Huawei MediaPad T3 8 Review

By Jacqui Dent

Last updated 06 March 2018

Huawei MediaPad T3 8 Review: The Verdict

The Huawei MediaPad T3 8 is a reliable budget tablet for light users. If you just want something small and portable for watching Netflix, surfing the net and checking your emails, this could be the tablet for you.

What we love

Speedy performance
Long battery life
Fine screen for Netflix

What could be improved

A bit heavy
Screen is a smudge magnet
Limited accessories

The essentials

Performance: Smooth and speedy enough for net surfing and streaming TV
Battery: Will last for six hours of streaming TV or a week of intermittent net surfing
Screen: HD quality, bright and sharp enough to be satisfying

80/100

The day I was given this tablet to review I fell horrendously ill with a virus. Chronically tired, I found myself unable to do anything except lie around surfing the net, checking Facebook and streaming TV. Which are all the tasks the Huawei MediaPad T3 8 is most suited to.

In fact, it seems to me the Huawei MediaPad T3 8 is a tablet built for tired people - commuters, travellers, and Netflix-in-bed watchers. It's small and portable enough to carry in your hand-bag or curl up with under a blanket. It has long battery life which works for people on the go as well as those too fatigued to be bothered charging it. And it doesn't have any super fancy extras - when you're a tired person, you can't deal with bells and whistles.

It's perfectly adequate

The best way that I can think to describe the Huawei MediaPad T3 8 is "fine". And that's fine. It didn't blow me away, but it didn't need to. When you're a tired person, you just want a machine that works and this was certainly my experience of the MediaPad T3. It booted fast enough, loaded applications smoothly enough, let me play a game and watch Netflix without ever getting slow or buggy. It has 16GB of storage which is standard for tablets in its class and allows for expansion with a micro-SD card.

The display was sharp and bright enough to watch TV and be satisfied with the quality. At 800 x 1280 pixels the resolution isn't the latest and greatest on the market but it can handle HD just fine.

As for the camera, at 5MP the performance is nothing special, but it will do for basic use. And let's be honest, you're probably not buying this tablet for the camera. This is a tired person's tablet and tired people aren't in the mood for photography. It captured bright colours and could handle a close-up, but struggled to perform when there was back-lighting and when I took photos at night. (See camera samples at the end.)

All that being said, the battery life on the MediaPad T3 is more than fine. It's excellent. As a sleepy sick person, the first thing I wanted to do on this tablet was smash through some serious hours of TV. And the MediaPad T3 wasn't going to let a thing like battery power get in my way. I watched six hours of Netflix before I got the 20% low battery warning. Then I charged it up and surfed the net on and off for seven days before it needed juice again.

What's not so adequate

The main drawback of the MediaPad T3 is the weight. It's not a brick but at 350 grams, it's a little on the heavy side. For comparison, consider that the Lenovo Tab 4 at 8 inches weighs 310 grams and the Samsung Galaxy Tab A at 7 inches weighs 285 grams. This may seem like a small difference, but it will start to feel like a real pain after more than about 30 minutes.

That's why you'll almost definitely want to invest in a standing case or some other apparatus to ease the burden on your poor tired hands. And unfortunately, Huawei doesn't seem to manufacture accessories for this tablet, although you can buy third-party manufactured cases from eBay or Amazon.

If you're a lover of all things neat and tidy, it may also bug you that the screen doesn't seem to have oleophobic coating. That's the stuff that limits smudges from your greasy fingers. It won't show up when you're actually using the tablet but put it in sleep mode and with the right lighting that screen is like a scene from CSI - fingerprints everywhere. The MediaPad T3 is likely not the only budget tablet to be missing the coating, so this may not be a deal-breaker. But it's worth thinking about whether or not it's going to annoy you.

The colour quality can also degrade a little if the screen is angled in certain ways. This isn't a problem if you're watching TV by yourself - you can change the angle. But might be if you're trying to share the screen between two people.

Availability and price

Huawei has released the MediaPad T3 8 exclusively with Vodafone. It's only available on a range of 24-month plans, starting at $20 per month for 1.5GB and finishing at $60 per month for 12GB. Over 24 months, that means you'll be paying a minimum of $480.

Overall, the Huawei MediaPad T3 offers satisfactory performance, and for a budget tablet, that's excellent. Moreover, Huawei is a brand known for reliable mid-range smartphones and tablets. If you think you can overlook the slightly heavy, smudgy factor, you may well be happy with the MediaPad T3.

But if you think the weight, poor accessory choices and smudgy screen are going to be a problem for you, it's worth noting that other tablets like the Lenovo Tab 4 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab A 7 offer the same basic specs. If you can summon the energy, you have the option of shopping around.