Alongside the MediaPad X1, Huawei this week introduced the MediaPad M1 8, an 8-inch tablet. This device also has a SIM slot and can be used as a phone. We stopped by Huawei's booth at MWC Barcelona to get a look at the M1 in person and, like our friends at Laptop Mag, were surprised at how much it looks like a smartphone we know. Oddly enough, that smartphone is not made by Huawei but HTC. Check out the tablet next to the HTC One below and tell us that these devices don't look similar:
So they're not identical, but they do look very similar. Even the speaker placement is the same! That's where the similarities stop, though, as the HTC One is completely different under the hood. And, though both devices are based on Android, they have different UIs on top of Android. The HTC One has the company's Sense software while the MediaPad M1 boasts Huawei's Emotion UI and both of these offer a different experience.
This 8-inch device is still small enough to be able to two-thumb type in portrait mode and feels quite comfortable in your hands. Despite there being only one inch in the difference as far as screen size is concerned, this device is considerably heavier and thicker than the MediaPad X1. Weighing in at 329g, the MediaPad M1 is almost 50 percent heavier than the X1, and it measures 7.9 mm thick.
Under the hood you're looking at Android 4.2 with Emotion UI 2.0, that 8-inch display we talked about before with an 800 x 1280 resolution, a 1.6 GHz CPU, 1 GB of RAM, 8 GB or 16 GB of storage, WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, LTE, a 5-megapixel camera in the back, a 1-megapixel lens up front, and a 4,800 mAh battery.
Similar to the X1, there's been no mention of pricing or release date, but this would slot easily into the mid-range tablet market, so we're hoping the pricing will reflect that. If it's priced in line with high-end current generation tablets, we can't see it receiving too warm a reception with consumers.
Check out all our Mobile World Congress 2014 coverage here!
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