Huawei MediaPad M5 Lite Brings A Stylus To Mid-Range

Apple's Pencil-enabled 2018 iPad will hopefully start a new trend in tablets. Samsung, ironically, seems to have gone the other way and forgotten to give its newest Galaxy Tab A slates an S Pen. If you are searching for an affordable Android slate with that exact feature, you might want to look at Huawei for salvation. That's because its new MediaPad M5 Lite might exactly be what you need.

Given the M5 number, it is a clear continuation of last year's premium Huawei Android tablets. And given the "lite" suffix, you can pretty much assume it won't be as powerful and, hopefully, not as expensive either. And yet, Huawei manages to cram in almost every feature that made its MediaPad M5 line special.

The 10.1-inch 1920x1200 display might not be that pixel dense, but it's just fine. When you pair that with Harman Kardon-tunes quad speakers, you're definitely in for a show. And the 7,500 mAh battery assures you that the show will go on for hours on end.

Most impressive, however, is that the MediaPad M5 lite has a "specially designed" M-Pen lite that delivers 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity. That's something the non-Pro MediaPad tablets couldn't offer.

That said, there's no denying this is a mid-range tablet when you get to the specs. Those include Huawei's mid-range Kirin 659 chip, 3 or 4 GB of RAM, 32 or 64 GB of expandable storage, a measly 8 megapixel AF rear camera and an 8 megapixel fixed focus front camera. No word on availability or pricing yet, but it's clear what market tier Huawei is aiming for with the MediaPad M5 lite.