Huawei is pulling a page of the Remarkable playbook by introducing paid features for the MatePad Paper digital paper. They have just introduced voice-to-text behind a paywall. You have to now register an account just to access the feature free accounts get a 30-minute trial and paid subscriptions get access to various minutes. You can buy a 1-hour plan, a 5-hour plan, a 10-hour plan and a 50-hour plan. The fees range from a couple of dollars to forty dollars. The voice clips are actually uploaded to the Huawei servers and then offloaded to your physical device.
This is not the only new paywall feature. Huawei is now charging for cloud storage to house all of your notes and PDF files. They have silver, gold and diamond plans and these give you from around a few GB of storage to multiple GB. You likely do not need to pay for this plan, since the Huawei Matepad tops out at 256GB of storage, which is enough for the average person.
Huawei sells the Matepad in China and Europe. Their device has Chinese and English. I am worried about needing to register for a Huawei account, just to get free minutes for text-to-speech.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.