The Huawei Matebook 14s was released in Singapore in February 2022, retailing at $1,998.
Look & Feel
The Matebook 14s is an attractive, sleekly designed piece of hardware with a smooth feel to it. It comes in two dinstinctive colours — Space Grey and Spruce Green.
The lightweight and thin body makes the 14s very comfortable to hold. Wighing in at only 1.43kg, the 14s is pretty light for a notebook.
Its build quality is in tandem with the design. The Matebook 14s has an incredibly premium feel to it, demonstrating its use of good quality materials.
Part of the design philosophy of the Matebook series is pure and invisible and can be seen with the amount of I/O ports. There are two USB-C ports on the left along with an HDMI port and a 2-in-1 audio jack. Being the highest edition of the 14s, one of the USB-C ports also supports Thunderbolt 4. In addition, there’s a single usb 3.2 port on the right of the device.
The power button is on the top right of the keyboard, which doubles as a fingerprint reader.
The keyboard and the trackpad are large enough to allow a comfortable experience while using the notebook without a mouse. The keyboard is nicely spaced out and is also backlit with 3 levels of brightness.
Internals
The Matebook 14s runs on the 11th generation intel i7-11370H processor with 16GB of Ram. It uses an integrated graphics processing unit or GPU through Intel’s Iris X graphics. The 14s isn’t meant for any serious gaming, but it can handle some light gaming.
We did try out a few different games on it. Hades ran well since it didn’t require much graphics power to run. Similar indie or low graphics games should be able to run smoothly as well. But No Man’s Sky was struggling to get stable frame rates. I wouldn’t recommend playing games that need higher hardware requirements.
However, I did try GTA V and it was able to run fairly smoothly, though at the lowest settings. There was also some graphical artifacting occurring, so it wasn’t the best experience.
Despite its poor performance in gaming, the best thing about the 14s is its display.
Display & Performance
The display sports a resolution of 2.5k that makes it look amazing and crisp. With the narrow bezels, you get a great viewing angle. The screen also has a 90Hz refresh rate which makes everything look smoother and clearer. And as a power-saving option, this can be reduced down to 60hz. The screen refresh rate can be easily switched by clicking Fn+R on the keyboard.
The display is also a touch screen. It is relatively responsive, but fingerprints are quite apparent when touching the screen.
Camera and Audio
The Matebook 14s comes with a 720p webcam. Honestly, it’s nothing amazing — just a standard webcam. It doesn’t do well in low-light. You’ll have better results in a well-lit environment. It’s mainly there for facial recognition compatibility since it’s also an IR camera.
The sound quality of the 14s is quite commendable. The speakers produced a well-balanced sound and would be great for listening to music or watching movies.
Connectivity
The laptop comes with a nicely sized 90w power adapter. It charges via the USB-C port, which is great for portability. The power adapter can also be used with other Huawei devices since it supports Huawei Supercharge.
For connectivity options, Bluetooth 5.1 and wifi 6 are available for the 14s.
A cool thing that Huawei has available with its latest devices is Huawei Share. Huawei Share allows you to connect your Huawei devices to each other, opening up a multitude of functionality.
In our case, we tried pairing the Matebook14s with The Matepad11, one of Huawei’s latest tablets. Connecting them is a simple process through Huawei’s preinstalled app.
Once they are connected, you can use the other device as a second monitor, or as both a second and duplicated display. Another great feature is that you are able to seamlessly transfer files between the two devices by just dragging and dropping. Also the Bluetooth mouse I connected to the 14s was able to move between both devices which adds on to the seamlessness of Huawei Share.
Conclusion
The Huawei Matebook 14s is a great device if you’re looking for something portable, up-to-date, with a cool design and an amazing screen. Using it with Huawei Share makes it almost like a portable office, with the amount of flexibility it provides.
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