Huawei MateBook D15 review

Huawei's currently blocked from offering Google's Android OS on its phones, but no such restriction is in place (for now) for its laptop lines. That means that the Huawei MateBook D15 is a full Windows 10 laptop, like its predecessors were.

Unlike many of Huawei's previous offerings, this isn't a high-end ultrabook style model, but instead more of a mid-range laptop. The MateBook D15 benefits from Huawei's uncluttered design, and it's moderately powerful for a laptop in its class, but it does lack the kind of battery endurance you're likely to want in a laptop of this size and price.

Design

Design

• 15.6-inch 1,080p display
• Range of ports on both sides
• Pop-up webcam

• Read more about the Huawei MateBook D15's design

  The Huawei MateBook D15 is a follow-up to the MateBook D14, and realistically Huawei hasn't done that much to change the design of its more affordable desktop replacement notebook. It's an essentially unfussy design in "Space Grey" finish, and if that sounds rather like a competing laptop brand, that's probably not coincidental. Still, imitation and flattery and all that, and it works, because the MateBook D15 is mostly a good-looking laptop.

  The display is a 15.6-inch full HD (1,920x1,080) IPS LCD with moderate viewing angles – you probably don't want to present to anyone sitting to your left or right on it if you can avoid it – and quite small bezels, which means it's not quite as big overall as you'd expect a 15.6-inch laptop to be. Still, at 357.8x229.9x16.9mm and 1.53kg, it's not an ultrabook like the MateBook X Pro is either.

  The keyboard on the Huawei MateBook D15 also owes a debt of design gratitude to Apple's MacBook, save for the inclusion of Huawei's own take on where a webcam should sit. There's no top bezel gap for a camera in the Huawei MateBook D15, because it sits in the function key row between the F6 and F7 keys.

  Huawei clearly loves this idea because it does save screen space, but it's at the cost of utility, because popping the camera up means that you're nearly always having video conferencing meetings where the other participants are looking right up your nose.

  No amount of fancy Zoom backgrounds is going to distract them from the view of your nostrils, sadly. You can duck your head down to avoid this fate, but that's not exactly comfortable or desirable.

  The Huawei MateBook D15 certainly isn't lacking in ports, with USB C and full sized HDMI on the left, and dual USB A type and headphone sockets on the right. The power button also doubles as a fingerprint sensor if biometric authentication is an important feature to you.

Performance

Performance

• AMD Ryzen 5 3500U with 8GB of RAM is fair at this price
• Huawei Share only works with Huawei phones

• Read more about the Huawei MateBook D15's performance

  Huawei's laptops have tended to use Intel processors and graphics solutions, but for the Huawei MateBook D15 it's instead jumped over to the AMD camp, using an AMD Ryzen 5 3500U CPU, paired up with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD.

  The MateBook D15 presents a small benchmarking challenge, simply because it's in a class of devices we've not benchmarked extensively to date, so it was somewhat inevitable that it would end up looking a little weak by comparison. However, that's in comparison to laptops with price points that start at around twice that of the MateBook D15.

  Here's how the MateBook D15 compared against a range of laptop alternatives using PC Mark, Geekbench, 3DMark and Cinebench R20:

  It is worth bearing in mind that the closest competitor to the MateBook D15 in price terms that we've tested is the tiny Surface Go 2, a smaller laptop that serves a very different market. The practical reality of using the MateBook D15 is that while it's not a knockout in performance terms for a mid-range device, it's more than powerful enough for most mid-range needs.

  The Huawei MateBook D15 runs on Windows 10 Home, and it's mostly a blank slate, with just a few key Huawei apps for device management pre-installed.

  One of the key software inclusions that Huawei promotes is Huawei Share, an application that's designed to make it effortless for you to fling files and data to or from your smartphone to the MateBook D15. It's not an absolutely original idea, but one that could have a lot of appeal, were it not for one significant catch.

  Huawei Share only works with phones running Android 10 and EMUI 10, which means it's a shortlist of the Huawei P30 Pro, Huawei Mate 30 Pro and Huawei P40 Pro . If this was an Android-wide tool it would be an amazing value add, but limiting it to just a handful of phones – and two of them with no proper Google access – means it's instead a niche tool for most laptop buyers.

Battery life

Battery life

• Very fast charging
• Wide charger
• Sub-par battery life

• Read more about the Huawei MateBook D15's battery life

  The Huawei MateBook D15 ships with a sealed 42Wh battery that recharges via USB C. Huawei's big claim here is that its laptop charger is way smaller than those you'd find on competing laptops, while still being able to pump enough juice into the MateBook D15 to bump up its battery to 53% in half an hour. It's not wrong that the supplied charger is smaller than most laptop chargers, but there's a slight catch here, at least based on the review sample I tested.

  The charger looks much like a mobile phone charger, but it's a very wide one, and the orientation of the plugs on the US sample I tested forced it sideways into an Australian plug socket. This means – presuming the actual Aussie models follow suit in an orientation sense – that it's quite likely to block the charging port next to it when you plug it in, or fail to fit if there are already plugs present. Because I had to use a plug adaptor I could tower over other plugs to an extent, but that's not always going to be a possibility.

  Fast charging is great, and it's very much a hallmark of the Huawei experience in other areas such as mobile phones. Huawei's phones have historically had some of the best battery life you can find in a mobile, but sadly that's not the story for the Huawei MateBook D15. It's a good job that you can top up its battery quickly, because the reality within a working day is that you're probably going to need to.

  Battery usage over a day can vary a lot, so to test that, I ran the Huawei MateBook D15 through our standard battery tests. First, a 1,080p locally stored video was run with full brightness and moderate volume to battery exhaustion. Video processing isn't the hard test it once was, so to give it a heavy run, I also put it through PCMark's Gaming Battery benchmark to get a worst-case figure. Here's how the MateBook D15 compared across both tests:

  The practical reality here – and I've noticed this myself while testing out the MateBook D15 – is that on most days if you can't keep it plugged in and charging, you're going to run out of power before a full working day is out.

Should you buy the Huawei MateBook D15?

The Huawei MateBook D15 doesn't do too much wrong within its price bracket. The design is a little derivative, but it's also pleasant, and it's graced with more ports than you'll find on a more expensive MacBook in any case. There's enough processing power for what is a mid-range device, so it's an entirely capable unit on that score.

Battery life isn't what it should be. That might not be an issue if your daily work simply involves using it plugged in at your desk and only away from power for brief meetings, but it's still not hard to get better battery endurance, even at this price point.

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Finder score: 3

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Images: Alex Kidman