Huawei MatePad 11

A strong budget choice if you can live with a Google-less operating system, and there are ways to make that work

- TIM DANTON

PRICE With keyboard and pen, £375 (£450 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com/uk

The beautiful thing about tablets is their simplicity. You really only need ask yourself four questions before buying: does it do what I need it to do? Is it fast enough? Is the battery life long enough? And how good is the screen? Everything else is in the detail.

I’ll tackle those four questions in reverse, starting with the excellent screen. The 11in diagonal that gives this tablet its name includes 2,560 x 1,600 pixels, equating to 274ppi, 10ppi higher than the Apple iPad Air (see issue 332, p63). It hit a peak brightness of 492cd/m2 in our tests, covering a glorious 91% of the DCI-P3 colour space. Colour accuracy is excellent, with an average Delta E of 1.14.

Native colour temperature is around 8700K, but it’s simple to fine-tune this by touching anywhere in a colour circle in the display settings. You also have control over the refresh rate, with the choice of 60Hz, 120Hz or “dynamic”, where the OS decides. That’s how I left it, as it provided fluid results without ramping up power demands.

This brings us to battery life, which is strong. It lasted for over 15 hours in our video-rundown test, and when I just left it to idle (while connected to Wi-Fi) it kept going for 17hrs 3mins. One slight negative is that the supplied 22.5W charger can only take it from 0% to 35% in half an hour, with a full charge taking a shade over two hours, but that’s bearable.