Exhibition in Barcelona in full swing MWC 2015 within which manufacturers present their new smartphones, tablets and other portable equipment. It is for this event that companies are trying to prepare new flagships, with which demanding consumers will spend the whole year. So, at MWC 2015, Samsung introduced the Galaxy S6 in two reincarnations, and HTC — the One M9 model. A number of Chinese manufacturers, including the company Huawei, which many still do not take seriously, but they should. So, the company presented the coolest smart watch based on Android Wear in the opinion of the press, as well as an interesting 7-inch tablet phone. MediaPad X2.
Steel and sapphire
Before the announcement of the Chinese company, the Moto 360 was rightfully considered the most interesting smart watch based on the Google platform, but Huawei Watch clearly seized the initiative with an Asian, so to speak, scope.
The company has clearly placed an emphasis on design, and without compromise. The case is almost entirely made of stainless steel, including the bottom cover, which is plastic on competing models. Instead of plastic, the Chinese built a small sapphire panel into the metal from below, protecting the optical heart rate sensor:
The sapphire glass also covers the round 1.4-inch OLED display with the highest pixel density on the smartwatch market (286 ppi versus 205 ppi for the Moto 360). The choice will be steel bracelets and leather straps, plus several color options for the watch itself, including natural steel, black and gold.
Inside the device is quite a traditional stuffing: 1.2 GHz Qualcomm processor, 512 MB of RAM, 4 GB of flash memory, 6-axis motion sensor and Bluetooth 4.0 module. The device will go on sale in 20 countries around the world, however, while the release date and its price have not been announced.
It seems to me that this is a really good competitor to the Apple Watch, provided that Android Wear is actively developed. Although, the issue of software support from the manufacturer is important here. The Moto 360 has the best support so far in this regard, and new firmware is steadily released with every Android Wear update from Google.
And again a 7-inch phone
Such an unusual device as the Huawei MediaPad X1 is still the most compact and convenient 7-inch Android tablet on the market in terms of its characteristics, although in fact it is more of a tablet phone with full support for telephone functions and 3G/LTE. An excellent display, minimal dimensions, a memory card slot, an aluminum case, a good speaker and quite decent cameras. The only drawback of the gadget is not the most powerful processor. On paper, the 4-core HiSilicon Kirin 910 chip of its own production looked good, but in reality there was a lack of performance, which was expressed in strange lags in the interface, web browser, and a number of applications. The strange thing is that the device either worked smartly or started to slow down out of the blue.
Nevertheless, I repeat that in terms of design, display quality and weight and size characteristics, this is one of the best 7-inch gadgets on the market, which lacked only processor power. Announced at MWC 2015 MediaPad X2 this problem is gone and I am very happy that Huawei has decided to continue the line. It is this new product that I now consider as my future secondary Android gadget. But, more to the point, as they say.
Externally, the device has not changed — the same compact aluminum bar with dimensions of 183.5 × 103.9 × 7.28 mm (1 mm thicker than its predecessor) and a capacious 5000 mAh battery. 13- and 5-megapixel cameras are also preserved, as well as a high-quality 7-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1920×1200 pixels, which occupies 80% of the front panel. But the processor has become much more powerful. This is an 8-core Kirin 930 chip based on ARM Cortex-A53 computing cores and a Mali-T628 GPU. In white, the device is equipped with 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal flash memory, in gold — 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of flash memory. A similar configuration scheme, depending on the color, is also in the Ascend Mate 7 model.
It is also worth noting support for LTE Category 6 (data transfer rate up to 300 Mbps), but this is not relevant for Russia yet. The device will go on sale in the near future, although its exact release date and price have not yet been named. [The Verge] [Huawei]
