Huawei’s MatePad 12 X arrives in the high-end midrange with the swagger of a flagship, and carries with it all the baggage of its platform being incompatible with Western app habits. At £599 (about $783), it’s not just slick hardware but also a software story that continues to require you to make compromises. The question for students, freelancers, and digital artists is simple: Can clobber hardware overcome ecosystem drag?
Design and display create an impressive first impression
Svelte yet never flimsy: At 6mm thin and 555g, the MatePad 12 X is designed to be slim without feeling fragile. The rock-like, sandstone finish feels great in hand, and those rounded-off back corners saved our wrists from looking like Forrest Gump’s legs during long sessions. While Huawei no longer references a specific ingress protection, and is silent on glass durability, I’d still add a case.
- Design and display create an impressive first impression
- Performance and audio add muscle to creativity
- Big but annoying variability in battery and peak power
- Keyboard and stylus are promising, with caveats
- Software blockers are still the deciding factor
- Bottom line: awesome hardware, leashed by the ecosystem
There’s the headline act, a 12-inch LCD with 2,800 x 1,840 resolution and support for variable refresh up to 144Hz, all wrapped in a matte/anti-reflective coating that actually seems to make overhead lights less distracting. Peak brightness peaks at a claimed 1,000 nits and unlike many matte panels it maintains sharpness with minimal grain apparent. Fingerprints are more noticeable, but glare is substantially diminished—whether outdoors or beneath studio lamps. It’s not OLED, but at this price it looks good compared to some LCD competition like the Galaxy Tab S10 FE Plus and OnePlus Pad 3 — and beats that screens-on-paper 2,560 x 1,600 resolution of the Galaxy Tab S11.
Performance and audio add muscle to creativity
Under the hood, multitasking is clean thanks to Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin T92 and 12GB of RAM. Light Wondershare Filmora in the video timeline department is manageable, and GoPaint boasts it can take up to 250 4K layers — overkill for jotting down scribbles, but a comforting limit for artists flirting with dense compositions.
Six speakers bring room-filling sound with body-shaking bass. Mids and treble aren’t studio-accurate but dialog is intelligible and music playback is punchy for a tablet of this size. It’s as much an entertainment rig as a canvas.
Big but annoying variability in battery and peak power
That 10,100mAh cell is generous—20% or so more than the Galaxy Tab S11 (8,400mAh) and a little shy of the S11 Ultra (11,600mAh). Huawei advertises up to 14 hours of video. In early testing, repeating 480p YouTube over Wi-Fi lasted for around six hours before giving up. That gap could tighten with firmware updates and the way tablets are actually used, but it’s worth tempering expectations.
Charging maxes out at 66W, though only with Huawei’s own brick sold separately. Speeds are more modest when using standard PD chargers. Power users that bounce between classrooms or client sites may want AliothSys’s official adapter in their bag.
Keyboard and stylus are promising, with caveats
The included magnetic keyboard has OK key travel, but no trackpad. It’s chunky, not too portable and a typing sprinter, not an all-day laptop replacement. Those among you who are tablet-only folks will like the fact that it can snap on and off in a jiffy.
The optional M-Pencil Pro (€129) is the star accessory: 16,384 pressure levels, support for rotation, a side button and a double-tap gesture. A pinch gesture was hit-or-miss (responding correctly roughly a third of the time) — but latency is low, and the 144Hz display combined with the PaperMatte texture adds just enough pencil-to-paper friction to feel eerily natural. Sketchbook can be found in AppGallery, with Huawei’s GoPaint and M-Pencil Zone available from the company — they have a similarly approachable interface to Procreate.
Software blockers are still the deciding factor
Here’s the thorn. Continued limitations due to the US Commerce Department’s Entity List prohibit new Huawei devices from coming with Google Play Services and the Play Store. AppGallery has a lot of the expanded basics in China and select markets, and web-based access to YouTube, Netflix and Disney Plus works for easy watching — but offline downloads are missing, as are native apps.
For creatives, the disparities are more meaningful. If you depend on Google apps, Adobe’s full Android lineup, or cross-platform sync through Play Services, then you’re going to be juggling APK sideloads and workarounds that may break with the next update. Previewed by Huawei at its developer events, HarmonyOS Next seems to move away from Android compatibility layers; unless developers are prepared for native builds, the pool of apps on offer may contract before it expands.
None of this detracts from the tablet’s strengths. If you can get over the app hurdle, drawing performance is fantastic, multitasking is buttery smooth and the matte panel is a godsend in bright environments. But the time tax — finding, fixing and maintaining your set of app setups — is still real.
Bottom line: awesome hardware, leashed by the ecosystem
If you’re deep in the Huawei ecosystem, or if AppGallery and browser-based services are all you need to get by, the MatePad 12 X will deliver stand-out display tech, punchy speakers, and a capable stylus experience for only £300. For artists who can make the jump to GoPaint or Sketchbook, there will be a responsive, rewarding canvas.
If your day revolves around Play Store apps, deep Google integration or frictionless collaboration with clients and classmates, then you might save yourself hours by considering alternatives like the Galaxy Tab S11 series or an iPad. The MatePad 12 X is a hardware winner held back by a software category — and for many shoppers, that’s the deal breaker.
