Best Huawei Tablets: Which one is best for you?

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Huawei tablets are manufactured in China. According to the US government, the connection between Huawei and the Chinese government poses a threat to privacy and national security.

Despite disagreeing with these claims and maintaining their innocence, Huawei devices have been locked out of access to Google Play and other American products. Additionally, some of their product lines are unavailable in America.

Limited Google Play access results in a lack of essential applications that are crucial for an overall good Android experience. For example, Google Mail, YouTube and other Google Services come free with other Android tablets; they are unavailable on Huawei, resulting in the tablet seeming limited in terms of compatibility and usefulness.

Huawei have maintained their high-quality hardware features that maintain the tablet’s powerful functionality for other uses. Luckily, the limitations do not affect their older subbrands, such as the Honor line of tablets. Therefore, if you need a tablet similar to Huawei but with Google Play compatibility, we recommend any Honor tablet.

Honor tablets have no compatibility limitations to American applications. However, they are not available in the American market since they have been affiliated with Huawei for a very long time. You can buy them in different countries like the UK and Germany but not the USA.

Best Honor and Huawei Tablets in 2024

1. Honor Pad 9: Best Overall Honor Tablet
2. Honor Pad 8: Affordable tablet
3. Honor Pad X9: Best Budget
4. Honor Pad X9a
5. Huawei MatePad Pro 11 2024: Best OLED screen
6. Huawei MatePad SE 10.4: Budget Huawei Tablet
7. Huawei MatePad 11 2023: Affordable Tablet from Huawei

Honor Pad 9: Best Overall Honor Tablet

It features a large screen with a 12.1-inch size, 2K resolution at 2560 x 1600 pixels IPS and a high 120 Hz screen refresh rate. This quality display and fast refresh rate, similar to an iPad Pro, form a clean view for gaming. It does not have an OLED screen, which would have cemented the viewing quality, although the IPS screen is decent for its price.

Processing power, multitasking capability and general performance are good thanks to a strong Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 and 8 GB of RAM. It has a 256 GB SSD storage space, which is good but not optimal. Unfortunately, the storage space is not upgradeable using a MicroSD card like other Android tablets.

Accessories on the tablet, like 8 surround speakers and the high-quality 2.5K screen with a free protective layer, make this tablet ideal for media consumption and streaming. The tablet’s thin 6.9 mm body and light weight at 555 g make it easy to carry around.

The tablet costs only £199, which is very affordable for its specs. For an additional £60 price, you can get an optional Bluetooth keyboard cover to protect your device. The keyboard comes with the cover, but neither has a touchpad nor adjustable angles and needs to be charged separately.

On the software side, it’s running MagicOS 7.2 on top of Android 13, with full Google Play support. A big downside, though, is the lack of guaranteed software updates. The Pad 9 is stuck with Android 13 with no chance to advance to Android 14.

The biggest negatives are the questionable future for software updates and the rudimentary keyboard accessory. It’s a powerful option if you need an entertainment tablet on a budget. If you are on the lookout for its closest competitor from another brand, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE Plus is the best pick.

Honor Pad 8: Affordable tablet

There’s a good chance that the Honor Pad 8 is the best entertainment tablet for the price, with a comparatively massive 12-inch screen and good audio.

One of the cheapest 12-inch tablets around, it offers a quality, full-metal body with a premium feel, albeit with small design concessions such as visible plastic Wi-Fi antenna covers.

The 12-inch LCD has a 2000 x 1200 resolution slightly above Full HD and it looks decent for most purposes, though it lacks sharpness when you’re looking at it up close. It’s laminated front to back with a decent level of brightness, so it’s good for indoors or shaded outdoor areas.

One highlight is its audio system, with eight speakers producing surprisingly great audio quality for this price range — even better than some pricier competitors like the Galaxy Tab S7 FE.

The Pad 8 stumbles, though, when it comes to performance. Driven by the Snapdragon 680 and accompanied by 6 GB RAM and 128GB storage, it’s just above entry level in CPU tests and well behind in graphics performance, with it being a task for it to handle anything but low settings in demanding games.

For day-to-day chores like web surfing, watching videos, or running two apps side by side, it’s smooth enough. Running Android 12 with the new Magic UI 6.1, it also finally has Google Play support again a refreshing change from Honor’s Huawei days.

There’s no fingerprint sensor just basic facial recognition using the 5MP front camera and the rear 5MP camera is disappointing. You’ll get similar battery life of around 6.5 hours, streaming, at max brightness.

In the end, the Honor Pad 8 isn’t a gaming powerhouse or productivity machine, but it’ll do a great job serving as a dedicated large-screen entertainment tablet with great-sounding speakers all for well below $400.

If media consumption is your main concern rather than raw power or high-res graphics, it’s a decent choice, but those seeking better performance or pen support may prefer alternatives such as the Galaxy Tab S7 FE or Xiaomi Pad 5.

Huawei MatePad Pro 11 2024: Huawei Tablet with OLED screen

Huawei is announcing the MatePad Pro 11 (2024), a fully featured high-end tablet. It is equipped with an 11-inch OLED display that has a 2560 x 1600 resolution, a 120 Hz refresh rate, 600 nits brightness, and support for 1 billion colours — making it perfect for work and play.

Powering it is the Kirin 9000s chipset with an octa-core 2.49 GHz CPU and Maleoon 910 MP4 GPU, paired with 12 GB RAM and either 256 GB or 512 GB of UFS 3.1 storage, which makes for smooth multitasking and apps to open quickly.

The tablet also offers BDS satellite calling and messaging — an unconventional feature for tablets — as well as a range of sensors, including ambient light, gyroscope and compass.

On the camera side, there’s a 13MP main + 8MP ultra-wide rear array with 4K video recording, while the front camera is a 16MP sensor with 1080p recording.

Audio is pumped out by six stereo speakers and an 8,300mAh battery with 66W fast charging via USB-C 3.1. The device runs HarmonyOS 4.0 and is fully compatible with the Huawei M-Pencil (3rd gen).

Huawei MatePad SE 10.4: Budget Huawei Tablet

A cheap tablet, the Huawei MatePad SE retails for 298 SGD and sits between the MatePad T10 and MatePad 10.4. It lacks the premium aesthetic of the MatePad 10.4, but it’s still built well, with a matte textured back and a plastic surround between the two metal and glass.

The 10.4-inch LCD (1200 x 2000 resolution) is sharp but not nearly as bright or vibrant as the MatePad 10.4. On the performance side, the Snapdragon 680 processor runs basic tasks smoothly — browsing, emails and streaming — as long as you’re not running too many apps at the same time. It is fine for light games, but a graphics-heavy game creates delayed graphics.

The MatePad SE runs HarmonyOS 3, so it doesn’t natively support the Google Play Store, but you can use the G-space app to install Google apps—albeit with a slightly slower loading time. It also doesn’t have pen support (unlike the MatePad 10.4, which supports the Huawei M-Pencil 2).

Audio duties are handled by four-way speakers — fine but slightly hollow compared to the MatePad 10.4’s fuller sound. At least it has a 3.5mm headphone jack — a feature absent from its costlier counterpart. A microSD card slot helps with the storage, which is important if you get the base model, with 3 GB RAM and 32 GB storage.

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