An impressive display of hardware quality in a gigantic phone form factor
Huawei is making a big deal about its latest huge phone, the MediaPad X1, here at MWC 2014. Yes, this 7-inch device is technically a phone, but Huawei is marketing it more as an intersecting point of phones and tablets. We’ve seen Sony do it with the Z Ultra and Samsung with the Galaxy Mega, and now it’s Huawei’s turn.
This is basically just a gigantic phone, with little to make it easy to use one-handed. Huawei does its best by offering small bezels — less than 3mm on the left and right sides — and extreme thinness of 7.18mm. It accomplishes this thickness with an impressive build quality of an all-glass front and aluminum back and sides that uses an interesting nanotechnology to keep it rigid.
On the inside, Huawei is going with a relatively unknown Kirin 910 1.6 GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM — in our time with the device the UI seems snappy and fluid with not a single slowdown. The display comes in at an impressive 1200 x 1920 and looks absolutely great to our eyes with solid viewing angles and colors. Huawei is still doing some weird things with its interface that keep icons and settings overly-colorful to our eyes, but if you know its interface than you’ll feel at home here.
Stick around for a closer look at the phone, including video, after the break.
The rest of the device rounds out just like most of Huawei’s other devices — a 13MP Sony Exmor R camera on the rear and wide-angle 5MP camera on the front, a few new camera modes and the ability to charge other devices off the USB port. The hardware design is a step in the right directon for Huawei and really feels like a more premium device. The software still needs some work, we think, but is also heading in the right direction.
Huawei says that the MediaPad X1 will be coming to China, Russia, Western Europe, Middle East, Japan and Latin America in four colors starting in March. The price is an impressively-low €399, and we’ll have more pricing details as they become available.