great machine for your productivity

Huawei has been struggling with unfavorable conditions in the field of mobile phones for quite some time. Not only that, it recently launched a notebook market, where it also offers several models from the flagship MateBook Pro X to the Huawei MateBook D15, which can be purchased for very solid money. In today’s test we will imagine Huawei MateBook 14, which is a middle class that excels in display, quality workmanship, performance or surprisingly good speakers.

Review content

Package contents

The Huawei MateBook 14 notebook comes in a fairly ordinary white paper box with the gold Huawei MateBook Series inscription. In addition to the laptop itself, you will also find it 65W adapter and booklets. There is no adapter, case or headphones here, but it is a mid-range laptop, so we didn’t even expect it. With such a MateBook X Pro, the presence will definitely please you, but it costs twice as much.

Design and quality of workmanship

The company first introduced the MateBook 14 in 2019 and adheres to its design language with the 2020 model we tested. It is therefore a relatively compact device that weighs decent 1.5 kg and at the widest point it has a thickness of 15.9 mm, which is a very solid value. Of course, it is not enough for the flagship MateBook X (X Pro), but we would not expect that either. On the contrary, you will enjoy the better port equipment, which includes 2x USB-A 3.2, USB-C (for charging), HDMI and audio jack. But maybe we would appreciate the microSD card slot, which is unfortunately missing here. Speaking of connectivity, the presence is definitely worth mentioning Wi-Fi 6.

The notebook is made of aluminum and overall gives us the impression of premium. However, the chosen surface treatment it reflects quite a bit of light and fingerprints are captured on it more than we would like. We had the need to clean the laptop all the time. Otherwise, it will not throw or rattle anything, which should be the standard in this price category, but unfortunately this is not the case. Needless to say, a travel laptop is perfect. He also surprised us quite a bit good sound Huawei sound, while the speakers do not lack bass. Of course, it will always be worse compared to quality speakers, but they give quite good performance for laptops.

Display

The design also goes hand in hand with a display, which may seem a bit unconventional at first glance. It has thin frames (90% of the screen to the body), which gives the design even higher premiumity. The front camera, which is located directly in one of the buttons, did not even fit here. But about that later. It is about 14 ″ IPS panel with a resolution of 2160 x 1440 pixels and a 60Hz refresh rate. The aspect ratio is then 3: 2, while a large part of laptops on the market have a more classic 16: 9. And what is it good for? The notebook gives you more space more vertically, so it’s suitable for productivity. If so you often drown documents, you will definitely appreciate this aspect ratio. On the contrary, 16: 9 is more suitable for movies and videos.

We got used to it quickly, after all, we also write this review in part on it. The maximum brightness is then 300 rivets (although, for example, the GSMArena measured a higher value), which is enough to work indoors without any problems. But if you plan to take it regularly to the garden, you won’t be bothered by the brightness as well high display reflectivitywhich sometimes bothered us. The display is also touch, which is certainly a nice bonus and surprised us that even with longer work only through the touch control is not extra tangled.

Keyboard, touchpad and fingerprint reader

The Huawei keyboard just can. He has already done this in his previous notebooks and he proves it with this model as well. We had the opportunity to use a MacBook Pro from 2017, which had a problematic butterfly keyboard, and typing on it didn’t suit us very personally. However, we blamed it on the lower keystroke. Although Huawei has a Matebook 14 as well relatively low keystroke, it ‘s a completely different song. It is much better written on it, you get better feedback and it is also relatively quiet. Over the last three years, we’ve tried several different laptops, and the keyboards for this model are among the best.

Huawei has decided to put the video call camera back on the button again, and we really ask it, no matter what. Why? Because it just doesn’t work. For video calls, when you still tap the keyboard you can’t see through your fingers at all. If you do not write, the situation is similar. If you want to looking directly at the camera, you can’t see the person on the other side because you’re not looking at the screen, and when you look at the screen, you seem to be looking somewhere completely different.

We had to get used to it for a while touchpad, whose surface is not as smooth as we personally imagined, but after several days of use, we finally got used to it. In the end, we can conclude that he is really good and also supports various gestures that can make work easier if you can learn them. The fingerprint reader works perfectly and in most experiments it recognized us on the first try.

Hardware and performance

In our case, the processor is ticking under the hood of the MateBook 14 laptop AMD Ryzen 7 4800H, which has a total of eight cores and sixteen threads. She helps him 16 GB DDR4 RAM a 512 GB PCIe NVMe SSD disk. At the very first good, we can say that the performance of the laptop is really good, no matter what it applies to. It is probably not possible to assume that you would buy such a machine for playing games, there are better candidates for this in this price category. Nevertheless, they don’t even have to be ashamed of the game performance. We don’t have a dedicated card here, the graphics performance is taken care of by the integrated Radeon Vega 7 and you are able to play some older titles on a medium-high graphic setting, newer ones on a low and lower resolution.

• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – 720p, medium details (35-45 FPS)
• Forza Horizon 4 – 1080p, low details (28-35 FPS)
• Battlefield V – 720p, medium details (45-60 FPS)
• Assassins Creed: Valhalla – 720p, low details (30-40 FPS)
• Red Dead Redemption 2 – 720p, low details (27-35 FPS)

So if you want, you can play on your laptop. Rather, it is designed for productivity and working with video or photos. Working with Photoshop or Adobe Premiere is lightning fast, here you can see the true power of the laptop. Just like multitasking, where it’s not a problem to have 20 tabs open in Chrome, listen to Spotify and have rendering running in the background.

System

Of course, we can find the system in Huawei MateBook 14 Windows 10 in the Home version and there is also the Huawei Share function, which we wrote about earlier. The laptop also has a pre-installed application PC Managerwhich we found quite useful. It automatically checks if you have all the drivers updated, you can set the power modes directly in it (Performance or Balanced) and there is also diagnostics that will test whether all components and drivers work as they should.

Battery life and charging

Huawei MateBook 14 has a battery with a capacity of 56 Wh and from 0 to 45% can be recharged in 30 minuteswhich is great value. You can then get 100% easily over an hour. But if you don’t play games, edit video or do other demanding work on your laptop, know that you just won’t need a cable. We used the notebook as our main device, which consists of several open Chrome windows, listening to music and occasionally watching YouTube, and the notebook lasted all day without any problems. With a brightness of 100%, you can count on endurance 7-8 hours and if you lower it, you can easily get over 10 hours.

Price and availability

The basic variant is a laptop CZK 21,990 with the fact that it can be purchased only on the official website, but it should also be available in regular e-shops.

Resumé

Huawei MateBook 14 2020 is a great travel assistant, which also has enough power for more demanding work. If you often work with documents, you will quickly get used to the 3: 2 display and, last but not least, an excellent keyboard and quality workmanship. However, if you often use a laptop for long video conferences, we recommend that you try the webcam first, because personally its location did not suit us at all. Sure, laptops with dedicated graphics are available for that price, but they’ll be much harder and compromise on other things. Overall, it is a very successful device for interesting money, so if you are looking for a laptop in this price category, we can definitely recommend it with a calm heart.

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