I was going to buy a Lenovo Tab 2 A7 20 since I bought one for someone else and it's a surprisingly good tablet at it's price point but I saw this deal for a Vi8 and now I'm curious about how those tablets are. From what I've gathered on the internet they're supposed to be really good. Also I was more curious about this dual OS one. Does anyone have anything like this? How is it? I'm also still considering the Lenovo one since the difference in price point is about $40-$50 (Lenovo comes to $83 with the 15% off, a friend one wants as well so it pushes it past the $150 mark, the Chuwi ones are about $130 though). I would also ask for other suggestions but there are plenty of tablet threads already for me to scour through.
Someone mind telling how these Chuwi tablets are?
sarmen2 on 29/12/2015 - 22:07
Comments
Regardless of what I said before I ended up getting the Chuwi Hi8. I was also considering the Teclast X80HD and Onda V820w which were $25 cheaper. I had settled on the Teclast but figured I would get the Chuwi for the better screen (and apparently they both have about 4 hours for battery life and they both come with Windows 10 installed from the get go). Now I just wait for it to arrive.
I bought a Chuwi Hi8 a few months back (it is very similar to the Vi8 - just higher screen resolution and no micro HDMI port) for about $99 USD.
It was dual boot between Android and Windows 8. I removed Android pretty much straight away and resized the Windows partition for more (much needed) storage.
While incredibly cheap, the device is hindered by many significant defects. The touch screen feels flimsy, and isn't very accurate. Applications keep crashing (probably due to bad memory), and upgrading the tablet to Windows 10 was extremely difficult (the installer would repeatedly fail). In the end, I finally managed to upgrade it by re-installing a blank version of Windows 8 without drivers through a USB Hub, upgrading and activating (so that Microsoft would recognise the hardware ID) and then clean installing a Windows 10 image (can't remember if it was from Chuwi or the official Microsoft image).
Unfortunately, the battery life is also quite poor (about 3 hours), and Windows just hasn't evolved well enough (IMO) to deal with touch adequately on these tiny screens.
It currently sits in a drawer and isn't used.
I can't comment more without knowing what use you intend to put yours to.
Hope this helps.
The Hi8 is the one I was after and my plan was to mostly use Android and use the Windows 8 at uni occasionally (to take it instead of my laptop cause it's too heavy to take there). But with 3 hours of battery life it just won't do, as well as those other problems. Shame, reviews seemed positive (and paid) and they said it would last about 4-4.5 hours but I suppose I'll just stick to the Lenovo.
You could just buy something like the Xiaomi 5000mAh slim power bank (~$30) to double that battery life without wasting too much space. The Hi8 has a lot of advantages over the lenovo-OS versatility, screen resolution, and storage to name a couple.
That OS versatility is useless if Windows is as buggy as kips says it is. And the power bank just widens the rift between the two tablets for price. But the ebay sale ended before I got it so now the best I can do is use a JB voucher for the Lenovo.
I was keen on the Chuwi 10" thinking I can use it for office apps and presentations, and then for retrogaming/emulators. Plug into HDMI was a big plus. But looking more into it, I probably don't need dual os to accomplish that, especially since that seriously depletes the very limited storage space. Do keep us posted on what you decide!