Study of the Huawei MateBook 16S

 Introduction

This is the new Huawei MateBook 16S, a laptop that shares the same general form as the MateBook 16 from a year ago but has internal components made by Intel's Alder Lake. If you've never heard of Huawei's MateBook 16, it sports a 16-inch display with a higher 3:2 aspect ratio and is housed in a slim frame that weighs just under 2kg.

In addition, we'll explain display aspect ratios in plain English if you're not familiar with them. A 3:2 display is only slightly smaller but has much more vertical room than a 16:9 monitor, which is ideal for broad videos. It greatly improves its suitability for displaying web pages and pictures (those are usually 4:3 or 3:2). In video editing, where you must accommodate the actual video and a number of UI components underneath it, the squarer aspect is also more practical.

Huawei used the MateBook 16's chassis, complete with connectors, but chose to employ Intel's 12th generation Alder Lake H series chips rather of AMD's Ryzen 7 series processors from the previous year. The 12-core i5-12500H (4 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores), the 14-core i7-12700H, and the i9-12900H are the options this year (both of which have 6 performance cores and 8 efficient cores).

All of these 45W processors are designed for high-end laptops, but with to this year's major change in Intel's architecture (the big.LITTLE architecture), we can anticipate a significantly improved performance to battery life ratio. Later, more on that. Additionally, Wi-Fi 6e is supported, and one USB-C port has Thunderbolt 4.

For the most part, the show is the same as it was last year. Still a 16-inch IPS LCD with a resolution of 2560 x 1680 pixels, it has a brightness of 300 nits and a contrast ratio of 1500:1. The main update this year is the touch-sensitive display, which can occasionally be useful but we would have happily exchanged that feature for greater brightness.

The Huawei MateBook 16S features the same 84Wh battery as its predecessor, and depending on the CPU you choose, you may choose between a monstrous 135W charger or a more acceptable 90W brick.

A better 1080p camera that can follow you around the frame and display a personalised virtual background is also included with the laptop. The keyboard, touchpad, and even the cooling below are all the same, as is the speaker configuration.

design, display, ports, touchpad, keyboard

The MateBook 16S and MateBook 16 are practically interchangeable. Its dimensions and 1.99kg weight are identical. The display has the same diagonal and small bezels as other contemporary 16-inch laptops, but they are a little bigger.

Since Space Gray is the only colour offered, everyone will have the same model as us. We anticipate that 16-inch computers will be grey and practical. The case is metal, which is a plus.

The laptop may be opened with a single finger. You are met with a sizable glass touchpad and a full-sized backlit keyboard without a Numpad or other row of specialty buttons. Multi-touch gestures are simple to use, and the touchpad's surface is very pleasant to the touch.

Excellent keyboard quality. When typing, the keys have excellent 1.5mm travel and are soft but not mushy. As you might anticipate from a Numpad-free keyboard on a 16-inch laptop frame, they are also evenly spaced. The backlight has two brightness settings. The keyboard is surrounded on either side by speaker grilles. These are great speakers since they can be turned up loud and keep a lot of bass.

Your hands can fit in the palm rests on either side of the touchpad while you're typing. The touchpad itself has good palm rejection, so we had no trouble using this tablet to type.

We have conflicting emotions towards the display. One the one hand, its high resolution and 189ppi density make it highly sharp. The benefit of viewing angles is that they prevent the display from losing contrast when seen at an angle. The shiny panel, however, is incredibly reflecting. Almost anything in the area can be seen reflected on the glass, and the effect is amplified when the glass is angled.

This makes the screen only useful in low-light settings when combined with the display's just average brightness.

The panel's 300 nits are claimed by Huawei. We recorded 320 nits in the display's middle and about 280 nits in its corners. It's not ideal uniformity, but it's also not terrible. This year, we would have preferred a brighter panel because 300 nits is starting to seem pretty disappointing, especially at this price.

Additionally, the display only runs at 60 frames per second; we had hoped to see a 90Hz panel like on some of Huawei's other laptops.

The display is quite contrasty and the colours are beautifully rich and saturated despite the modest brightness. Although Huawei says that its average Delta E is under 1, our measurement of 2.5 shows that it isn't suitable for content creation. Our unit's display has a very noticeable blue tint. The panel may be calibrated to perfectly match sRGB.

Compared to the 16-inch MacBook Pro or the 16-inch Asus laptops, the screen bezels are a little bigger. But until you explicitly compare them, you wouldn't notice this. This year, Huawei improved the top-mounted camera. It has 1080p resolution, FollowCam, virtual backgrounds, and even a feature that tries to make it appear as though you're staring at the camera when you're not. FollowCam maintains you in the centre as you walk around (we were unable to make this work, though).

Although the camera isn't Windows Hello certified, you still get a fingerprint reader that supports caching and is located behind the power button, allowing you to turn on the computer and log in with just one touch.

The MateBook 16S performs admirably in terms of ports. One full-sized HDMI 2.0, two USB-C ports (3.2 Gen 1), one of which supports 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4, and a 3.5mm audio connector are all located on the left (the bottom one with the lightning arrow). On the right side, there are two USB-A ports (3.2 Gen 1). An SD card reader is the only item that is missing.

The Huawei MateBook 16S is simple to open; all you need to do is remove five T5 Torx screws. There isn't much to do inside, though, as the Intel AX211 Wi-Fi 6E wireless card is now soldered to the motherboard and there isn't a second SSD socket.

Battery life and performance

With the MateBook 16S, Huawei switched to Intel hardware, and you may choose from 12th generation Intel Core i9-12900H, Intel Core i7-12700H, and Intel Core i5-12500H CPUs. The Core i5 features 4 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores, but the Core i7 and Core i9 each have 6 performance cores, despite the fact that they are all 45W.

The i7-12700H is the greatest option, in our opinion. In this kind of laptop, it performs almost identically to the i9 while being noticeably faster than the i5. On a computer that isn't designed for gaming, the i9 gives about 300MHz higher clock speeds, which isn't something you'd notice.

In keeping with that theme, the MateBook 16S depends on Intel's Iris Xe integrated graphics in the absence of a standalone GPU. You can play entry-level to midrange games at lower settings in 1080p with no problems, but you won't be able to play triple-A games on the MateBook 16S.

After we calibrated the screen, the Core i7-12700H in our review unit handled photo editing and even a little 4K video editing with some proxies without any issues.

The performance of gaming and creative apps would improve if you switched to Intel's 12th generation processors because AMD currently trails Intel in these areas. But without a discrete GPU to complement the powerful processor, that is useless. In this situation, you're not actually getting the performance advantages while also receiving a chip that is less effective than last year's, which can reduce battery life.

The Matebook 16S offers enhanced ecosystem integration with other devices that Huawei refers to as Super Device. Huawei PC Manager, which is one way to use Huawei Share, is included with the laptop. The programme allows you to mirror the laptop, enlarge the display, or even transfer files using drag-and-drop gestures while using a Matepad tablet as a secondary screen.

The Huawei M Pencil may also be used in reverse to transform the Matepad into a graphics tablet or to run any software, however there will undoubtedly be a very slight lag due to wireless connectivity.

With Huawei Share, owners of compatible phones may interact with their devices through a laptop. Owners can answer calls (which is especially helpful if you have a set of Freebuds ready), share screens, or drag and drop documents and other items. Only devices running HarmonyOS 2.0 are officially supported by this, not necessarily all of them.

Now let's examine performance. Given that the MateBook 16S's motherboard is expected to support PCIe 4.0 and that the 1TB SSD achieved great performance results, you might want to explore a PCIe 4.0 SSD for a bit more speed.

We won't go into great detail because by this point, nearly every respected PC reviewer has tested Intel's 12th generation chips extensively. It is sufficient to mention that the Core i7-12700H is one of the most effective processors available at the moment.

In single core Geekbench tests, the Core i7-12700H outperformed the Ryzen 5800H in the MateBook 16 from the previous year by 20%, and in multi-core tests, it outperformed it by 54%. Applications like Photoshop, Premiere, or DaVinci Resolve would greatly benefit from the latter.

The speed of Intel's most recent processors is once again highlighted by Cinebench R23, which places them near the top of the single core and multi core rankings. When we attempted to run GFXBench, the application kept crashing during each test.

No matter the processor series chosen, Huawei employed the same heat management tuning as on its other MateBook computers. Huawei designed the MateBook 16S to be a quiet, cool laptop because it enjoys using them.

Although it has a base frequency of 2.3GHz, the processor typically runs at 1.4GHz. The cores briefly reached 3.2GHz during our CPU burner test, then subsequently decelerated to around 1.3GHz. As a result, the laptop's two fans rarely turn on and are generally audible. The fans were very quiet, even during our stress test in a space with a temperature of about 24°C.

As a result, neither the laptop nor I felt uncomfortable warmth. The majority of users will like the operation's quietness and coolness, but it implies that the potent Intel Core i7-12700H processor is being used far too little. If the chip were optimised to run as coolly and quietly as possible, it would make more sense to place it in a lower series.

The efficiency of Intel's most recent processors is still below that of AMD's competitors. The 7nm of the Ryzen 5000 series or the new 6nm Ryzen 7 are more efficient than the 10mm design.

We performed a battery test in which a YouTube movie was played continuously at its highest brightness and volume until the laptop shut down. It offers you an estimate of how long the laptop will last while everything is at its maximum. It recorded little over 6 hours, which isn't bad but falls short of the record set by the model from the previous year, which was over 7 hours.

Thirty minutes of charging with the 90W brick resulted in a return of 37 percent from 0%. It took about an hour and a half to fully recharge.

Wrap-up

Great laptop: Huawei MateBook 16S. It is solidly constructed with high-quality components and offers good performance. The battery life is respectable, if not particularly outstanding, and the same is true of the display.

The MateBook 16S is significantly more expensive even though it doesn't perform noticeably better than its predecessor. These are all official Huawei prices, and the MateBook 16S costs €1,700/£1,300 for the Core i7-12700H model as opposed to €900/£800 for the MateBook 16. The AMD Ryzen 7 processor from last year is still excellent and is better for batteries than Intel's Alder Lake processors.

Huawei's own MateBook D16, which costs €1,300/£1,000 and has close-enough specs, including a 16-inch 1920x1200px IPS LCD but isn't a 3:2 panel but is still taller than a conventional 16:9 display, complicates the situation further. It also has the same i7-12700H processor.

Because of this, we are unable to currently recommend the Huawei MateBook 16S at its current pricing. For a little bit more money, you could purchase a laptop with a much better display and comparable performance, and for a little bit less, one with a brighter display and similar performance. The MateBook 16 from Huawei is superior to the 16S in almost every way, and it is also significantly less expensive.

Pros

• Big, sharp display with good head-on viewing experience
• 3:2 aspect allows for better usability
• Powerful Intel 12th gen processors
• Excellent port selection - Thunderbolt 4 is nice
• Keyboard and touchpad are both high-quality
• Good, loud speakers

Cons

• Expensive, especially compared to predecessor
• Only 300 nits of brightness
• Little practical effect of move to Intel Alder Lake
• Very reflective display