Huawei is late to the digital note taking game, many people thought their first product would be a learning curve and not provide much value to consumers. This is totally incorrect, this is a premium e-note that has leather on the back of the device and wraps around the front of the bezel, which aesthetically looks like a ledger. The bezels are black and really makes the E INK screen pop.

The MatePad Paper features an E INK Carta HD display panel with a resolution of 1448×1072 with 227 PPI. It has an impressive 86.3% screen-to-body ratio. There is an anti-glare solution and 32 levels of brightness, so it should be readable both at night. There’s also a built-in smart refresh rate, which automatically adjusts to help conserve battery life. This product is geared towards taking notes and freehand drawing. It will come with a suite of apps to make this possible. It ships with the Huawei’s M-Pencil stylus that has 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity and just 26ms latency, it’s designed to accurately simulate the experience of pen on paper.

Underneath the hood is a Kirin 820E 5G which has three 2.22 GHz Cortex-A76 cores and three 1.84 GHz Cortex-A55 cores, it also has a Mali-G57 6-core GPU. There is a whopping 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. You will have access to Wi-Fi 6+, Bluetooth 5.1 and fingerprint sensor built into the power button and a total weight of 360g. Continuing Huawei’s push to connect all of its devices as seamlessly as possible, you can connect the MatePad Paper to the company’s laptops, PCs, tablets and phones. Huawei says the tablet will appear like a USB drive, and you can drag and drop your notes and annotated PDFs across to your laptop. If this is not your jam, you can use the USB-C port to transfer content to and from the MattePad. It is powered by a 3625 mAh battery and supports 22.5 fast charging, if you plug it in for 1.5 hours you get 6 days of use. If you want to keep it secure, there is a fingerprint scanner.  The dimensions are 6.65mm thick and is 182mm wide, and weighs 305 grams.

This device is running HarmonyOS, which is Huawei’s answer to Android. It provides a slick operating system and the company has already issued a number of firmware updates to introduce new features, such as a floating navigation bar and fixed a few bugs. It is nice to see that they are standing behind this tablet. HarmonyOS is basically an Android fork, so you can sideload in your favorite Android apps or alternative markets.

Huawei has their own digital bookstore and has titles available in a dozen languages. They have a number of popular books, but they aren’t available in every language. I would likely recommend to sideload in your favorite digital bookstore, such as Kindle, Kobo, Nook or an unlimited subscription service such as Scribd. Of course, you can also read library books via Libby, Hoopla or Cloud Library.  There’s a Notes app installed, and in it, there are a few options including paper styles, pen types, font colors, and text boldness. You can convert handwriting to text ready to copy and paste into an email.

You can order the Huawei MatePad Paper for $719.99 from the Good e-Reader Store. It comes with a free premium case and stylus.

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