The Huawei MateBook X Pro looks as much "Air" as Pro. Arthur Fuentes, ABS-CBN News MANILA - The Huawei MateBook X Pro is an excellent thin and light laptop, with a gorgeous design, great keyboard and enough processing power to get a busy business exec or creative through the day. However, with the introduction of newer more power-efficient chips, it may leave you wondering: what if?

When I first unboxed and held this laptop, I was struck by how light it was. I could not recall reviewing a laptop that was lighter than this. With a claimed weight of 980 grams, this is definitely one of the lightest, if not the lightest 14-inch laptops out on the market today.  

With a thickness of 13.5 mm, it’s not exactly the thinnest of its kind, but the sloping design of the body makes you feel like you’re holding something really slim.

It also has a unique design, which uses magnesium alloy for the body and a paint coating that made me mistake it for a polycarbonate (plastic) instead of metal. It was a pleasant confusion. I also really like how clean the laptop is–there’s just one sticker on the inside, which  

Our review unit, which came in the Morandi Blue colorway, had a very nice grainy feel that was very good at resisting the fingerprints of my often oily hands. I really liked what Huawei did with this.

The Huawei MateBook X Pro has a very clean look. Arthur Fuentes, ABS-CBN News 

Despite being a featherweight, the MateBook X Pro also has enough muscle to stand toe to toe with much heavier machines. This laptop boasts of 32 GB of memory, 2 terabytes of storage, an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor running at 2.5 GHz.

Its screen is also easy on the eyes. The 14.2-inch flexible OLED display has very slim bezels, a massive 3120x 2080 resolution, that could go up 1000 nits of brightness, and run at 120Hz. Like a lot of new smartphones today, the display also features 1,440 Hz high-frequency PWM dimming that minimizes eye strain.

But what I like most about the display is the 3:2 aspect ratio which is very work-centric. A lot of laptops still use the 16:9 ratio, which is fine if you just want to view video. But if you’re writing a document, doing code or editing photos or videos, the taller screen shows you more of what you’re working on, and is just so much better. It’s also really nice that Huawei made the display a touchscreen, which is even better for work.

The Huawei MateBook X Pro's thin-ness seen here side by side with a Galaxy S22. Arthur Fuentes, ABS-CBN News 

I also love the keyboard on this machine. It’s clicky, with a very satisfying sound and depth. This is definitely one of the best typing experiences I’ve had on a laptop. It reminded me of my old 2012 Macbook Pro Retina, which had one of the best keyboards ever.

This also one of the fastest Windows Hello logins– just flip the cover open and in about a second, your face is scanned and you’re in. The sound is also very good for a 14-inch laptop.

As expected from a thin-and-light device, the MateBook X Pro’s ports are a bit limited. There are only 2  Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left side and 1 USB-C port on the right. It would have been nice if they had included a USB Type A, but most laptops in this class also forego ports selection for portability.

When it comes to battery, I got around 6 hours of work (which means around 30 browser tabs running several Google Docs documents, GMail, Outlook, Teams, several YouTube channels, Facebook, Instagram, X and news sites) on this laptop before getting the 20-percent low-battery warning. This is fine for most users at present, but this also makes me wonder: what if Huawei had spec’d this with the Snapdragon X Elite or even the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, which are more power efficient?

Of course, Snapdragon laptops have their own issues–namely app compatibility with the ARM processor– but a Ryzen AI chip would have been an even more excellent choice for this already formidable machine.

Still, this is a solid choice for professionals who are on the go, and want a sleek Windows machine for the daily grind.