Amongst the barrage of products that end up in our offices, I tend to have a somewhat fondness for tablets. There’s just something eerily mesmerizing about them, and there’s an immense satisfaction from seeing how long you can last before installing Angry Birds or Jetpack Joyride. But jokes aside, I’ve played with some great tablets and some truly awful ones as well. Today I’m looking at the Huawei MediaPad 10 FHD, a sleek 10-inch tablet with a full HD screen. Reach on to see how it stacks up against some of the big boys in the market.

Build quality & design

Probably the first thing that strikes you about the MediaPad 10 FHD is its rather sleek and stylish design. While most other manufacturers seem to love encasing their tablets in glossy, fingerprint-attracting glossy black plastic, the MediaPad 10 FHD is instead crafted with a smooth aluminum plating with a thin white strip at the top that highlights the rear camera. The tablet is certainly on the skinny side, measuring just 8.8mm and 257×176 mm. The MediaPad 10 FHD like most other tablets, has a minimum number of ports and buttons. There’s a power and volume rocker, headphone jack, a docking/charging port at the bottom, and a plastic cover that hides the SIM and microSD slots at the top.

The front is as ordinary as a tablet can look, with a standard black bezel framing the screen, discreetly hiding the front-facing camera at the top. It’s a lesson in minimalism, but one that we’ve seen before on devices such as the iPad and the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Still, the MediaPad 10 FHD looks very nice, and feels much more premium than other tablets I’ve recently used.

Specifications

Despite its rather elegant looks, the MediaPad 10 FHD packs some serious punch under the hood. A quad-core 1.4GHz Cortex-A9 powers this beast, which is more than adequate for running some of the more demanding apps you can find in the Google Play store.

The quad-core processor is also speedy enough to navigate through the tablet, though it does slow down in a few areas, as seen in our tests.

Benchmarks and Performance

The MediaPad 10 FHD did fairly well in our tests, and for most of the applications you would want to run on the MediaPad 10 FHD, the performance of this tablet is adequate. Firing up the bundled ‘Puss in Boots: Fruit Ninja’ game was a complete disappointment however, as the game lagged terribly in most of the levels. I’m writing this off as due to the tablet’s old OS, so hopefully when Jelly Bean hits it’s going to make the tablet run a lot smoother.

Where the MediaPad 10 FHD does do well is with playing back media on its gorgeous screen. Watching videos via the DLNA app or YouTube is a great experience, and viewing photos was also likewise a real treat.