E-Reader Review: Huawei MatePad Paper

A few months ago I reviewed the Onyx Boox Note Air 2+ , which has a whole intro about what exactly e-ink devices are and why I’m interested in them, so I won’t rehash all of that. At the bottom of that review, I noted that Huawei and Lenovo had competing devices coming out; the Lenovo one appears to be on ice, but the Huawei is now available in the UK, so I went ahead and decided to try it out. First things first: the price tag is WAY more justifiable than the Boox . The Huawei MatePad Paper retails for £450, which is already £50 cheaper than I bought the Boox for, but an early bird 10% discount (which is still ongoing) brings it down to £405. I did glance at Amazon and I admit that the Boox is now £460, but a) that’s still a £55 discount over the Huawei currently; and b) Boox devices are awful when it comes to longevity. They go obsolete ridiculously quickly, since the company releases new iterations of a model multiple times a year, and - from what I’ve seen online - the build quality can come undone at unexpected moments. At which point you’re on your own, since I can personally tell you that the customer service at Boox is dire. Huawei may also be a Chinese company, and its relationship with the US government obviously isn’t great, but at least it has an established foothold in the UK and I know I’ve got some recourse if things go wrong. And I almost forgot to mention point c), which is that the price tag includes a bundled folio case and pen! Both are actually very good quality too, and I’ll discuss them in more depth later in the review. The Boox does come with a pen, but it isn’t their best kind of pen, and there’s no case. So the Huawei MatePad Paper beats the Note Ait 2+ on value for money any way you slice it. Hardware Quality Okay, now let’s talk about the MatePad Paper itself. It’s a slim, very light device - at 360 grams, it’s almost 100g lighter than the Boox. It has a 10.3′′ screen which sits flush against a thicker left-hand bezel. Not to worry if you’re left-handed; the internal gyroscope will reorient the screen if you flip it around. As soon as I took the MatePad Paper out of the box, I was struck by its interesting material. The back is textured black plastic (pic below), which is what enables the device to be so light. I admit that it means you have to sacrifice the premium feel and appearance of metal, but the upsides are that you’ll get a much better grip and there are no smeared fingerprints. It also doesn’t exactly feel like plastic, more like grainy faux leather. The lack of metal is definitely not a dealbreaker. If anything, it’s probably beneficial for longevity, because it doesn’t feel like the whole...

Preview: ~500 words