Huawei Mediapad M3 8.4 daily experience review

Posted on by Pastor Cmentarny

This review is for people who are interesting in the daily experience of using Huawei Mediapad M3 8.4. This is not a professional review. so if you looking for synthetic tests, horny teenager unboxing and so on then you can leave this page as you will waste your precious time.

If you do not bother to read the whole article, then this is a main take away points:

GOOD

  1. Great Quality and Value for money.
  2. Screen.
  3. AKG earphones with 128GB version.
  4. You can use as a smartphone but you will look …weird.
  5. Devices get regular minor updates.
  6. Dual Speakers.
  7. Split Screen works great.
  8. Battery life on battery saver if you use the tablet to listen to music and reading/writing, 
 BAD

  1. Battery size is mediocre.
  2. Huawei’s virtual keyboard can be annoying because I keep pressing 123 buttons accidentally.
  3. I had some problems with Bluetooth  (resolved in one of the updates).
  4. Speaker position.
  5. Performance is not too good on battery saver. (It got better over time)
  6. Lack of fast charging.
  SUMMARY. It is a decent tablet reasonably priced. It is not perfect as you can see it has few bad parts but the overall experience is great. It is worth its price if you need a tablet for a daily long commute, long-haul trips (well with help of battery saver) and medium-range walks/ hiking.

STORY

When I bought Nexus 9 I knew that the main problem will be RAM as 2 GB was OK in the beginning but a 2 years later it causes lots of troubles and it makes tablet unusable. I needed the new one and I decided to buy a new one.

MY EXPECTATION was:

  • Great screen that will not destroy my eyes
  • Long battery life
  • Decent performance
  • 64GB storage
  • 4GB RAM
  • Good sound quality

Problem is .. .there is not many tablets to choose from these days.

  • I did not want iPad because it is waste of money and it uses iOS.
  • I hate Samsung for an endless amount of shitty products they made in the past so I have a rule now. DO NOT BUY ANYTHING MADE BY SAMSUNG.
  • Sony got the waterproof model but above my budget.
  • There are many cheap Chinese tablets but they are rubbish too.
  • Google tablet is ridiculously expensive.

While I was in China, I saw a guy calling from Honor tablet and I was shocked but then I decided to check is Huawei has a decent tablet. From the model’s that Huawei has, I found Huawei MediaPad M3 8.4. Other models were mediocre at best. I check others Chinese brands but as I already wrote they were crap and because I was happy with Huawei P9 and I decided to buy MediaPad M3. I planned to buy 64GB version but because they had great offer so I bought the 128GB version with 4GB RAM with AKG earphones.

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Huawei Mediapad M3

FIRST IMPRESSION

    When I touch tablet it feels very fragile. Over time I found it is not as fragile after a few accidental drops. I decided to turn on and then screen impressed me. It was a clean and sharp screen. When I start using and install apps and like this tablet more and more. Everything works smoothly. There are many settings to personalise tablet in the way you prefer. I tried to call somebody and it works well, but I look … ridiculous. However, I  use this tablet to call occasionally but I use my headphones. Battery life starts worrying me because during my trip back to the UK I noticed that battery starts to draining quite quickly. I managed to survive because I used battery saving mode but then I start to have some minors performance problems. Overall impression was very good.

MY DAILY EXPERIENCE WITH Huawei Mediapad M3

  • The screen is great. Everything is clear and quite sharp. You have many settings so you can set a screen that suit you best.
  • The sound quality is good but speakers are in crap place. It means in landscape mode if u hold tablet normally, you will cover speakers and affect the sound. HTC sorted this out much better.
  • Battery. This is the saddest part. The battery is too small. 5100 is perfect for a smartphone but for tablet … It is just too small. If u use a tablet for long commute then is not a problem. It gets problematic if you are using for long-haul travelling or adventure. It can be a bigger problem if you are using Bluetooth to connect to your watch and headphones, GPS for find way and WiFi/4G for internet then battery life will drain quite quickly. Yes. It can be fixed with power bank but it is an inconvenience. Luckily you can turn out power saving to extend battery life and it works well but performance degradation will be visible but the tablet will be usable. I found it that when I uninstall Facebook then battery life is better by 5-10%!
  • WiFi works smoothly. I had no problem with connecting to home or enterprise network.
  • Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about Bluetooth. I had a few problems with Bluetooth. For example, when I press volume up on a tablet it deactivated my headphones and switch to the loudspeaker (Bose Q35). I had many problems with Bluetooth LE when I pair with smartwatches. (It took me 2 hours on Garmin and it refused  to work with Fitbit). Some bugs were caused by watches and some were caused by the tablet. All problems caused by tablet was fixed in one of the tablet’s software updates.
  • Speaking of updates. This tablet didn’t get Android 8 but it gets quite many minor updates where they add some feature, improve battery life and fix problems (they fix all problems I had with Bluetooth).
  • I like Huawei’s EMUI. It is not as beautiful as HTC but it has the great functionality I found useful. Some people moaning about aggressive app killing which I really like. In fact, you can always adjust app killing settings to set which app can/should be murdered when not in use.
  • It is very stable. I didn’t have encounter any crashes.
  • I had some hiccups with performance in battery saver mode in split mode but are rare.
  • There is no dual sim version.
  • Back Camera is poor.
  • Front Camera is ok for video chats but I guess it will be crap for selfies (Sorry, I am not expert in selfies).
  • It uses a normal charger not fast one so charging … takes time. However, on my USB charger that has IQ fast charge .. it charges quite quickly … not as good as Huawei with fast charging functionality but still acceptable.

SUMMARY

After few months I am very happy with this tablet. It is not perfect. Battery life is medium, the speaker should be positioned better and performance on battery saver is a bit too low. However, advantages overcome bad side. It has a great screen, decent dual speakers, good performance while using split screen. Is worth buy it?  It is worth its price if you need a tablet for a daily long commute, medium-haul trips and medium-range walks/ hiking.  Depends on your requirements it can be a great option but Huawei Mediapad M5 coming soon and it has many interesting improvements but it also means the price of Huawei Mediapad M3 will go down and it will be an even more attractive option.

I hope it was useful for you. If you have any questions about this tablet, feel free to ask. Meanwhile, have an awesome rest part of your day/night!