LAS VEGAS — Music lovers, we have found your next tablet. Here at CES 2016, Huawei has unveiled its first premium slate for the US, the 10.1-inch MediaPad M2. The silver slate will catch eyes with its beautiful display, but it's audio quality is even more impressive. The tablet should land in the US in the first quarter of 2016.
At 1.08 pounds and 0.29 inches thick, the M2 felt light in my hands, even as it blasted powerful bass and clear highs from its four speakers. The tablet is able to deliver such incredible audio thanks to a collaboration with Harman/Kardon, which worked with Huawei to tune the tablet's sound quality. Harmon/Kardon's Clari-Fi audio technology, which intelligently corrects distortions in music, is also featured in the M2.
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Huawei's producing the M2 in two versions, standard and premium, but both versions have a brilliant 1920 x 1200 IPS LCD display that impressed us with vivid color, as well as dual quad-core Kirin processors (2.0GHz and 1.5GHz) and a 680 MHz Mali-T628 MP4 GPU. The premium M2 comes with 64GB of storage and 3GB of RAM, while the standard edition has a 16GB of storage and 2GB of RAM. Other specs include a 5-megapixel front camera, a 13-MP rear shooter and a 6660mAh battery.
We also got to test the MediaPad M2's optional stylus, which has 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity, twice as many as you'll find in the tip of Microsoft's Surface Pen. Each stroke of the Huawei's pen was silky and smooth, and the Notepad app did a great job of taking our handwriting and turning it into text. The stylus is optional and comes with the premium version of the tablet.
The M2, which runs Android 5.1 Lollipop and version 3.1 of Huawei's EMUI, also boasts split-screen views, an option still missing in stock Android 6.0.
Huawei has yet to reveal pricing for the M2 as well as which version(s) of the tablet will land in the U.S. Stay tuned to Laptop Mag for more from CES 2016.
