Huawei announces Matebook X Pro Windows laptop with 13.9" touchscreen that has 91% screen-to-body ratio and 3 Android tablets - 8" and 10.8" M5 and 10.8" M5 Pro
The webcam is built into the keyboard — Huawei isn't bringing a new flagship phone to Mobile World Congress this year …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Huawei's PC business graduating from experiment to flagship. It entered laptops in 2016 with the Surface-style original MateBook, broadened the line in 2017 with the E, X, and D models in one sweep, and now leads MWC with a 13.9-inch X Pro whose defining trick is a webcam that pops out of the keyboard — the price of a 91% screen-to-body ratio with no top bezel to hide a camera in.
The timing matters because Huawei is skipping a flagship phone launch at MWC this year, so its booth story rests entirely on the laptop and three new Android M5 tablets. The bet pays off on design — the hands-on praises the near-12-inch footprint — but the later review flags the keyboard webcam as terrible, the trade-off made explicit.
First-order effects
- Huawei's MWC presence pivots from phones to PCs and tablets: the €1,499 MateBook X Pro becomes its halo device, and the M5 tablets give it a three-size Android lineup at 8 and 10.8 inches.
- Buyers get a genuinely thin-bezel Windows laptop, but the pop-up camera means video calls happen with an unflattering up-the-nose angle — a real usability cost baked into the headline spec.
Second-order effects
- The keyboard-webcam compromise becomes the design debate around the product: every reviewer weighing the 91% screen-to-body ratio has to score the webcam against it, making camera placement the differentiator other thin-bezel laptops are judged by.
- Running Windows laptops and Android tablets side by side lets Huawei reuse its phone supply chain and brand across categories, lowering the cost of staying in a PC market where it started only two years earlier.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds: Huawei keeps the same 13.9-inch edge-to-edge formula through the 2020 refresh and extends the tablet line into the MatePad Pro — evidence that PCs became a durable pillar rather than a one-off MWC stunt, even as Google app access later disappears from its tablets.
- If bezel-less laptop design spreads, the industry faces a structural question about where webcams live — keyboard pop-ups, notches, or accepting thicker top bezels — with privacy-conscious buyers gaining a physical shutter as a side benefit.
The trend: Huawei is turning its two-year-old PC experiment into a permanent third device category alongside phones and tablets, with aggressive screen-to-body ratios as the wedge.