Huawei recently unveiled its latest tablet offering, the Huawei MediaPad M5 Lite. Huawei claims that the device was designed with families in mind, so the company included features like Kid’s Corner, fingerprint sensor-enabled parental controls, and an enhanced Eye-comfort mode. Parents may use the included fingerprint sensor to create user profiles for specific family members, and for children, they could also set a dedicated environment by taking advantage of the Kid’s Corner feature. This functionality allows parents to create a customized environment for their children by choosing the type of content that they could access and setting the amount of time that the children could use the devices.
The Chinese device maker also incorporated features that protect the eyesight of young tablet users. This functionality takes advantage of the distance, posture detect, and ambient light sensors of the device. For example, if the distance sensor of the tablet recognizes that the display is less than 9.8 inches away from the face of the child or when the posture detect sensor identifies that the user is lying down, the MediaPad M5 Lite will provide instructions that will either remind the user about the appropriate distance of the eyes from the device or guide the person in adjusting their posture when viewing tablet. Furthermore, the device uses its ambient light sensor to adjust the color and brightness of the display, while its Blue Ray filter feature blocks out blue light that often causes eye strain.
The MediaPad M5 Lite features a metal unibody design and it includes mostly mid-range hardware internals. The device sports the Kirin 659 chipset, and this SoC includes eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores running at a maximum clock speed of up to 2.36 GHz and the Mali-T830 MP2 GPU. The tablet has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal flash storage, which is expandable using a microSD card with a capacity of up to 256GB. The MediaPad M5 Lite features a 10.1-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1920 by 1200 pixels and the product also supports the ClariVu 5.0 feature, which uses algorithms to adjust the contrast and color of the display when viewing images or video clips. The tablet also sports a quad speaker setup developed in collaboration with Harman Kardon, and it also supports the M-Pen lite stylus, which is useful for taking notes and sketching illustrations directly on the tablet, and the Huawei QuickCharge technology, which helps the user top up the tablet’s 7,500mAh battery in less than three hours. The device ships with Android 8.0 Oreo pre-installed, with Huawei’s proprietary skin, EMUI 8.0, running on top of Google’s operating system.
Background: The MediaPad M5 Lite is an addition to the company’s MediaPad M5 series. Huawei announced the MediaPad M5 back in Mobile World Congress 2018 last February. As opposed to the MediaPad M5 Lite, the MediaPad M5 is available in two different display sizes, namely 8.4-inches and 10.8-inches. The MediaPad M5 is also available with larger internal storage capacities compared to the MediaPad M5 Lite.
Impact: Huawei will ship the MediaPad M5 Lite with a price tag of $299, and it is available in Space Gray. Despite the recent developments, Huawei will surprisingly retail this device in the United States starting late January, and interested consumers may buy this device from retailers like Amazon and Newegg.
