HUAWEI, in the past, was making some of the best smartphones in the world alongside the likes of Samsung. While the idea of comparing a HUAWEI device today to a Samsung device seems a little on the funny side, you cannot deny that HUAWEI still makes some very interesting, very compelling smartphones that, on paper at least, could be one of the best smartphones in the world. The only undoing for HUAWEI is Western politics.
Funnily enough though, the political issues did not hinder HUAWEI’s PC development. They introduced notebook after notebook, and most of them comes with Intel processors, and Microsoft Windows operating system. Weird? Yes. Do we care? Not one bit. In fact, we are happy about that. HUAWEI genuinely makes great notebooks at relatively reasonable prices compared to more established players in the field.
Now there is this new thing. They introduced the HUAWEI MateBook 14S, a sort of thin-and-light notebook based on Intel’s 11th Generation processors. Amid the latest 12th Generation Intel though, is it still relevant? Is it worth the MYR 4,999 asking price? Should you even consider getting one if you do not have a HUAWEI device? We find out.
Design
It comes in two distinct colours, and the unit they passed to us is Green in colour. We have to say that we quite like the light shade of green that HUAWEI shipped this with. It stands out while remaining conspicuous and understated, if that makes sense.
The shell of the HUAWEI MateBook is clean. It only features the enlarged ‘HUAWEI’ wording on the cover. You find no sign of HUAWEI’s usual petal logo anywhere on the notebook. We assume that that the exclusion is to make the HUAWEI MateBook 14S cleaner and more professional.
The entire MateBook 14S is made from aluminium. The extensive use of metal means two things. It is very solid, but also quite hefty. It weighs 1.43kg, which is not exactly heavy, but it is still heavier than most thin-and-light notebooks out there. We appreciate the solid build and premium feel of metal, though.
Hardware
Our test unit is not the most expensive variant available in the market. It packs an Intel Core i5-11300H made for efficiency and long battery life. It also packs less RAM than the more premium Core i7 variant at 8GB. Everything else is the same, so it is not like you are shorthanded with the lesser model.
Specification
| HUAWEI MateBook 14S (2021) | As Tested |
| Processor (clock) | Intel Core i5-11300H |
| GPU | Intel Iris Xe Integrated Graphics |
| Display(s) | 14.2-inch LTPS (2520 x 1680 2.5K 3:2) 60Hz 400nits 100% sRGB 1500:1 contrast ratio 10-point multi-touch sensitive Narrow Bezel |
| Memory | 512GB NVMe PCIe SSD 8GB LPDDR4X RAM |
| Networking and Connections (I/O) | 2 x USB 3.1 Type-C (Charging, Data, DisplayPort) 1 x USB 3.2 Type-A 1 x 3.5mm AUX 1 x HDMI 2.0 WiFi 6 (802.11ax) Bluetooth 5.1 |
| Operating System | Windows 10 Home (64-bit) upgradeable to Windows 11 |
| Battery | 60Wh |
| Miscellaneous | 1.43kg HUAWEI Share Fingerprint Power Button Windows Hello Facial Recognition Quad Speakers Quad Microphone All-metal body |
Features
MYR 4,999 is still a lot of money to ask for a thin-and-light though. That is entry-level gaming laptop money. Then again, you should not compare it to gaming purpose devices.
Form With Function
Usually, a thin-and-light requires sacrifice in terms of port practicality. Because most thin-and-light comes with USB Type-C Ports exclusively, you need to obtain an extra dongle so that it’ll take your USB drives, your external hard drives and whatever peripherals you want to work with.
For the HUAWEI MateBook 14S though, you can leave your dongle at home if you want. HUAWEI managed to fit one full USB 3.0 Type-A port on the right side. On the left side are two USB Type-C ports, both can be used for charging, or data, or display. There is also a full-sized HDMI port at the same side. On top of that, a 3.5mm audio jack will always come in handy.
3:2 Aspect Ratio Goodness
Most notebooks today are moving to the 16:10 aspect ratio. That is because with a taller display you can see more, and that bodes well for productivity. A 3:2 aspect ratio is not that different from the 16:10 option but with more height than usual. We admit that it is a little weird at first, a near square display is strange.
The taller display allows us to fit more information on the display, which also means putting two windows beside one another does not make the display feel cramped. Reading articles off websites also requires a lot less scrolling than before, so web browsing feels a lot less cumbersome.
That is not to say that 3:2 aspect ratio should be the standard in mobile computing though. It works with web browsing, article reading, and even essay writing. It makes less sense for most gaming conditions and movies.
While certain games might benefit the taller aspect ratio, most tend to look a little odd. When you watch movies, you get large amounts of dead space at the top and bottom of the display. It makes the movies look small and takes a little bit away from the immersion.
The Correct Place for a Webcam
We want to say that early MateBooks were odd. Not because they looked like nothing you can find in the market. It was because the MateBooks featured super thin bezels that would not fit a webcam. They chose to relocate the webcam to be tucked within the keyboard itself with a pop-up mechanism which met hilarious results.
Thankfully, at the age where webcam is a big part of our lives, no thanks to the pandemic, HUAWEI’s MateBook 14S has it in the right place. It does mean that HUAWEI have to compromise with bezel thickness a little bit. From the looks of it though, it does not look like HUAWEI had to sacrifice all that much too.
Use Your Finger, or Your Face
Of course, most modern thin-and-light notebooks come with biometric security in the form of a basic fingerprint sensor. This one does too, but it has another thing up its sleeve, or rather, in its bezel. The webcam also comes with a slew of sensors that works with Windows Hello to scan your face.
That also means that you can walk away from the notebook, and it will lock itself to ensure that whatever you are working on is safe. When you come back, it sees your face and unlocks. In the case that it does not unlock, the fingerprint sensor is quick enough also that it unlocks the moment you touch the fingerprint sensor that doubles as the power button. Just do not mistakenly press it down to power down the notebook and you will be fine.
HUAWEI Share
This has been one of the biggest selling features for HUAWEI’s devices, or at least HUAWEI notebooks if you have a HUAWEI device. Of course, most of the current features of the program can only work with HUAWEI’s latest OS on its mobile devices. Unfortunately, we did not have a HUAWEI device that is running on Harmony OS 2 at the time of review, so we could not test the feature.
Unlike the previous HUAWEI Share functionality too, there is no NFC tag to be found on the notebook, which also means that transferring data through HUAWEI share has to be done manually instead of just touching both devices together like before. While it just feels like you are going back to the conventional data sharing method, transfer speeds over HUAWEI Share are faster than Bluetooth.
Performance
The HUAWEI MateBook 14S is not a gaming notebook. The unit we are reviewing does not even come with Intel’s Core i7 processor. It also only features 8GB of RAM. It also lacks a dedicated GPU to work with.
Multitasking & Productivity
Where the HUAWEI MateBook 14S shines is when you take it out for a day of work. 8GB is ample enough for you to entertain multiple tabs on Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox browsers; both have been our browsers of choice these days. Google Chrome can be a RAM hog, but five tabs on the browser still did not hurt the HUAWEI MateBook 14S.
While you might want to spend a little more for the Intel Core i7 variant, the Intel Core i5 variant never felt sluggish in most cases. If you only need it to complete mundane tasks like filling up Word documents, create Powerpoint slides, or even work with Excel sheets, you will have enough push from the Core i5 to complete all of them with ease.
When it comes to content creation though, you might want to adjust your expectations a little bit. You can technically edit 4K videos thanks to improved optimisation of Intel’s 11th Generation CPUs. It may not be entirely smooth, but it is useable with Adobe Premiere Pro. Rendering videos will take some time still. But that is just about the most it can handle though.
Typing an Essay
The keyboard on the MateBook 14S is not the best you can find out there. It is not the worst thing to come on a laptop though. It works, and well enough at that to ensure that you do not throw it against a wall whenever you need to reply to an email with a long essay, or when you need to type out long documents with it.
The key travel is shallow, which makes it a little odd to type with. Strangely, typing on the keyboard does not wear us out as much as we thought it would though. We could attribute that to the mushiness of the keyboard. The combination of the short travel and mushiness makes the keyboard feels odd to work with. It is not quite unpleasant, just odd.
At the same time though, the keyboard is very much silent. You can bring it to the library, type out an essay and get out without anyone noticing that you have been working on it. You can even sneak in an email reply or two in the meeting room.
Gaming
You can still game on the HUAWEI MateBook 14S. You do have to adjust your expectations, though. You can still play games like Two Point Hospital, Cities: Skylines, or even Counter Strike: Global Offensive on the MateBook 14S. If you really want, you can even play Dota 2 at the screen’s 2.5K resolution. You might want to set your graphics to medium or even low if you want to take full advantage of the 2.5K display.
Battery Life
In our typical use, we usually have a few apps open on the notebook. Our browsers have about 10 tabs open at any given time. We kept our screen brightness to the maximum in most use cases. Our speakers are usually turned down to about 20% or less on the HUAWEI MateBook 14S, it can get quite loud. That said, we usually will play music via Tidal, which also means we have Tidal installed and opened. We also will have a couple of Microsoft Word instances open.
In that use case, we get about 8 hours of use from a full battery before we need to think about plugging the device to our charger. The Charger provided is a little bit of an overkill at 90W, but that means you can use it to charge other devices and other laptops that charges via USB Type-C also, which is always welcome since you just need to carry one charger for all your devices now.
Display & Audio
As mentioned, the HUAWEI MateBook 14S packs an odd 3:2 display. True to its name, it has a 14-inch display too; 14.2-inch specifically. The 14.2-inch display covers up to 90% of the body. This points to a massive display experience from a small notebook.
It is a very beautiful 2.5K (2,520 x 1,680) high-resolution display. It is a higher resolution display than regular notebooks of its class making it really stand out. It covers 100% of the sRGB colour gamut, which should mean that you get highly accurate and vibrant colours on the display. 400nits also means that it should be bright enough to work with in any indoor situation.
Its 1500:1 contrast ratio comes to play when you are watching movies with the HUAWEI MateBook 14S too. Movies look amazing on the 14-incher with vibrant and rich colours. The only issue with it is the two big black bars at the top and bottom of the video itself.
Did we mention that it is also a touch sensitive display? While we do not think that Windows 10 is very much optimised for touch experience, we think Windows 11 will change that once you get it to update. But still, having a touch display when you scroll through the web makes a lot of sense. Even going through long word documents is a much better experience with touch sensitive display.
Then there is the audio, which is not actually half bad. It does not have a subwoofer installed to it, so you cannot expect it to produce the best audio experience from a notebook. But for a notebook its size, the audio experience is respectable enough that you can enjoy good music from the HUAWEI MateBook 145S. The high-frequencies and mid-frequencies are detailed enough that vocals tend to stand out a little bit more in most music. It tends to be quite loud too, which is surprising coming from speakers its size. Then again, there are 4 speakers on this thing.
The HUAWEI MateBook 14S – Green Lit
The HUAWEI MateBook 14S is pretty in its Spruce Green guise. While there is not much in terms of design cues, its green colour helps it stand out. It is also one of the only thin-and-light notebooks you can find in the market that comes with a full-sized USB port and a full-sized HDMI port.
At MYR 4,999, it is more expensive than a lot of thin-and-light notebooks out there. Most of them does not come with a display quite like the one you can find on the HUAWEI MateBook 14S. It is not just a touch display, it is a 2.5K display that is stretched out to 3:2 aspect ratio, which is unique. On top of that you get facial recognition, also a premium feature you do not normally get in a regular thin-and-light notebook. It is a feature you mostly find on enterprise class device, or at much higher price point.
If you are a HUAWEI device owner that works with Harmony OS 2, this should be a no brainer to boost your productivity even more. With a HUAWEI MatePad 12.6, you are effectively carrying an extra storage, notepad, drawing pad, and display in your bag. HUAWEI Share is also wireless, which also means you do not need to tangle your bag with cables.
So, is this HUAWEI MateBook 14S worth MYR 4,999? We would say so, in some ways. We are not saying that it is not expensive, because it is. But at the same time this is one of the most practical thin-and-light notebook out there with a unique and beautiful display. It packs features that most thin-and-light notebooks in its price range does not too. Of course, if you have a HUAWEI Harmony OS 2 device, the HUAWEI MateBook 14S makes more sense than any other notebook in its class.