Chuwi already hinted at working on a new flagship
tablet model equipped with Intel Apollo Lake processor at the start of November
on their Twitter and seems like the plans are finally coming to fruition soon.
The new flagship Chuwi Hi13 is going to be revealed during the CES 2017.
The most important change compared to majority of
chinese production in 2016 comes with the Intel’s decision to scrap the whole
Atom line of processors so the new Chuwi Hi13 will come with Intel Celeron
N3450 based on the Apollo Lake Platform. This 14nm processor with Goldmont
architecture and max burst frequency of 2.2 GHz is about 50 % powerful than the
Cherry Trails of the past and should be roughly on par with the Core M
processors. Also the Intel HD Graphics 500 Gen. 9 chip has way more juice and
also packs hardware decoding for H.265 and VP9 codecs. Still pretty power
effiecent with 6 W TDP and ability to operate fanless.
Another fair highlight comes with the 13,5-inch
display, which is more or less identical as the one used in Microsoft Surface
Book and has pretty smooth 3000 x 2000 pixel resolution, 3:2 aspect ratio,
1700:1 contrast and 400 nits of brightness. It means the tablet won’t be a small
delicate flower, but more like full sized small convertible or a laptop.
Full laptop utility will come with the optional
detachable keyboard, which will be once again probably mandatory, because the
tablet still doesn’t seem to have full-sized USB ports on the body, that’s left
for the keyboard dock. The metal body itself looks very much similar to the
previous generation of Chuwi tablets so no surprise there at all.
Rest of the hardware include 4 GB DDR3L RAM (where i
think 8 GB could be already a better option) and 64 GB of sadly still eMMC
storage. SSD disk would boost the power performance and usability to another
level, maybe next time. Tablet should have stylus support and all the usual
stuff like dualband Wi-Fi or USB Type-C port. Windows 10 Home as the used OS
also feels more or less natural.
We have to wait for the actual pricing to fully
evaluate the potention of Chuwi Hi13 to succeed in the market, but personally i
welcome the new Apollo Lake platform with open arms, it’s really time to put the
whole Atom X5-Z83xx generation into the early grave.
