Huawei's first desktop PC to be sold outside China is a sleek business machine with optional 'smart' keyboard

Perhaps the only element of Huawei's consumer business that's emerged unscathed from US sanctions has been its PC line. With the Chinese tech giant's computer supply chain intact, it has been business as usual, and the company just introduced its first desktop PC beyond mainland China. Specs-wise, there isn't much to write …

[TeeCee]

"like your favourite coffee table book."

Presumably because it gets on teh internets and thus has a huge supply of "art pictures".

[Paul Herber]

Re: "like your favourite coffee table book."

Presumably because it gets on teh internets and thus has a huge supply of "cat pictures".

Fixed for you.

[doublelayer]

Re: "like your favourite coffee table book."

Why do they do this? I thought that phrase was trying to talk about the size of the machine, but if it is, it's not doing it well. It's not at all similar in dimensions to either a coffee table or a book. More importantly, I know a lot of Chinese people who speak English really well. It can't be hard to find at least one person who understands how to write naturally. Especially as, if they run out of candidates in China's 1.3 billion options, they can always use some of their money to hire a person fluent in both languages from many other countries. Proper translation for a marketing release would be very cheap since it's usually at most six paragraphs and a spec list. And yet a lot of large Chinese companies (other countries do it too but usually not as crazily) have descriptions that don't make any sense.

[Pen-y-gors]

Re: "like your favourite coffee table book."

It's an odd comment. The whole point of 'coffee table books' is that you don't have a favourite. They are large and glossy, and sit on your coffee table to impress your friends. They aren't for reading and enjoying.

[Alan Brown]

Re: "like your favourite coffee table book."

"other countries do it too but usually not as crazily"

Allow me to introduce you to Franglish (Quebecous are the worst)

[Andy Non]

BYOKMD

Bundling an unwanted monitor, keyboard and rodent would spoil it for me. I prefer to spec my own. I also like to instal Linux Mint rather than having Windows foisted on me. Linux compatible?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: BYOKMD

I suspect you aren't the target market

[karlkarl]

Looks great but... "matestation"? What a yuck name! Sounds like a dating app ;)

The use of an integrated GPU isn't a show stopper for me. Especially since it is AMD and they are pretty decent in terms of open-source drivers.

The specs look "boring" which is certainly a good thing. It might actually support OpenBSD out of the box!

[David 132]

If a workstation that's designed to be your mate is a "matestation", what would you call one designed for moles?

[Alan Brown]

Train station - where trains stop

Bus station - where busses stop

I think you can see where I'm going with this

[david 12]

Serial Ports are for Point Of Sale retail.

Serial ports are used for legacy cash drawers and legacy bar-code scanners, so they are still common on POS computers. Dell models in this form factor have a serial port too.

[Pen-y-gors]

Re: Serial Ports are for Point Of Sale retail.

Nope. It's for fitting the official Chinese-Government-issued personal Id dongle, and won't work without one.

[jvf]

Serial port-Yay!

I still have to connect to some older data collection instruments (temperature, voltage, etc) and cursed the day when RS232 disappeared from the landscape. USB adapters can be iffy (or misplaced). So, yay for Huawei.

[David 132]

Re: Serial port-Yay!

I wouldn't get too excited, I highly doubt that they're leveraging direct RS232 support from the chipset. It's almost certainly a USB bridge type solution in there, i.e. functionally equivalent to an external USB dongle.

[david 12]

Re: Serial port-Yay!

The standard internal bus is PCI. There will be a PCI - RS232 bridge, not PCI - USB - RS232 bridges.

[Oneman2Many]

Target market is corporate desktops, no need for discreet gpu. Price wise it will need to undercut Dell, HP, etc to make a dent on target market.

[Anonymous Coward]

Should have called it the “ET”

I bet it phones home quite a lot.

[IGotOut]

I won't be buying this!

It's bound to be full of Chinese backdoors and spyware.

I'll stick to my Lenovo thanks.

[ifekas]

Hmmm not sure about suitability for business

Although we tend to stick to Lenovo, I bought a couple of inexpensive Matebook Ryzen 5 Huawei laptops for work a month or so ago. We require the BIOS to be locked to prevent PXE and USB boot , but I couldn't find the option to restrict boot from usb on the BIOS and tried the usual things like updating the BIOS. I raised a ticket with Huawei who after checking confirmed this is not possible! Shame as the laptops are actually good for the price point and are nice and slim, but no good for business users.