight 1.49 kg
The best part? PRICE.
The Huawei Matebook 14 2020 retails for only PHP54,995 and on paper offers much more than what it’s current competitors do. At PHP54,995 you’d usually get a measly 4 core, 8 thread cpu paired with 8GB ram and 512GB SSD running a FHD display but the Matebook 14 ups them with a 6core/12thread CPU, double the ram at 16GB and a 2K 3:2 aspect ratio display with 100% sRGB coverage. AMAZING. JUST AMAZING.
We can’t wait to share our full review with you. Watch out for it in the coming days.