CHUWI Tablet PC 13 Inch UBook XPro with Keyboard and Stylus

 

Use it to do computer programming . Quick enough to test arduinos and servo. Like a pc but easy to travel with don’t even need to use the keyboard as its got one but in.

 

Apart from (some) ipads, the only 4:3 ratio screen I can currently find – so much better for browsing, reading, etc.
Nice large 11″ screen feels good and works well – nice device to have.

Only negatives are: suitable case availability (not much choice) & limited Chuwi apps / those I’m used to / like only run on that Mfr’s hardware. But these aren’t directly about the tablet, yet to note any direct negatives about it.

Would definitely buy again if I needed another.

 

The tablet arrived well-packed and -protected. An ‘open here’ notice on the box would have saved two minutes of me faffing around trying to work out their particular brand of box-folding magic, but I guess that’s down to me! The tablet arrived with a 90% charge, which was nice. The supplied charger is slow and its USB-C charging cable is rather short, which makes things a little more awkward than they needed to have been.

Connection to the home wifi was standard fare, after which the logging in with a Google account and subsequent first-time setup went as usual. The really *un*usual thing was after that first setup process, however: practically no software of any sort is pre-installed, leaving you with a **lovely** and highly-desirable ‘no bloatware’ experience. You get to decide what software gets installed, not Chuwi, which is great. The standard Google apps are already present (i.e., things like Chrome and Youtube), but nothing much else, which I found a wonderful breath of fresh air for these days.

I had read reports about wifi dropping out unexpectedly, but that hasn’t happened to me. The signal strength is not great (compared to my phone, say), but it hasn’t just “stopped working”, either. More annoying is that the screen keeps turning off after 15 seconds when left idle -and, although there’s a setting for increasing that all the way to 30 minutes, there’s no ‘ok’ button to accept the new setting, so it cannot actually be changed. I will need to read up on how to make the increased timeout ‘stick’, but I don’t think it right for it to require that level of involvement to achieve something that’s meant to be so trivially easy to achieve.

I bought this tablet really for only one reason: to be able to display PDF orchestral scores and follow along as they play on my hifi. For this purpose, the tablet is pretty much perfect: even very complex scores display with practically no delay as you jump about them, and flicking between pages as the piece playback progresses is responsive and painless. It’s taken me many years to find an e-score reader I can actually live with: this tablet, with its plus-sized screen and high-resolution, coupled with more-than-adequate CPU resources, has finally scratched that itch. Naturally, full scores do not actually ‘fit’ on a smaller-than-A4 screen, but the scaling involved is relatively minor and definitely leaves the pages more-than-acceptably readable.

Movie playback on the device (via Emby) is excellent, too: vibrant colours, high contrast, fine screen resolution -and, again, no network drop-out during whatever 2-hour movie I’ve opted to play. My battery charge did drop from 86% to 26% having watched one movie, though: I could wish for better endurance than that.

I wish the tablet had come with a protective case. There aren’t a lot of Chuwi Hipad Plus 11″ cases out there, so choice is definitely limited, and delivery of the ones that one does manage to find is invariably on the proverbial slow boat from China. The one advertised by Amazon that’s ‘often bought with’ the tablet, for example, is available for for less than 10, which sounds great… until you notice that there’s an extra 15 postage and a wait until February (i.e., over three weeks at the time of writing) for delivery. That’s not a great option, therefore… but it’s apparently almost the only option you have at the current time!

There’s no stylus, either, which is a bit of a drawback compared with other tablets I looked at (though none had the screensize or resolution I was after): marking up my orchestral scores as I use them seems to be a project for another time. It’s a deficiency I’ll live with in the meantime.

Overall, I’m happy. The price was acceptable; the display is fine; the almost bog-standard Android experience is lovely; its score-reading and video-playback capabilities are more than adequate. On the other hand, the battery life seems a little short; and the apparent inability to alter the screen sleep time is annoying (but probably fixable in due course). Would I buy again? Definitely.

 

Really good for the price. Boots fast, 1440p is good. Runs things like Minecraft really well. Laptop technology has gone really far !

 

The laptop arrived the next day despite foul weather up in the Highlands of Scotland. Started off fine. Nice screen beautiful colours and definition. I worried about the keyboard change to UK keyboard but it was no bother. One problem was that it froze one evening and would not shut down or anything. Had sorted itself out the next day. I rang the helpline and was adviced to look for and install updates. This seems to have worked but leaves me with a slight worry that it will happen again. The helpline chat person said he would ring me the next day but did not do so.