The Huawei MateBook X Pro Review: Calling Out The Competition

Battery Life

One of the sacrifices made when making a laptop as compact as possible with thin bezels is that you’re got less room for a large battery, but Huawei still managed to squeeze in 57 Wh of capacity, which is less than some of the competition, but not necessarily a lot less.

And despite the MateBook X Pro offering a discrete GPU, that’s of course turned off with NVIDIA Optimus when not in use, so for more mundane tasks, the integrated GPU is leveraged to save some power.

We test all laptops at 200 nits brightness, and use the built-in Microsoft Edge browser and Films & TV app for testing.

2013 Light Battery Test

This test is being phased out because it’s become too easy for modern machines, and is almost the same amount of time you’d see for a completely idle system, but we’ve got a long history of devices tested so we’ll likely keep it around for Bench for a while still. Despite the high-resolution display, and average battery capacity, the MateBook X Pro still got over 13.5 hours of battery life on this test.

2016 Web Battery

Our newer test is much more demanding, and impacts battery life pretty significantly, and should represent a more accurate depiction of what you could expect if you were just browsing the web all day on the device. Once again, the MateBook X Pro delivers very solid battery life, at over 9.5 hours.

Normalized Results

By removing the battery capacity from the run time, we can see how efficient each device is. On our lighter 2013 test, the MateBook X Pro gets a very respectable 14.3 minutes per Wh, which is right up there with the most efficient devices we’ve seen, but those generally have a much lower resolution display.

On the 2016 version of the test, the result is the same, with the MateBook very close to the top of our efficiency chart despite the display. Huawei has done a fantastic job of getting as much battery life out of the limited battery size as they could.

Movie Playback

Playing back a locally stored movie on the MateBook resulted in right about 12 hours of battery life.

Tesseract

To put the movie playback in perspective, we divide the run time by the length The Avengers movie to see how many movies you could watch if you needed to. The MateBook would let you watch almost six entire movies before it forced you to go do something else for a while.

Charge Time

Huawei ships the MateBook X Pro with a 65-Watt adapter which is USB-C based, and can charge in either of the USB-C ports. A small complaint would be that there’s no USB-C on the right side, so you’re stuck charging on the left, but that’s not that much different than laptops that charge with a barrel connector so it’s hard to be too upset.

Charge time was fairly average at 161 minutes, but it does reach 50% charge in about 40 minutes which is likely quick enough for most people.