Chris here with the Chuwi Surbook mini. So this is a smaller version of the Sur
book that I reviewed and you could call it really a cut-down cheaper version now
why I say cut down because they have loaded the RAM so the Rams not six
gigabytes like the Sur book it is now four on this particular model which was
what we were first getting with the intel celeron N3450's which this is
powered by so that's a chip that's a quad core and it has two megabytes of
cache and a maximum to about 2.2 gigahertz this has wireless AC just like
the sir book that made no compromises there which is good but they made a
compromise with the stylus so it supports an active stylus which I happen
to have right here but as one of those very simple styluses so it's on or off
that is it when it touches the screen there is no pressure sensitivity so not
a recommended stylus at all for people into handwriting they want to take notes
well or artists this is going to actually drive you mad because you
cannot really use this properly it's more just like an accurate pointer so
when it is on and touching the screen you do have power rejection but really
that is basically it I will not cover any more of the stylus because there is
no point to it without having any pressure sensitivity oh it does work
quite close up to the edges as well within imagine of
about one millimeter or so but that's the stylus no more on that now an
optional keyboard as well you can get for this which is just like a keyboard
you'd find on a Microsoft Surface but not quite the same quality however that
you get on this one so the key travel on this is quite shallow about 1.2 to 1.1
millimeters that I measured it's okay but because of the smaller size of the
screen being ten point eight inches that the typing experience isn't quite as
comfortable the other thing to note too that the touchpad is not a precision one
so it can be frustrating to use you cannot disable the gestures without any
registry hacks the other thing to of the keyboard is that it does have this
plastic either side of those keys which is normal because they're separated but
it is raised up a little bit higher and the key travel actually goes beyond that
when you're typing on it and you happen to touch in between by accident it can
be a little bit uncomfortable so something else to bear in mind we get a
few shortcuts on here but obviously it is limited within limited size and the
real estate they have for this keyboard it docks in just like any surface device
would magnetically without Pogo ports there and you can prop it up to another
level now when you press down hard on this there is a little bit of flex
depending on how heavy you are when typing you may notice a little bit of
bounce to pressing it on so the keyboard a rate as average but you still do
recommend getting their keyboard of course if you are going to be buying
this particular device oh and there is a magnet in it so when you do close it
that magnet the whole sensor can put the device in to sleep so that's something
that is handy there and it doubles as a screen protector when you've got it
closed up there so the build of it you can see we have a kickstand again like a
Microsoft Surface this is based really off the surface 3 it's not fixed angle
but variable angle 1 so you can angle it all the way back like this and prop it
up to where I had it before about there that's really the maximum angle you can
get before it risks actually falling over there but it works the hinge on it
it's made out of metal the build overall is mostly metal you see along the top
here we have a plastic chrome style buttons they feel ok and I will see this
triple on the top that is plastic before the wireless and Bluetooth reception
we've got wireless AC on this model and the ports we have on the right-hand side
we've got 2 USB 3 ports that will power external hard drives type C port that
supports display video outs and data all at the same time now I have ass minor
complaint with this type C port and that is because of the housing it's a little
bit of an angle you can see there that pressing in some type C plugs of mine
with hubs or even a charging cable can be a little bit challenging at times and
sometimes the charging cable has popped out so not the greatest there at hoping
that Chewie would have fixed this because I had the same problem with the
surberg you see we also have a three point
five I'm gonna need a headphone jack sound output on this is okay the
loudness is also okay I do wish was a little bit louder focusing on that
screen now so it is 1920 by twelve it in resin ten point eight inches three by
two aspect ratio and it's can see from my sample images here that color
reproduction is very good and a really nice screen very bright as well five
hundred and twenty lux maximum output and really decent colors on this the
fact that it's fully laminated is what makes this display shine because you get
deep blacks the contrast is just a little better there and really a nice
panel if it was good enough for Microsoft to use in the surface three
then it is definitely good enough for a alternative cheaper Chinese model here
so book many ships with Windows 10 Home version 1703 I've run a couple of
benchmarks on here so the chipset has a maximum turbo of 2.2 gigahertz it's quad
core and this is a way to gauge the performance if you have a similar kind
of tablet or a notebook run this test here and you can get an idea of just how
the performance stands with your own existing machine so this is Geekbench 4
and those scores they're they're fine for the cell run in 30 for 50 more or
less what I'm getting on others perhaps a little bit lower the multi-core score
here I often see close to 4,000 here but the single core score that is definitely
perfectly fine there here is the open CL score so this is using the Intel HD 500
graphics the GPU there to calculate that and in the wireless speed so this is
testing my 300 megabyte fiber line from within the studio here and the room so
the actual router is about two rooms away and the performance is okay this
isn't bad more less what you get with other devices running this chipset the
Intel 31 65 it's not a premium chipset but at least it is wireless AC dual band
and it offers reasonably good performance there now what is really
good in terms of performance is the emmc Drive on here so we don't have any
expandability with the storage there is no M.2 SATA 3 is this the slot
unfortunately at least chewy have put in here a
SanDisk eMMC 5.1 spec drive and as you can see from these speeds here that it's
really quite quick look at les 271 sequential reads and then 815 writes and
good 4k speed so very pleased with the performance of the internal storage
taking a look now at chrome performance I wanted to show you the touch response
so in general touch response at accuracy is good in Windows but I have noticed
that there is a little bit of lag in chrome you can see here that it's not
performing as fast as it could not the greatest now it is quite an image
intensive heavy website my website here so that does affect the performance but
you can see even then loading that in it's a little slower than I would like
there and a bit of a delay there with touch so chrome performance isn't that
great but when you switch over to something like edge then you find the
performance is just so much better it's girls of course a lot faster for
those websites though I'm looking at a little bit lighter but even if I go into
my own website take tablets you'll see loading really fast it's the first time
I've loaded it by the way in edge and the scrolling performance is a lot
better not perfect you see there's a little few stutters they're just
rendering still that's why that happened but so much better which is why I
recommend that if you're going to be doing a lot of web browsing like this
stick to edge or Internet Explorer oh something's a little bit lighter than
chrome this runs okay can see it's a little bit slow and laggy there when
going to full screen drop two frames only but overall if you stick to edge
again then 4k streaming at least and YouTube here is going to be fine but
don't try this in chrome chrome is very choppy and laggy now we only have four
gigabytes of RAM here you get six on the sir book so ideally that is better to
have the six of course the more the merrier because it's going to perform a
little bit more fluid a little faster and you do notice it once you start to
fill up the memory so if you run in Chrome in a few other applications for
example got League of Legends here paint open and all that's actually images
there you'll notice that it starts to bog down a little bit when you start to
move around or hit the Start menu that things become a little slower the
animations just a little lag here so it doesn't handle heavy multitasking that
well now the is running in dual-channel at least and
at 1600 megahertz it's low powered double data rate three specs you can
only expect so much from this kind of hardware so if you want to edit videos
or images very heavy images then I wouldn't really be doing it on an Apollo
Lakes Elrond in 3450 so you might be wondering hang on Chris where the
speakers I didn't see them in the beginning well that's because they're
actually just inside here now when I say speakers yes there are two of them in
here I thought it was just mono speaker but of course having both of the
speakers on the left-hand side we're going to get very poor separation and
these speakers do sound quite poor they just are not loud enough at all give you
sample of them
okay how to believe that that it was 100% volume they had terrible in terms
of loudness just way too quiet so it has a 37 watt hour battery and really it's
just not enough because I only managed to get 5 hours and 20 minutes in my
battery life test here so I ran it down from a hundred percent 30 percent
brightness I just kept using it continuously so
YouTube Chrome and really I expected a little bit more than this even though
it's only 37 watt hours I was hoping for somewhere around 67
hour mark so fall short here and definitely a lot less battery than the
likes of its bigger sibling the sir book now charge times it will take 2 hours
and 51 minutes to charge when powered off going from 10 percent right up to
100 taking a look now at the gaming performance this is a stall game called
Ashford extreme and it's a little choppy it doesn't quite run at 30 frames per
second it's on the large visual seating but it's still not ideal let's have a
look at how legal agents and counter-strike perform so counter-strike
800 x 600 resolution is very choppy on the lowest settings it Peaks about 30
frames per second but it's just far too slow so you really want to apply that
power limit tweak you can see down to 3 frames per second there ouch
not good at all so you can see here that legal agents running at 720p on the
medium settings is getting at least playable frames per second it hovers
around 50 40 frames per second I haven't seen a dip down to about 31 there's a
lot on-screen but overall it is at least playable so thermals are really good
here maximum of 56 degrees this was after 30 minutes of gaming and charging
at the same time so there's plenty of headroom here to unlock those power
limits and push this chip a lot higher because we've just got so much thermal
Headroom it'll probably get up to about eighty degrees if you set it to 10 watts
but it will really boost that GPU performance which is really restricted
and lacking at the with the factory power limit sitting
short clip here now from the front webcam so 720p max 30 frames per second
you can see the quality is actually alright it's not bad compared to other
tablets that I have looked at then half an hour in 50/50 now if you're wondering
about the BIOS unfortunately it's locked out to us all we have is to some basic
configuration settings here so none of those advanced menus are open so this is
the latest build of Linux Mint jar and everything is working apart from touch
one thing to the audio seems to be outputting to the 3.5 millimeter
headphone jack and not via the speakers so you need to configure that so that is
it really you just need to hunt around and find the driver for the touchscreen
and then if you can get that working Linux will run okay on this particular
machine all right so let's just wrap things up here this screen of it is
really great I do love it fully laminated it's super bright decent
colors and blacks the best thing about this tablet and the build quality is
great we've got also fast internal storage wireless AC but there are quite
a few disappointing areas now one of them has to definitely be the stylus you
make a tablet like this which is really like a Microsoft Surface 3 but then you
pair it up with the high pin 2 it should be true is high pin 3 that supports a
thousand and 24 levels of sensitivity and this of course does not have any
sensitivity whatsoever to pressure which means really to just throw it out the
window because it's an accurate pointer and just for basic tasks so artists
people that need to write a lot of notes and things like that forget it you don't
want to be using a stylus like this ever on a device like this because it will
frustrate you and it is the point disappointing now the other thing that
there's also frustrating with this device in my time using it for a week is
the touchpad the touchpad you can often trigger gestures by mistake and you
cannot disable them it's not a precision touchpad as well so the accuracy doesn't
seem that great on it and it does frustrate me quite a bit
typing on that keyboard once I adapted to the smaller size here so this of
course is a keyboard design for a 10.8 inch screens so they've had to cram
it down a little bit we don't have all of the shortcuts we normally see and the
typing experience on those keys is a little shallow the key travel and I do
find it cramped but once I adapted to it I was typing okay and you do have to hit
those Keys really square on in the center because if you do touch a little
bit to the side you'll end up hitting that plastic which is raised up I think
they've done this to recessed it a little bit here reducing that key travel
to stop the keys from hopefully scratching up and touching the screen
when you've got it all closed which I do believe will end up happening if you
have it pressed in between books or other things in your bag there and then
it will probably end up scratching the screen which doesn't have scratch
resistant glass but there is a screen protector on here so overall I would go
for the Chewie sir book because it's got 2 gigabytes of RAM more and has about 2
hours more of battery life as well and we get of course a stylus that has 1024
levels of pressure sensitivity so please do check out my review of the Chewie
Cermak up here and in my latest videos and thank you so much for watching if
you have not subscribed then why don't think about subscribing to the channel
because I will have plenty more of reviews like this one here up and coming
some more tablets and other tech out of China bye for now