The Huawei MatePad 11.5 S is a small and beautiful tablet with possibly the best stylus we've ever tested

Huawei is back with another of its flashy tablets, the MatePad 11.5 S, a sort of mid-range model that comes with a new and improved PaperMatte display. This was launched in tandem with a new MatePad X model. However, the 11.5 S will cost you around £400 with the keyboard and M-Pencil bundled in, and comes with either 8GB or 12GB of RAM and then 128GB or 256GB of storage.

Huawei MatePad 11.5 S: Design

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When it comes to hardware, Huawei is at its best. Its MatePad range is always very eyecatching, clean, and memorable. For the 11.5 S, the accompanying keyboard is an improvement over the 13.2in model we tested in 2025. And the tablet itself is utterly smooth, well-rounded, and simply gorgeous.

You have a glass front with minimal bezels and a metal unibody with a minor camera bump. It's 6.1mm thick, so slightly fatter than the likes of the Galaxy Tab S11, but still easy enough to hold in one hand. Which is also helped by its 515g weight.

Our review unit is the kind of shade of green that only Huawei seems to add to its hardware. It's a very cool mint that complements the all-white M-Pencil and the very light gray keyboard case. The Huawei logo on both tablet and keyboard is beautiful and reflective as well.

Huawei MatePad 11.5 S: Display, keyboard, and stylus

The display is where Huawei wants your focus. A lot of work has gone into PaperMatte Editions of the MatePad over the last few years, and they have gone down well in reviews. For the 11.5 S, and the new MatePad X, their PaperMatte screens include high-precision nanoscale etching technology. Huawei says this reduces the sparkle of LCD PaperMatte displays, making them clearer. I can say from experience that this is true – even with the brightness low, the screen's anti-glare tech works remarkably well.

The 11.5in OLED screen has up to 144Hz for screen refresh, and a 2.8K resolution. You get options for both natural and vivid screen styles, but also a gray scale, e-ink-type of setting, which is great for reading books. Overall, regardless of the setting, the screen is pleasant. You get bright, punchy colors, which are best displayed in the Go Paint app.

The Huawei Smart Keyboard is also a delight... for a keyboard cover. I have to make that distinction, as it isn't as good as your notebook's keyboard, and you will see that there are some drawbacks. But as magnetic tablet keyboards go, it is a delight.

It comes in two sections that allow for multiple use cases. You can have it as a mini laptop or split with the tablet propped up with a stand and the keyboard detached. You can also have it in 'Studio Form', where the tablet is in portrait mode, and the keyboard is removed completely – this is where you get the most out of the Huawei M-Pencil Pro (more on that in a bit).

Typing on the keyboard is good; there is a surprising amount of travel for such a shallow board. The keys are pretty much edge-to-edge, and there is about a 6in depth from the base of the screen to the other side of the space bar. It means that some keys are difficult to tap at speed – up and down keys are basically one button sliced in half.

What is good, however, is the M-Pencil. Light, responsive, and perfectly matched or calibrated to the PaperMatte display. It's as close to physical drawing as any other tech company (Remarkable) has managed.

And the quick panel feature on the stylus is pretty impressive. Operated with just a pinch on the shaft of the pen, you get a crescent tool bar with options that differ from app to app... a button at the end of the pencil can be customised to open other applications – much like OnePlus, but more loaded

Huawei MatePad 11.5 S: Specs and performance

Under the hood of the MatePad 11.5 S, there is some secrecy. We don't know exactly what series of Kirin chipsets it has – Huawei left this vital piece of info out of the reviewer's guide, and there's no way of finding that out via the tablet itself. It doesn't even come up when you run the Geekbench test. GSMArena has it as the Kirin T82B, but we can't prove that.

However, it's paired with a generous lump of RAM (12GB) and ample storage (256GB). And in Geekbench 6, it scored reasonably well, with 1393 for single core and 3730 for multi-core. Those are not results that will trouble the Samsung Galaxy Tab 11, or the M5 iPad Pro. But the 11.5 S is much cheaper, so it does look good in its price range.

And its battery life was decent; it lasted 16hrs and 26mins in our looped video test – slightly longer than Lenovo's Idea Tab and the OnePlus Pad 3 – though the latter has far superior CPU performance.

Huawei MatePad 11.5 S: Features

The first feature to discuss is Wi-Fi 6 – so no Wi-Fi 7. It means the 11.5 S model isn't completely future-proof and behind other leading tablets. Not that we found any issues with its connectivity.

The other topic of concern is with HarmonyOS; you have more bloatware than any other platform – this is partly because it's clearly trying to prove it's a decent alternative to Android and iOS, but also because it does have some useful applications, such as Go Paint.

Despite the improvements, we all still want our Google apps, and there are more realistic ways to get them on Huawei devices – though it is largely through complex setups via emulators. This is all fairly well documented on Huawei forums, and it is a little bit of a faff. But once you've added the MicroG app and then the Aurora Store, you can start to pick up all your favourite Android apps. And from there, the MatePad becomes a top-quality tablet again.

Huawei MatePad 11.5 S: Is it worth it?

How good is the MatePad 11.5 S? I could sketch and draw with the GoPaint app and the M-Pencil all day long; for me, the price is worth that alone. But for work purposes, I depend on Google and Android apps – not having Google Docs, regardless of APKs, is problematic. But it does get better every year.

However, the PaperMatte display is gorgeous, the processor (whatever it really is) is fast enough for what you'll use it for, and the keyboard is actually quite good. All in all, at this price tag, the MatePad 11.5 S is a thoroughly good business tablet and or illustration tool.

Huawei MatePad 11.5 specifications