Huawei Just Launched the World's Thinnest Tablet, and It Has a Few Tricks Nobody Else Has Tried Yet

Huawei has a habit of doing things that make you pay attention even when you weren't planning to. The MatePad Pro Max, which just debuted in China, is one of those moments.

The Headline Numbers

At 4.7mm thick, the MatePad Pro Max is the slimmest tablet in existence, narrower than the Honor MagicPad 4 Pro, which itself was no slouch in the thinness department. The 13.2-inch flexible OLED display stretches across a body that weighs just 499 grams, with bezels measuring 3.55mm around the screen. There's no notch, no cutout, no interruption to the viewing surface, just display, edge to edge.

The screen itself runs at 3000 x 2000 resolution, peaks at 1600 nits of brightness, and refreshes at 144Hz. On paper, it's competitive with anything currently available in the large-format tablet space.

The Chip That Makes Everything Go

The processing muscle here comes from the Kirin T93 Pro, which Huawei describes as the tablet-specific sibling of the Kirin 9030 Pro. Running alongside HarmonyOS 6.1, the new chipset delivers a claimed 45% performance improvement over last year's MatePad Pro 13.2. That's a significant generational jump rather than the incremental shuffling that tablet upgrades often turn out to be.

The performance gains show up most meaningfully in multitasking. The tablet can handle 20 simultaneously open applications through Huawei's Ark Engine, which keeps things fluid even under genuine workload pressure.

Desktop Mode Without the Desktop

One of the more interesting aspects of the MatePad Pro Max is how aggressively Huawei has positioned it as a laptop replacement rather than just a media consumption device. A four-finger swipe switches between standard tablet mode and a full PC-style desktop interface that supports proper windowed applications, including the WPS Office suite. Connect a Huawei Glide Keyboard and mouse, and the experience reportedly becomes genuinely office-capable rather than just gesture-toward-productivity-capable.

There's also a dedicated Educational Space mode, distraction-free, structured for learning, aimed clearly at the student market that has become increasingly important for tablet manufacturers worldwide.

The Camera Story

Most tablets treat their cameras as afterthoughts. The MatePad Pro Max doesn't quite do that. The rear unit is a 50MP sensor with autofocus capable enough for document scanning and video calls without being absurd about it. The front-facing camera is a 12MP sensor tucked invisibly into the bezel, offering enhanced video conferencing quality without disrupting the clean display surface.

The genuinely novel detail is the camera system's inclusion of a second-generation multispectral lens, a first for any tablet. Multispectral imaging captures light across a broader range of wavelengths than conventional cameras, enabling more accurate colour reproduction and, in some applications, health or material sensing capabilities. Exactly how Huawei intends to leverage this in consumer use cases will be interesting to watch as the software ecosystem develops around it.

Battery and Charging

The 10,400mAh battery is appropriately sized for a device this large, with 66W wired fast charging handling top-ups and 40W reverse wired charging allowing the tablet to function as a power bank for other devices. It's a practical combination for a machine that positions itself as a productivity tool.

Pricing

The MatePad Pro Max launches in China in Blue and Space Gray across two configurations, Standard and Enjoy Edition, with pricing starting from 5,999 yuan for the base Enjoy Edition (12GB RAM, 256GB storage) and climbing to 12,999 yuan for the top-tier Standard Edition with 20GB RAM, 1TB storage, and the Huawei Star Leap Keyboard included. A PaperMatte display variant is also available for those who prefer reduced reflectivity for reading and writing.

Huawei has spent the past few years building an ecosystem that operates largely independently of Google and Western software platforms, a necessity born of US sanctions that has gradually become a genuine design philosophy. HarmonyOS 6.1 is the latest expression of that, and the MatePad Pro Max is the hardware it was built to run on.

Whether the device makes meaningful inroads outside of China depends on factors well beyond the specification sheet. But as a demonstration of what Huawei is capable of when it focuses its engineering resources on a single product, the MatePad Pro Max is a genuinely impressive statement of intent, thin enough to turn heads, powerful enough to back it up.