In the quest to diversify its product offerings, industry giant Huawei has slowly been expanding into other venues beyond the smartphone market. The past years have seen the company launch a host of products from different lines, two of which include the MateBook laptops and flagship MatePad tablet.

Following an earlier announcement of its first-ever gaming monitor and an accompanying sibling for everyday productivity, the brand is also rolling out its new HarmonyOS operating system to Singapore, along with the MatePad Pro 10.8.

The 10.8-inch tablet will run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 870 chipset instead of the usual Huawei-designed Kirin processors, marking a surprising break in tradition in a long while.

It comes outfitted with an IPS LCD display, a 120Hz refresh rate, a 2560-by-1660 pixel resolution, and HDR 10 content playback, while covering the entire DCI-P3 colour gamut at the same time. Under the hood, the model offers 8GB of RAM, and an option between 128GB and 256GB of storage.

Beyond the hardware specifications is where the biggest upgrade lies. The MatePad Pro 10.8 is one of the first three tablets powering on the Huawei’s new operating system, with its two siblings – the MatePad 11 and MatePad Pro 12.6 – not heading to the Singapore market.

Courtesy of the change in software, tablet owners can look forward to improved multi-task friendliness and a more desktop-like experience, where the home screen is no longer a tight bunch of apps.

A separate dock is now available for widgets, while the in-app function bars have been shifted to the side. Mouse support, meanwhile, has been enhanced.

Several features will be making a return here. Multi-screen collaboration, for instance, is back with the mirror mode, allowing users to drag and drop files, answer calls, and do their work on the MatePad’s larger screen via their Huawei smartphone.

That’s not all the functionality it offers, however: creative professions and hobbyists can now use the tablet as a standalone drawing device in apps like Clip Studio Pro or Photoshop, or as an external display.

Alongside the new tablet, Huawei also announced its second-gen M-Pencil stylus that has been improved for increased precision. In similar fashion to Apple’s earlier tablets, the MatePad Pro 10.8 is able to automatically convert an individual’s handwriting into typed text via the FreeNote feature.

The HarmonyOS model will be available in Singapore this August, with local pricing and promotion details expected nearer to the date.

This article was first published in Geek Culture.