Huawei's stunning new iPad Pro rival brings its absurdly thin profile to an international audience
The 12-inch Huawei MatePad Pro is officially set for a European release at a pretty high but not obscene price with a few very impressive selling points.
The beautiful MatePad Pro 12 can successfully replace your full-blown laptop with an optional keyboard and stylus. | Image by Huawei
Huawei may not be the world's top smartphone, smartwatch, wireless earbuds, or tablet vendor right now, but the company is certainly trying its best to keep up with the global leaders of all these markets, throwing the Watch 6 series and Watch GT7 family in the Apple Watch-dominated ring, setting up the FreeBuds Neo for an epic clash against the AirPods 4, outshining boring mid-range handsets like Samsung's Galaxy A57 5G with the gorgeous new Nova 16s duo, and stealing the iPad Pro's thunder with one of the prettiest jumbo-sized slates I have ever seen.
This all happened yesterday, mind you, and the undeniably breathtaking MatePad Pro 12 almost went unnoticed due to the sheer number of exciting Huawei product announcements made in Munich, Germany.
There's a lot to love about the latest MatePad Pro
- 12-inch flexible OLED PaperMatte display with 3036 x 1952 pixel resolution, 144Hz refresh rate technology, and up to 1600 nits of brightness;
- 8 and 12GB RAM options;
- 256 and 512GB storage variants;
- HarmonyOS 4.3;
- 50MP rear-facing camera with f/1.8 aperture;
- 12MP front-facing camera with f/2.4 aperture;
- 9,760mAh battery;
- 66W charging technology;
- 40W reverse charging support;
- Four speakers;
- Wi-Fi 7;
- Bluetooth 6.0;
- USB Type-C 3.1 Gen 1;
- 264.2 x 172.9 x 4.7mm dimensions;
- 454 grams weight;
- Blue and Space Gray color options.
A few things deserve special praise here
Almost every number and detail listed above is either good or great, helping the Huawei MatePad Pro 12 rival or eclipse most of the best Android tablets around, but the 4.7mm profile is simply mind-blowing.
The MatePad Pro 12 looks especially awesome in a blue paint job. | Image by Huawei
You've all heard of (and hopefully used) ultra-thin tablets before, but this thing is somehow 0.4mm and 0.6mm slimmer than Apple's newest 13 and 11-inch iPad Pros, respectively. The 5.5mm Galaxy Tab S11 and 5.1mm Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra are also unable to match the incredible elegance of Huawei's latest 12-inch powerhouse, which is somehow lighter than the smallest of Samsung's two 2025 flagship slates as well... despite offering more screen real estate.
Speaking of the screen, that's no ordinary high-end OLED affair either, with its super-advanced PaperMatte technology promising a more comfortable viewing experience than you might be used to in the trickiest lighting conditions. Oh, and let's not forget about the remarkably large battery squeezed into that ridiculously light and thin chassis to deliver up to 14.7 hours (that's weirdly specific) of life between (blazing fast) charges.
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The price is... not very low
But it's not prohibitive either. Specifically, the Huawei MatePad Pro 12 starts at €799 in most European markets that use that currency while costing €899 in a top-of-the-line configuration with 12GB RAM and 512 gigs of internal storage space.
What do you think about the MatePad Pro 12 European prices?
1 Votes
There's obviously no point in converting those tags to US dollars, as the tablet is unlikely (to say the least) to ever see daylight stateside, so instead of that, I'd like to point out that the 11-inch Galaxy Tab S11 normally starts at a little over €800 on the old continent, while Apple's iPad Pro 11 (2025) costs a whopping €1,299 in an entry-level variant.
That actually makes the MatePad Pro 12 pretty affordable for what it brings to the table, and although Huawei weirdly doesn't mention the processor used by the European tablet, last month's China debut makes me confident that's either a Kirin T93 or Kirin T93A.
Should you buy the Huawei MatePad Pro 12?
I strongly believe you should at least consider it as a low-cost alternative to the latest iPad Pro duo... even though those two aforementioned Huawei-made chips are obviously nowhere near as powerful as an Apple M5.
The battery, its charging speeds, and reverse charging speeds are all among the new tablet's key strengths. | Image by Huawei
The gorgeous design (that's entirely made of robust metal, by the way), equally impressive screen, excellent battery endurance, even better charging speeds, and yes, even the ultra-advanced cameras make the value proposition here pretty hard to beat... unless you're into larger devices and have a little more money to spend, in which case you might want to opt for the 13.2-inch MatePad Pro Max.
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