It’s not every day you see a new tablet being announced, but Huawei is breaking that recent industry trend with a new announcement that might just surprise you. Last year’s IFA brought us the MediaPad T1, and earlier this year the MediaPad M2 at CES 2016, so it’s only appropriate that this year’s IFA would bring us yet another new Huawei tablet. Huawei’s MediaPad M3 is powered by the in-house Huawei Kirin 950 octa-core SoC, which is made up of 8 ARM Cortex-A72 cores running at 1.8Ghz, along with 4GB of RAM. An 8.4-inch 1600 x 2560 resolution IPS LCD panel sits on the front, with an 8-megapixel camera placed right above it. Below the screen is an interesting new type of home button from Huawei, one that not only doubles as a fingerprint scanner of course, but also performs multiple functions, much like the home buttons on Meizu’s phones.
Inside you’ll find a 5,100mAh battery, which should be plenty to get through any long day of Netflix binging while on a road trip. 32GB of internal storage gives you room for a few movies, and if that’s not enough you can drop a microSD card into the dual SIM/microSD card tray located on the bottom. Since there’s a SIM card slot you can be rest assured that the Huawei MediaPad M3 supports most global GSM networks, including US LTE networks as well, a rarity among unlocked devices of this caliber. This one has an all-metal unibody design very reminiscent of Huawei’s devices in the last two years, with only a strip of decorative glass on the top portion of the back.
Huawei has once again partnered up with Harman/Kardon to come up with a great sound solution that’s likely to prove itself a real winner for users who enjoy media on their tablet without the use of headphones. These stereo speakers are located on the top and bottom and become left and right channel speakers when the device is held in landscape position. Lastly we’re looking at Huawei’s EmotionUI 4.1 (EMUI) running atop Android 6.0 Marshmallow for the OS portion of the tablet. Pricing and availability to follow.
