I spent a month with the Huawei Mate Pad Air, and it's confirmed my one big wish for the next i Pad Air | Tech Radar

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I spent a month with the Huawei Mate Pad Air, and it's confirmed my one big wish for the next i Pad Air

Huawei's Mate Pad Air has one display upgrade I desperately want Apple to bring to the next i Pad Air

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Huawei, as a brand, is in a very interesting place right now. The company is genuinely innovating on a lot of fronts. It just launched the Mate XT2 tri-folding phone, which brings Samsung-like Privacy Display tech to the tri-folding form factor, as well as the Watch D3, which puts medical-grade blood pressure measurements into an even slimmer smartwatch.

But the problem with Huawei has always been that you can't buy a lot of the company's devices in markets outside Asia. And while that doesn't look like it's changing anytime soon, every once in a while, Huawei does launch some products in the West, and it reminds us (again) of what we're missing from other major hardware makers.

That's exactly what happened with the new Huawei Mate Pad Air. I usually use my still-going-strong M1 i Pad Air (2022) as my main tablet, but I've spent the past month using the Mate Pad Air as my primary device. And it has shown me the one upgrade Apple could make that would probably convince me to finally buy the next i Pad Air.

The Mate Pad Air itself doesn't look like some groundbreaking new tablet. In fact, Huawei has so many tablets in its lineup that you'd probably have a hard time distinguishing the new Mate Pad Air from some of the company's other models just by looking at the back.

But flip the Mate Pad Air around, and that's where, for me, it starts beating a lot of the competition. The Mate Pad Air comes with a 12-inch OLED display with up to a 144 Hz refresh rate and a 1,200-nit peak brightness. But the model I've been testing for the past month is the higher-end Paper Matte version, which can reach up to 2,000 nits.

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If you're unfamiliar with Huawei's Paper Matte display technology, it's essentially a special anti-glare treatment on top of the display that, Huawei says, eliminates up to 99% of ambient light reflections. It also gives the screen a more paper-like texture, which feels natural when you're writing with a stylus, while also helping reduce things like eye strain and smudges.

And this display alone is what has made me prefer using the Mate Pad Air over my i Pad Air for the past month.

Think about what you actually do with a tablet. Whether you use an i Pad Pro or the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra, almost everything revolves around the display. You're watching content, taking notes, making video calls, or reading. For 99% of the time, you're looking at and interacting with a screen.

It's not like the i Pad Air's display is bad. It's still a good-looking panel, and I've used my M1 i Pad Air for years without any complaints. But Apple hasn't meaningfully upgraded the display technology in a while, and it's starting to show its age.

The i Pad Air still uses an LCD panel. It's still stuck at 60 Hz, and the bezels are quite thick as well. None of these things really bothered me before, but switching back and forth between it and the Mate Pad Air made the difference quite obvious.

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The 144 Hz OLED panel on the Mate Pad Air is obviously smoother, the colors look great, and the thinner bezels make watching content much nicer. And that Paper Matte display just makes everything twice as nice.

I've used the Mate Pad Air pretty much everywhere, be it the subway, airplanes, or my home, and not having reflections constantly bouncing off the screen has been great.

And it's not like Apple doesn't know how to do this. The company already offers its nano-texture display on the i Pad Pro. The problem is that you need to buy one of the most expensive i Pad Pro configurations (specifically, a model with 1TB or more) to even get the option, pushing the price to

1,899 / £1,899 / AU

3,249.

Huawei, on the other hand, makes the upgrade much easier to swallow. In the UK, you get the Paper Matte display regardless of which version of the Mate Pad Air you choose; the cheapest is just £699.99 (it's not available in the US). You're also getting 256GB of storage on the base model, compared to the 128GB starting storage on the i Pad Air.

Of course, the Mate Pad Air isn't better than the i Pad Air at everything. Apple's M-series chips still give the i Pad a major performance advantage, and if I'm editing videos or doing other compute-heavy work on a tablet, I'd still rather have the i Pad Air.

But most of the time, that's not what I'm doing on my tablet. I mostly use my i Pad to watch content and browse the web, and for both of these things, I'd rather have the Mate Pad Air's display.

Plus, the hardware around the OLED display is pretty impressive, too. At 12 inches, the Mate Pad Air sits somewhere between Apple's 11-inch and 13-inch i Pad Air models. It weighs just 509g and uses an aluminum frame and back, making it more than 100g lighter than the 13-inch i Pad Air.

It's thinner too, measuring just 5.3mm compared to 6.1mm for the larger i Pad Air, despite Huawei fitting a 10,100m Ah battery inside compared to roughly 9,705m Ah on Apple's tablet.

That said, none of this means I'm ready to completely ditch the i Pad. I still prefer its performance, app ecosystem, and just how well it works with the rest of my Apple devices. But after a month with the Mate Pad Air, the one thing I desperately want to take back to my i Pad is this display.

Give the next i Pad Air an OLED display with (hopefully) an anti-reflective Paper Matte-like option that doesn't burn a hole in my pocket, and my M1 i Pad Air might finally have a reason to retire.

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Sanuj Bhatia is a freelance tech journalist covering smartphones, tablets, wearables, and occasionally computing devices for Tech Radar. In addition to Tech Radar, he actively contributes to Android Central, Tom's Guide, Android Authority, and Android Police. When he's not testing the latest tech, you'll usually find him sipping a cup of tea or watching and reading about his favorite football team, Chelsea.

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News, deals, reviews, guides and more on the newest computing gadgets
Start exploring exclusive deals, expert advice and more
Unlock and manage exclusive Techradar member rewards
Unlock instant access to exclusive member features
Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards