Huawei has teased its new MatePad Mini tablet, which appears to go about its business of taking on the iPad Mini in a slightly different way.

The company has taken to Chinese social network Weibo to tease the launch of its new mini tablet later this week, on 4 September.

The post features the following line of text (via machine translation):

“Mini, lightweight and portable, arrives as promised. See you on September 4th”.

More interestingly, we also get the above image – not so much a teaser as a full blown design reveal. It showcases the device from the front (twice), back, and side, and it looks refreshingly different to the iPad Mini 7.

Notable here is the rounded edge, which appears to go against the post-iPad Pro order of flat-edged tablets, together with a prominent black circle of a camera module.

Said module has the words ‘AI Dual Camera’ scrawled across it, and sure enough, there are two distinct camera modules on display.

Luke Baker

Notch one up for a fresh design

Perhaps more noteworthy here is the device’s front camera. Huawei seems to be going with minimal bezels and adopting a hole punch notch. Again, this runs counter to the Apple way of doing things (larger bezels with an integrated front camera) that has taken hold of the wider tablet market.

Generally, we prefer Apple’s approach, as it optimises all that lovely screen space. However, in a mini tablet such as this, where portability is a significant factor, we can see the argument for keeping the footprint as compact as possible.

Huawei will have a number of new devices on display on 4 September. Most notably, we’ll be seeing its new tri-fold foldable, the Huawei Mate XTs.

The preceding Huawei Mate XT (pictured) was a bit of technological wonder, if one that was hampered by the usual caveats of iffy software and hamstrung performance.