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Different Magic - PIPO M8 Dual Core Tablet Hands-on Review

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First, I have to say that I am really very excited that PIPO has chosen me, along with 19 other people, to review this new tablet. I’ve become quite a fan of the device as soon as I laid my eyes on it. As I always go for uniqueness and the feel of black technology (Sorry, Apple!), the PIPO M8 gives me just everything I need!
For people who have never heard of this brand, it is a company focusing on making differentiated tablets in the Chinese markets. It is the first Chinese company to market a 7 inch tablet with 1280*800 IPS display, an 8.9 inch PLS tablet as well as this 9.4 IPS display device we are testing today. As far as I am concerned, this marketing strategy has been quite successful, as PIPO has attracted tens of thousands of fans in just a few months’ time since U1 hit the market.
Highlights
9.4” IPS Capacitive Touchscreen, 1280*800
Slim Magazine-like Design
Support WCDMA/GSM Mobile Internet (Only the 3G version)
Android 4.1 OS
RK3066 Dual Core 1.6GHZ processor, quad-core of Mali-400MP
1GB RAM, 16GB ROM
5.0 Mega-pixels AF Camera
Front facing Stereo Speakers
Bluetooth 2.1
Support OTG, HDMI
Support 2160p video playback
Specifications
Operating System: Android 4.1.1
Model: PIPO M8
Display Technology: IPS Capacitive touch screen
Screen Size: 9.4 inch
Resolution: 1280*800
CPU Manufacturer: Rockchip
CPU Model: RK3066 Dual core A9 Chipset with Mali-400MP4
CPU Speed: 1.6GHz
RAM:1GB [email protected]
Hard Drive Capacity: 16GB
PCMCIA Expansion: T-FLASH (Support 32GB MAX)
Camera: 2MP+5MP Auto Focus
HDMI: HDMI1.4
3G: Internal 3G for 3G version, external 3G for the WIFI version
Bluetooth: Yes
GPS:NO
G-Sensor:Yes
Gyroscope: Yes
Audio: Built in stereo speakers (frontal)/ Built in Microphone
Language:Multi-language support
Battery Type: Li-ion, 6500mAh
Charging Voltage: DC 9V - 2.5A
Color: Black
Item Dimensions/ W*D*H:240x 172 x 9.0mm
Net Weight: 520g
Connectors
Ports: 2 x Micro USB port (USB Host and USB data port)
1 x Micro SD card slot
1 x 2.5mm DC input (9V, 2.5A)
1 x Audio jack
1 x Mini HDMI port
Communications
Wireless Connection:WIFI 802.11 b/g/n; WIFI+3G for the 3G version
Bluetooth 2.1
Retail Package
I received a gigantic delivery package last Friday, within which there are a slim paper back box which holds the tablet and a warranty certificate, another smaller but thicker paper box which holds the fittings and the manual for this tablet. A protection cover which is more likely an optional fitting more than a bundled one.
And above are all the standard fittings for the tablet.
Design
There’s no questioning that PIPO has come up with a stand-out look for this tablet. From the second you see the M8, it’s clear that the company is making a statement about how you’ll live and work with the device. The basic shape calls to mind a folded book or magazine, which is really comfortable to look at even though it feels very different. The device sports a 9.4-inch screen and weighs in at 520g, but it feels lighter in your hands than other tablets on the market because of the way the shape allows weight to be distributed. The tablet is only 9.02mm at its thickest point, and tapers down to a narrow 4.36mm.
Whether or not you warm up to this design is probably a matter of taste, but I found myself a big fan of the magazine shape, in both two-handed and single-hand settings, as well as on a flat surface. The beveled shape makes typing slightly easier when you have the M8 on a desk.
Besides the big screen up front, the M8 features a 2.0 Mega Pixels Front-facing camera, an ambient light detection sensor which enables auto-brightness of the display, and two speaker gates. This is the first time I’ve seen any tablets putting speaker gates on the front, but this is actually a very smart move, as you could never block them again wherever you put your tablet, Both the clarity of the outer sound the stereo speakers produces and its volume is very good, better than any other Chinese branded tablets I have tested.
Most of the ports and all the hardware keys are located on the upper edge, including a menu key, an ESC key. a Micro SD card slot which supports cards up to 32GB, a Micro USB Host connector, a Micro USB data port, a Mini HDMI interface, an LED notification light and a DC charging jack. The plug PIPO includes is of the 9V-2.5A standard, which ensures great charging efficiency.
​
On the left edge lies a 3.5mm audio jack, and on the right a Power/Standby switch which is artistically designed.
On the back you will find a 5 Mega-pixels AF camera which is able to shoot fairly sharp photos, another outstanding feature for the gorgeous device. All of the ports and buttons on the device feel very reasonably placed and easy to find.
In all, the M8 is a distinct device with a lot going for it in terms of industrial design, and there is almost no misstep here that makes the device underwhelming. The skin-feel metal back cover gives the device all the feel of expensiveness it needs, even comparing to those Apple and Samsung tablets which are priced many times more.
Display
The front is occupied by a 9.4” 1280x800 pixels screen, surrounded by fairly thin bezel. The screen resolution is the main gripe to be held against the M8, in this day and age of flagship slates with 1080p displays and above. Having said that, it is a very good screen in terms of colors, contrast ratio and viewing angles. The display brightness is also really satisfactory, meaning that you would be able to use the M8 outside even on a sunny day.
Internals
Inside the M8, you will find a healthy dose of familiar Android guts. The device is powered by Rockchip RK3066 dual core A9 chipset, running at 1.6GHZ, meaning you’ll get solid performance on all almost all applications. According to previous tests with other tablets powered by this chipset, RK3066 is arguably the most powerful dual core ARM processor. The M8 has 1GB of RAM onboard and 16GB of internal storage. The device also sports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and an array of sensors (gyro, light, accelerometer, etc.).
Software
​
Most tablets these days must be judged on their software. In the case of Android Jelly Bean tablets, that’s not exactly a Herculean effort.
PIPO is no different in the sense that the company has opted for slight tweaks in the software rather than a major overhaul. The M8 utilizes largely the same build of Jelly Bean as other tablets (like the Galaxy Tab 8.9), though there are a few notable differences.
First, PIPO has designed a customized M8 homescreen which does not have a portrait mode, this can be quite annoying sometimes when you exit an portrait-default application like an E-reader or games such as Temple Run.
The widgets and icons of the regular applications have been revised to fit the custom UI. Having seen lots of stock Android UIs, I find myself quite a fan of those cute, crystal-like icons. As the M8 has no hardware controls for volume adjustment, PIPO has put the virtual volume rocker in the permanent android status bar, along with a screenshot button and the regular ECS key, Home key and Task Switcher.
PIPO has also preinstalled a few applications and games on the M8, but one of them PIPO-exclusive. You can easily find them free in any android market app.
Cameras
The rear-facing 5.0 Mega-pixels camera does a great job of capturing images — if you’re into holding a nearly 10-inch tablet up while you snap away. As I’ve said in many other tablet reviews, taking photos with the cameras on tablets are completely silly to me, even though I actually have seen quite a few Chinese and Japanese people doing that in public. I certainly won’t. On the other hand, the front-facing camera here is a step up from most other models, and I’m happy to see PIPO trying to improve the specs on what is normally an afterthought.
Just know this: even though the rear camera is probably the best I have seen on any Chinese tablet, it won’t replace a real camera or decent smartphone option — mostly due to the size of the device and awkwardness in use.
You can also capture 480P videos with the M8, though this seems even more bizarre to me than snapping photos. Quality was solid, though the device’s awkward size made it tough to get steady content.
Performance
As I have mentioned above, the RK3066 chipset, although seemingly a little outdated as a bunch of quad-corers have already hit the market, is still able to provide more than enough power to run the device smoothly over a variety of applications.
Some benchmark scores of the M8 and the comparison to other dual core devices.
In terms of General performance, the device seemed speedy running graphically intense games. And the experience of video playback is also very pleasant as the chipset can easily supports all formats of videos to at least 1080P. Thanks to the updates Google has made for Android4.1, the responsiveness and smoothness is better than ever. It doesn’t pale even compared to the Apple iOS.
Connectivity
As for connectivity, M8 has probably the best WIFI reception of all Chinese tablets I've tested, Online video streaming is possible even when you are 10 meters and some walls away from the WIFI router.
Besides, M8 also has built-in Bluetooth, which is a rare feature for Chinese slates. The WIFI version of the tablet can also get access to 3G network through connecting a 3G network card to the device through an OTG cable. And the 3G version has built-in 3G module which supports WCDMA/GSM SIM card. As I've only received a WIFI version, I cannot tell you how well the 3G module works on the M8.
Battery Life
Battery life on the M8 seemed solid to me, as the device features a 6500mAh rechargeable Li-PO battery. In my intense 720p video playback test, the M8 lasted nearly 8 hours, which is quite something considering that most Chinese tablets can hardly stand 5 hours of screen-on use. However, I did notice a more pronounced drain on the battery when the device was sleeping than my Tegra2 powered Samsung Galaxy Tab8.9 and Motorola XOOM, and I felt it fell short of competitors like the Ainol NOVO10 (8000mAh battery) and FSL Fast (8000mAh battery) in terms of overall battery longevity.
Another annoying issue is that the device does not support charging under the shutdown state, even though the charging efficiency with the 9V-2.5A plug is quite amazing (A full charge only takes as short as 3 hours).
Wrap-up
Good stuff:
Fascinating industrial design
Great looking display
Capable cameras
Excellent front facing stereo speakers
Solid battery life
Wonderful WIFI reception
Not so good stuff:
Incapability of charging under a shutdown state
Pricier than alternative options
Android slates are mostly competing on specs and price these days, rather than with design and overall experience.
The M8 goes for RMB1199 ($193) from PIPO, and, granted, this is $200 less than the market-leading iPad Mini, or the original 9.4 inch Sony Tablet S which is powered by the quad-core Tegra3 chipset. But for the same $200 price you can get the Exynos Qua-core Ramos W30, or the brand new Ployer MOMO19 with quad-core A31 and 2GB of ram.
The M8 does offer some features to differentiate itself from the competition, though, apart from the distinctive looks, like the very capable cameras and battery. Other than that, you can find plenty of decent Android tablets with this screen resolution and processing power for even less.
Overall, those who'd appreciate the more distinctive, elegant look will find the M8 right up their alley. But for those who just want a cheap Chinese tablet with a big screen and decent processing power, there might be other options.

thanks for your report.
questions:
how fast is the gpu clock for the mali mp400mp4 in the m8, ist the clock at 533 mhz???

Thanks for your question, the GPU is clocked at 399MHZ, powerful enough to run all Android games smoothly.
Sent from my XT910 using xda premium

against cube u30gt how does it compete?
thanks

Okay, ive got one for over a week now, the M* 3G (built in), and I must say......it rocks! Can work for about 6 Hrs without recharging, Wifi is perfect, design is a beauty,Im living in the Netherlands and today I tried (without any hopes of working) my built in 3G sim...guess what, no problem, worked right away. Graphic Speed is more than sufficient. The screenres. is perfect, tried to stream from my QNAP 469 (Twonky & Serviio) and the QNAP apps, worked like charm ( besides the mkv of 20+ gb.....but that's normal). When you buy this Tablet, beware of the fact that the OTG cable can be defect (as was mine...) when i tried to hook up a keyboard which i ordered in a sleeve, after replacing it it worked fine (also mouse and HDD). Sufficient power out for the HDD. Conclusion for me (mind...non-gamer, mediafreak yess) for about $185 ex. shipping: A WINNER!

For me, m8 is the better choice, u30gt is much porkier. And I prefer the design of m8.
Sent from my XT910 using xda premium

the 3G version, $185? r u serious? It's priced at RMB1,399 here in China, which is above $200....
Sent from my XT910 using xda premium

You should mention in the negatives that you can't update the android OS by OTA you have to do a whole procedure to do a system update via your pc (so if you have a linux based pc you are pretty much sc....d). In my case I have an Andersson ADT 2.6 which is a rebranded Pipo M8
Sent from my ADT 2.6 using Tapatalk 4

M8 replacement
For those who love their M8 Pro, like I do ...and would like a viable replacement someday, look to the M8HD.
It is the same case with a 10.1" brighter screen installed; thinner screen surrounds; bigger battery.
Pretty sure the M8 Pro is being/has been discontinued. I hated that they might give up the M8 size and style.
Not so, thankfully!
Could be one day we will see a RK3288 in the M8 case. Now that would be nice! ?:good:
Edit on 6/28/15
Amazing that I can still edit this post after so long. My M8 Pro finally died a quiet death. I was going to give it to a family member now that I have my Cube T9; decided to update the RileyRom, and bricked the tablet. Dead android on back; frozen on screen with a triangle above him marking his demise.
Boo hoo! There was a lot about the M8 Pro I really liked!
?

The battery is not even close to what the review is referring. Its last for 2 hours only in daily use and it was something like that from the begging. I have the tablet for 1 and a half year and after 6 months it started to hang, freez, you hard reset it and does not come on easily. As a conclusion DO NOT BUY IT!!! NEVER NEVER!!!

Acube iWork 10 Hands-on Review - All-around tablet & decent laptop

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FOR
Powerful Intel Bay-Trail processors
Sleek build and compact design
Full Windows 8.1
Over 6 hours’ battery Life
Eye-watering IPS display
Affordable Price
Micro SD card support
HDMI port
Brilliant Keyboard Cover
AGAINST
Small internal storage
USB Host requires dongle
BOTTOM LINE
The Acube iWork 10 is an affordable Windows 8 tablet with good battery life and features. Just make sure you always have access to the Internet, as local storage is a little light on this tablet.
Key Features
10.1-inch IPS capacitive touchscreen of 1280 x 800 px resolution;
1.8GHZ Intel Atom Bay-Trail Z3740D Quad-core Processor, Intel HD Graphic (Gen7) GPU
2GB of LPDDR3 RAM
Windows 8.1 (Need to be activated by the user themselves)
32GB of SSD built-in Storage
2MP front-facing camera/2MP rear-facing camera
Back-mounted stereo speakers
Wi-Fi 802.11
Bluetooth v4.0
USB 2.0 host (adapter required)
Micro SD card slot
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
HDMI V1.4
8,000mAh Li-Po battery
Want the functionality of a laptop with the speed and ease of a tablet? Don't we all. Acube, along with many other bigger names in the PC and tablet industry, has taken another pass at that very Windows 8 dream. The Acube iWork 10 is one of a slew of new 10-inch Windows 8.1 tablets that are starting to make more sense in these connected times. Three years ago, we would have listed this system as unacceptable, since it has very little local storage after Windows 8.1, Office, and system recovery files take up most of the space on the smallish 32GB drive. However, people have become used to almost constant access to the Internet, along with the virtually limitless cloud storage and entertainment streaming options therein. If you take the iWork 10 primarily as an Internet-connected tablet, then the remaining virtues of the tablet bump the system up to an acceptable, nay, recommendable status.
Still, we had our qualms about the many Windows tablets that appeared in the past two year, which were either burdened by the sluggish Intel Atom Z2760 performance, or struggled with portability and poor battery life.
This new Acube iWork 10 seems to have been dealt a better hand, as it runs the full version of Windows 8.1 and the Bay Trail chip is restoring faith in Intel's tablet capabilities. At RMB1,699 ($281), it is really a worthy choice of both a laptop and a tablet.
Design and Features
Measuring about 258*173*10.4mm (HWD), the iWork 10 is quite svelte, only 1mm thicker than the Surface RT (9.4mm) and much slimmer than most of the Windows Tablets. For example the Acer Iconia W700 is 11.9mm thick, and the Surface Pro is at an even porkier 13.5mm. The front of the iWork 10 is dominated by a 10.1-inch display, with decent amount of bezel. And if held in the vertical orientation, the iWork 10 has a Windows Start key at six o'clock.
The hairline finished metal back panel has the Acube logos (both Chinese and English) and some other information we need to know about the device and its manufacturer.
The tablet has a 2-megapixel front camera and 2-megapixel rear camera, both of which can take pictures or interact with Skype sessions. The tablet has accelerometers, G-sensor, and vibration feedback (particularly when you use the Start button), three features that are almost must-haves for this type of product.
The tablet weighs in at a light 613g, even lighter than the Microsoft Surface RT (690g). It is as easy to tote and use as many of the 10-inch Android tablets, requiring much less labor than the Acer Iconia W700 (950g) or the Microsoft Surface Pro (903g).
All the ports and slots are hosted on the left side, you will find a headset jack, a micro USB 2.0 port, a mini HDMI port, a Micro SD card slot and a DC port. Hardware keys are also kept to the minimum, besides the aforementioned start key, only a power/standby key and a volume rocker are in place. The magnetic connector used for connecting to the keyboard cover is in the middle of the bottom side, with one fixing dock on each side.
The micro SD card may be needed to supplement the skimpy storage built into the system. The 32GB SSD only had about 19GB of free space after we went through the initial setup. Thankfully, the tablet comes with very few pieces of pre-loaded software, only the standard Windows 8.1 apps like Skype are included.
For me, the disappointment mainly comes from the absence of a full USB host, we need to use an OTG dongle to connect the iWork 10 with mobile storage or input devices. Microsoft did manage to include a full-size USB2.0 port on the even slimmer Surface RT, it is really a shame that Acube fail to do the same to the iWork 10.
Display and Sound
The 10.1-inch IPS screen has a 1,280 by 800 resolution. Although it is not as High-definition as the displays found on the iPad Air and some of the Android tablets, it still offers excellent color and contrast, as well as a very good viewing angle. You can even put the tablet down on a table to your side and still read text and view images clearly on the screen. Text is quite readable in Windows 8 UI-optimized apps, but if you view text on some apps in desktop mode, they may look small. That said, the screen is clear enough that you can still see the letters clearly. It's not going to win any awards for screen vibrancy, and certainly never going to challenge Retina, but it's good enough - and helps Microsoft keep the price down to a reasonable level.
Tapping, swiping, and prodding the screen was easy and accurate in on the Start screen and in Windows 8 UI optimized apps. It took a little more precision in desktop mode, which is where you'll use all the Windows programs that aren't optimized for Windows 8 mode. We had trouble tapping on small items and text on the screen before we got used to the sensitivity of the touch screen. This is par for the course for Windows 8 tablets, but if you're uneasy about working without a pointing device, you can purchase a stylus, I used the stylus that I bought along with the Acer Iconia W700 and it works perfectly on the iWork 10.
Sound from the system's speakers emerges through two apertures on the tablet's back. While there is the right amount of stereo effect and desirable volume, the richness of the sound is far less excellent than that produced by the Dolby-enabled speakers featured by the Acer W700. Still, the iWork 10 betters my Surface RT in both display and sound.
Software
The Acube iWork 10 ships with an inactivated version of Windows 8.1 (I have found a way to successfully activate it without being charged, lol). If you haven't yet read up on 8.1, I'd encourage you to check out the exhaustive screenshot tour, which breaks down not just the new UI features, but also the new built-in apps as well.
Speaking of new UI elements, you've probably heard by now about the "return" of the Start button. Indeed, there's now a Start button fixed in the lower-left corner of both the Start screen and the desktop, but clicking it just takes you back and forth from one to the other; if you were hoping for a return to the old-school fly-out menus, installing a third party software is the only solution. What's nice, though, is that Microsoft added an option to keep the same wallpaper for both your desktop and Start screen, so that the transition from one to the other feels less jarring; it almost looks like the Live Tiles are floating on top of your desktop. One of my favorite features, actually -- I suggest you try it out.
You can snap more than just two windows side by side on-screen, depending on the size and resolution of the display you're using. You also get more flexibility in terms of how much space every window takes up; it no longer has to be an 80/20 split. Other changes: You can take photos from the lock screen, and accept Skype calls too. Users now have more tile sizes to work with, including an extra-wide one and a tiny, quarter-sized one. You also have more options for arranging your app list, so that alphabetically isn't the only option.
The on-screen keyboard has received some neat shortcuts, which should be especially useful on all those smaller 8-inch tablets, which are easy to type on in portrait mode.
Search also works differently in Windows 8.1. For starters, you can do more just from the right-hand pane where the search results usually appear. From there, you can open apps, click on web results or even play music from the Xbox Music app. More importantly, perhaps, the OS can now create on-the-fly "apps" (for lack of a better word), which pull together all sorts of information on a given search result. For instance, a search for "China" would combine images, news, maps, a Wikipedia entry -- you name it. Just scroll through it from left-to-right inside the app, as it were, and when appropriate, you'll be redirected to other apps, like Maps.
Finally, Windows 8.1 adds a number of native applications, including Health & Fitness and Food & Drink, along with a calculator, alarm and sound recorder. Also, you'll want to check out the Photos app, even if you think you hate taking pictures on tablets: The app has gone from being spare and rudimentary, to actually offering some great editing features. My personal favorite is Color Enhance, which lets you adjust the color on a specific part of the photo using an intuitive on-screen dial. Definitely a must-see as you're giving yourself a tour around the new OS.
Running Windows 8.1 means that the iWork 10 is able to access all the windows compatible software, making it a much more productive device than the iPad, Surface RT or Android tablets. The HDMI port enables its user to connect the tablet to a much bigger display, which further enhances its productivity.
Besides, if somehow you decide that a Windows system is not what you want on a tablet, Acube will soon release an Android ROM for the iWork 10. And even better, you will probably be able to switch between both systems on one tablet.
Keyboard Covers​
The Acube iWork 10 does not have a kickstand like the Surface does, that’s why I strongly recommend the buyers of this slate to buy the official keyboard along with the tablet.
The design of the Keyboard cover is brilliant, even more so than the tablet itself. The extended part can be folded into a stand when you need to use the iWork 10 as a laptop.
And unfolded it can then protect the back of your tablet.
The connection of the iWork 10’s Keyboard cover is similar to that of the Surface. The magnetic connector on the bottom edge of the tablet instantly catch hold of the optional keyboard cover, so that you never have to guide them in.
The keyboard is more similar to the Type Cover, rather than the Touch Cover of the Surface, because it does offer pretty desirable key press depth. I found that I could type quickly with a low error rate, though I never totally got used to the closeness of the keys. We wouldn't be surprised if you came to prefer the Touch Cover once you got used to it, and it only cost RMB399, which is about $66 in US dollars.
The Keyboard offers greater press depth than the Surface Touch Cover and the Bluetooth Keyboard of the Acer W700.
Performance
The iWork 10 comes with a quad-core Intel Atom Z3470D processor, 2GB of DDR3L memory, and the aforementioned 32GB of SSD storage. The combination resulted in a CINBench R10 score of 3,262 points, which is the top for Atom-powered tablets. The ThinkPad Tablet 2 (1,754 points) was slower due to its older dual-core Atom processor, and the Lenovo Miix 2 10’ (3,303 points) scored close ahead of the iWork 10, since it shared an almost identical internal configuration. But the Acer W700, with its powerful i5 Processor, smashed them all with an astonishing 6898 points.
Sunspider, which tests Java performance, logged a result of 420.2ms on the iWork 10, putting it way ahead of the Surface RT (968.2ms), ThinkPad Tablet 2 (733.6ms), and 2013 version of Google Nexus 7(1141.9ms), closely behind the iPad Air (384.0) and Acer Iconia W700 (266.7ms).
The more graphically-intensive PeaceKeeper returned a score of 1012, which again put it way ahead of the Surface RT (329) and almost all the ARM-structured devices, but still no match for the 3516 points the Acer Iconia W700 delivered.
Essentially, if you've been holding out for a system that will perform like a full ultrabook laptop, the iWork 10 is as close as you can get while still using a power-sipping Atom processor.
In real world use, the iWork is extremely responsive, handling everything from scrolling through the start screen to opening image-heavy websites with speed. I haven’t experienced unbearable lags and hiccups in the two weeks that I spent with it, though delays did occur on a couple of occasions while background tasks pile up. Yet, the iWork 10, with Windows 8.1 on it, is still much faster than most RK3188 Android tablets. Sometimes it feels even faster than the i5 powered Acer Iconia W700, as the later is obviously labored by its own 1080P display.
Battery Life​
That energy-efficient processor helps the iWork 10 eke out an excellent 8 hours 11 minutes on our battery rundown test (720P Video Looping), which is virtually neck-and-neck with the Surface RT (9:04), and much more time than the Acer W700, which barely made it to five hours powring its 1080P display and hungry i5 processor. This means that the iWork 10 will easily entertain you beyond a normal workday, even if you use it as a laptop.
Verdict​
If you are only looking for a media-consuming device, your money would probably be better spent on an Android tablet with a higher-resolution display, I can easily list a dozen of these tablets for you if you want me to. But if you do need a tablet for both entertainment and business use, and hope to keep your expenditure to just under $300 (before accessories), then the iWork 10 makes a strong argument for buying a Windows 8 tablet instead of a cheap laptop, Chromebook, first-generation Apple iPad mini, or Android tablet. It is able to access the full Windows-compatible app library and will work with the same browser plug-ins as your home laptop. The skimpy leftover free storage does concern us quite a bit, but it should be on your short list if you have access to a 64GB micro SD card to shove into the iWork 10's expansion slot.
Other photos:

Screen looks awesome
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Maduro78 said:
Screen looks awesome
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Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The screen is good, but not as high-def as many of the Android tabs, I think it is nice they put overall performance before the screen.

Maduro78 said:
Screen looks awesome
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Click to collapse
I think Win8 tablet will dominate the market eventually.
Sent from my CUBE A5300 using xda app-developers app

Thanks for your accurate review!
Very interesting device

Thanks a lot for reading.
Sent from my LG-F240L using xda app-developers app

awesome tablet
hope android rom

wangyiling said:
hope android rom
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks a lot!

Do you know what the brightness is in terms of cd/m2?

zijin_cheng said:
Do you know what the brightness is in terms of cd/m2?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
not sure.
Sent from my GT-P6810 using XDA Free mobile app

I used the stylus that I bought along with the Acer Iconia W700 and it works perfectly on the iWork 10.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Do You mean that common rubber-like-rounded pen OR a precision drawing stylus like a Wacom that comes with the Surface?
I think the screen should be electromagnetic-type for this.

Fran.K said:
Do You mean that common rubber-like-rounded pen OR a precision drawing stylus like a Wacom that comes with the Surface?
I think the screen should be electromagnetic-type for this.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yes, but i think it is still just a capacitive screen.

jupiter2012 said:
yes, but i think it is still just a capacitive screen.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Can you post a link or the model name?
Thank you.

Fran.K said:
Can you post a link or the model name?
Thank you.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
you mean, the stylus?

jupiter2012 said:
you mean, the stylus?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, the stylus. My tablet is a iWork10 "clone". Before buy I asked to the seller about this but have no confirmation.
It would be very nice have the same precision than a Surface Pro.

I need a copy of the BIOS I blocked OTG does not work my keyboard

Teclast P98 Air （Octa-core）Hands-on Review

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Crashing into the spotlight is a new Android tablet for tech gadget lovers to desire – The Teclast P98 Air (Octa-core), the first tablet powered by the all new Allwinner A80T SoC. It is now available in China for about $195, but if you want to buy the tablet in Europe or America, then things get a little pricier with importing.
How does this processor do in the benchmark test and what else the P98 Air (Octa-core) can offer? You will find out in our review – Only here on Cngadget.info.
Main Features
--Android 4.4 Kitkat
--9.7" IPS Retina Screen, 2048 x 1536 pixels
--CPU: Allwinner A80T Octa-core, 2.0GHz
--GPU: PowerVR Rogue G6230
--2GB RAM + 32GB ROM
--WiFi/Bluetooth/OTG/Miracast
--Dual Camera, 13MP back camera + 2MP front camera
--Li-Ion 8000mAh Battery
Design and Build
At first glance, the P98 Air looks very much like an iPad Air clone, as many have commented. But it is different, there are no physical buttons in the front panel, only a 9.7-inch IPS display and relatively small bezel.
In Portrait, all the ports and slots are located on the top edge of the slate, you will find a 3.5mm audio jack, a Micro SD card slot, a unique USB3.0 data/charging port and a micro-HDMI port.
The right side of the tablet hosts all the hardware controls – a power/standby key and a volume rocker.
In the bottom side of the tablet you will find the stereo speakers.
On the metallic back of the P98 Air (Octa-core) you will find some of Teclast's branding and the 13MP rear-facing camera and the LED flash.
Teclast claims that the P98 Air Octa-core is only 7.4mm thick, but according to out measurement, it is actually 7.6mm, obviously thicker than the 7mm CUBE Talk 9X and feels almost as thick as the 7.9mm Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7. Overall it is still quite slim compared to most of the Chinese tablets!
Display and Sound
The P98 Air sports an IPS Panel at the resolution of 2,048 x 1,536 -- the very same as the iPad Air. It's one of the most impressive displays I've seen on a tablet to date, though it isn’t the absolute best, I would give that honor to the Google Nexus 10 2 or the Samsung Galaxy Tab S. However, things do look fantastically sharp here. Text is rendered incredibly crisp and the UI looks better than ever. The first-party icons are all crisp and clean, though some of the third-party app icons do look like they could use a new, higher-resolution rendering. Thankfully, the apps themselves look overwhelmingly fine.
The brightness of the display is also top-notch, almost as searingly bright as the 700 nits the ASUS Transformer Pad can pump out. Colors are well-rendered and viewing angles are extremely good.
Top: CUBE Talk 9X Bottom: Teclast P98 Air
Left: Samsung P6800 (Super AMOLED Plus) Right: Teclast P98 Air​
The color reproduction will also appeal to many, as it's pretty close to reality - it lacks the punch of the Super AMOLED screens seen on the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S for instance, but it will depend on personal preference as to whether that's a good thing.
Teclast employs stereo speakers on the P98 Air Octa-core and they're situated at the bottom side of the tablet. This lets them create a moderately convincing stereo image, but you will possibly block the speakers with your hands while you are holding the slate in landscape.
This isn’t the last word in sound quality, though. The main positive is dialogue is very clear and crisp, and the speakers reach a decent volume without obvious distortion. But there’s very little mid or low-end here, so there’s a real lack of warmth and body to the sound. They’re good for TV dramas and documentaries, but they fall short with music and anything action packed.
System & Interface​
Teclast hasn’t as drastic changes to Android in the P98 Air as, say, Xiaomi has with its MIUI, but it has managed to leave its own mark with some customized widgets and applications.
What we are talking about here are the icons, which look very much like those on the iOS and Xiaomi interface, the absence of an application drawer could be annoying to those who love the stock launcher.
Performance
​
The P98 Air Octa-core is, generally speaking, very smooth and slick. The kinks and jerkiness we detected in the Cube Talk 9X are mostly absent, though the P98 Air Octa-core doesn’t zip along quite as smoothly as the Snapdragon 800 powered LG Optimus G Pro2.
The processor behind this is Allwinner’s A80T, which is in eight core chip with four ARM Cortex A15 CPUs clocked at 2.0GHz, and four lower-power ARM A7 cores at 1.3GHz. It’s right up there with the most powerful processors on any Android phone or tablet, scoring 765 in Geekbench’s single-core test, and 2,235 in the multi-core. Even accounting for Chinese brands’ reputation to boosting benchmarks with high performance modes, it’s clear this is a very powerful device.
We tried a few other benchmarks, although bear in mind that these measurements are of limited use to prospective buyers. In Antutu 4X, the P98 Air was returned a score of 50,652. That compares with 41,638 for the CUBE Talk 9X - so yes, it has the potential to be almost twice as fast as the LG G Pad 8.3 (23,254) and Samsung Galaxy S4 (26,138). It's even faster than the Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4, which was recorded at 34810.
With the monstrous Imagination PowerVR Rogue G6230 GPU on board, the P98 Air is an even more impressive performer in the graphics department, more than powerful enough to run even demanding games smoothly. It scored 13,939 in the 3D Mark Ice Storm Unlimited test, and maxed out the Ice Storm standard test. It’s only a few thousand points less than the iPad Air, though, and you’re unlikely to find any games that won’t work on it. The only downside is that the 4:3 aspect ratio of the display may make some of the games designed for widescreen look a little bit too stretched. With that said, the P98 Air Octa-core, like most phones and tablets at present, has more processing power than it really needs.
Thanks to the multi-core structure and 2GB RAM, the P98 Air had little problem running several big applications simultaneously. Opening dozens of image-heavy websites in the stock browser and playing a 1080P video on top at the same time, the tablet remained extremely responsive.
Cameras​
The P98 Air features dual cameras, a 13MP rear-facing camera and a 2MP front-facing camera. The rear camera has an LED flash as well, which is handy. While the numbers might sound incredibly promising for a tablet, the actual quality of the photos is not.
The P98 Air is able to take some usable photos for Facebook and Instagram update, but the lack in clarity and sharpness is still very obvious, and you would never want to flash them into real photos.
The rear-facing camera is capable of 4K video shooting, but the quality of the videos it captured again wasn’t really good at all. The images were noisy and unstable, it is awkward to use a 10-inch pad to record videos anyway.
Battery
Here comes the greatest disappointment of this slate - the battery life. The P98 Air packs an 8000mAh Li-Po battery, and Teclast claims that it will give its users an average of 8-10 hours’ screen time. But in our standard tests, the P98 Air’s battery performance didn’t live up to its promise.
In our online video playback test, it took only 6 hours and 28 minutes for the tablet to shut down due to battery drain.
And we got even poorer result looping Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Can’t hold us” video (5 hours and 29 minutes).
We are not sure about the cause of such disappointing battery performance, maybe it is due to the lack of optimization of the new chipset, or maybe it is a result of the brightness of the display. Hopefully this issue can be fixed by later firmware upgrade.
Special features​
Knock on
One of my favorite features in the Teclast P98 Air is the ability to wake the tablet without using the power button by tapping twice on the screen. Called "Knock Knock" or "Knock On," it's sort of a necessary side effect from such a big screen. You might want to wake the tablet to see a notification, but not necessarily reach your fingers to the right side of the tablet to do so. We first saw this feature In the LG G2, and it is wonderful that a Chinese brand is willing to learn from the best!
USB3.0
In its early promotions, Teclast glazed over the importance of one new feature of the P98 Air Octa-core —the USB 3.0 data/charging port. The obvious plus for USB 3.0 is that it offers far faster data rates, potentially increasing the speed of transferring music, videos, and photos to and from our tablet.
Another less obvious benefit is we'll be able to charge the tablet directly from our PC much faster (assuming we have a USB 3.0-enabled device). USB 2.0 ports generally provide up to 500mA current, while USB 3.0 is 80 percent faster at 900mA, making plugging the tablet into our laptop more akin to connecting it to a wall charger.
Transferring files from my Acer W700 to the P98 Air was extremely fast, more than twice the speed of to the CUBE Talk 9X, thanks to both the USB 3.0 port and the eMMC storage the Slate has on board.
HDMI
As is mentioned above, the P98 Air has a Micro HDMI port on board, so that we can use it as a media center in the living room, watching videos and browsing pics on a larger TV or monitor.
Verdict​
The Teclast P98 Air (Octa-core) is a strong tablet with a few obvious weaknesses.
The Good
The P98 Air (Octa-core) is a pretty light and slim tablet, making for a super sleek media companion. Its beautiful screen, capable of delivering rich tones and colors, is also on our favorite list. Useful features such as USB3.0, Knock-on and HDMI really showed Teclast's determination in making a winner tablet. It is also sensibly priced, the 32GB version costs you only RMB1,199 ($195), which is less than one third of which a 32GB iPad Air asks for.
The Bad
According to our test results and experiences with the slate for more than 2 weeks, the P98 Air (Octa-core) delivers very poor battery performance. And the 13MP rear-facing camera’s performance is nowhere near what the numbers would suggest.
The Truth
The tablet is portable, nice-looking and has a great display. So if you need a media device to stream all your movies and browse all the awesome Tumblr galleries, you have come to the right place.
Our overall impressions are not very good, though, lots of things should have been a lot better. The P98 Air is promised as a top notch product from the Android ecosystem, we once even hoped that it could blow the CUBE Talk 9X out of the water, but it turned out to be just another mediocre Chinese tablet.
Sent from my GT-P6810 using XDA Free mobile app

build.prop of P98 Air (C6V8)
Hello,
i have a little problem. i edited my build.prop of the Teclast P98 Air (C6V8) because of timezone etc (things I should never have to change)... now the tablet wont boot anymore and i've no active usb-debugging. so i can't pull my backup out of the RomToolbox-directory and otherwise a cant push any files because the device is not "authorized" via adb.
now i've read that may its possible to inject an correct build.prop via update.zip from sdcard or adb sideload. i have an update.zip with an update-script that would replace the incorrect file
would anybody so nice and upload the stock build.prop for me!? Thanks dudes!

I like this tablet.

Krystyna said:
I like this tablet.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I hate this tablet

Simple Root for P98 Air
Very simple, with Taipower's own upgrade program installation package to a local upgrade. The upgrade package is downloaded to the plate in any position, you can find it.
Then click Taipower upgrade program
Select Local Upgrade
Select the downloaded upgrade package
Follow the steps to restart
root completed
Works really flawlessly!
Have Fun!

Antisound said:
Simple Root for P98 Air
Very simple, with Taipower's own upgrade program installation package to a local upgrade. The upgrade package is downloaded to the plate in any position, you can find it.
Then click Taipower upgrade program
Select Local Upgrade
Select the downloaded upgrade package
Follow the steps to restart
root completed
Works really flawlessly!
Have Fun!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
thank you very much! it works on my teclast p98 air (build v1.14)
i don't know what taipower means, i think it means teclast update app - i used it and it works

Dead
Antisound said:
Simple Root for P98 Air
Very simple, with Taipower's own upgrade program installation package to a local upgrade. The upgrade package is downloaded to the plate in any position, you can find it.
Then click Taipower upgrade program
Select Local Upgrade
Select the downloaded upgrade package
Follow the steps to restart
root completed
Works really flawlessly!
Have Fun!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hello,
thank you for the instructions. It works.
I have serious problem and was not able to resolve it even after whole day spent googling. I rooted it, install another launcher and found out, there is no option to set it as default, so I tried to remove the stock launcher. The system did not detect any of them and I was only able to enter the settings menu. So I tried to do factory reset to roll it back. But it removed only data. I thought it reflash the whole rom back but it did not. So I downloaded a rom for this tablet from a forum, copeid it to the sd card and installed through boot menu (available when I press power button + volume up button). There were error "E:Error in /tmp/sideload/package.zip" and after that I am not able to access even the settings menu as before. Can anyone download the rom from their tablet and send it to me please please please? I would be very grateful.
I have tow others possibilities to get it work:
1. getting the rom which I can flash to the tablet (from SD card) - either the stock one or any other which works
2. getting the usb drivers to flash the rom using either ADB or using the PhoenixSuit (which does not work now - it tells me that no device is connected (probably because I have no usb drivers for this tablet)).
Please any help? I'm completely helpless
Roman

Please mirror firmware for P98 3G (A9H8)
Can someone please mirror this file on dropbox or somewhere else - I can't get past Baidu registration requiring China-based SMS.
http___pan.baidu.com/s/1i3CRLJ3

I need same rom, my tablet stack on the logo viewing

The Cube i7 hands-on review – the first Core-M tablet from China

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Cube is well-known for their cost-efficient Android tablets, which matched those market-leading flagship slates in terms of overall performance while having a much lower price. And last year, this Chinese company started to enter new areas such as the smart accessories as well as Windows tablets to compensate its shrinking Android tablet business.
Cube's first-ever business-focused high-end tablet, the i7, is a superior system in every way. With a stunning, high-resolution screen and a wider range of connections, but it’s the upgrade to the extremely powerful Intel Core-M processor that is most telling. Also, with Windows 8.1 and the full range of applications at its disposal, the i7 feels like a stronger, more flexible device.
Cube i7 main specs:
• OS: Windows 8.1 with Bing (64-bit)
• Screen: 11.6-inch IPS, 10-point multi-touch, IGZO
• Display Resolution: 1920 x 1080 (16:9)
• CPU: Intel Broadwell Core-M 5Y10c
• CPU Frequency: 0.8GHz (Base clock) – 2.0GHZ (Turbo clock)
• GPU: Intel HD Graphics 5300
• RAM / Storage: 4GB DDR3L / 128GB SSD
• Function: WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, 4G, USB Host, HDMI
• WiFi: 802.11 b/g/n, WiFi hotspot
• GSM: band2, band3, band5, band8
• TDS: band34, band39
• WCDMA: band1, band5
• TDD: band38, band39, band40, band41
• FDD: band1, band3, band7
• Camera: 5MP back camera, 2MP front camera
• Battery: 7.4V - 5,000mAh
• Ports: Micro SD Card Slot, Micro USB 3.0 Port, Micro SIM Card Slot, 3.5mm Headphone Jack, DC Charging Port
• Size: 297*180*9.1mm, Weight: 840g
Design
Cube i7 (left), Acer W700 (right)
Android tablets and Apple iPads might be fighting it out for the thinnest, lightest tablet title, but Windows tablets normally are not competing that fiercely in this department. With its unusual 11.6-inch screen and rather big bezel, the Cube i7, which is 9.1mm thick and 840 grams in weight, is neither particularly svelte nor particularly light by tablet standards. It is as thick as the Microsoft Surface Pro3, which also measures at 9.1mm.
But if we compare it to the older Windows tablet models, we found it a much more compact slate than products such as the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 (13.5mm, 907g) and the Acer ICONIA W700 (11.9mm, 950g). The reason that the Cube i7 is much slimmer than most of its competitors is because it is fanless, and we will discuss this later in our review. With that said, it’s a little too heavy to use comfortably one-handed, and makes more sense if you have it resting on the arm of a chair or your lap while you tap away.
On the plus side, the relatively large bezel makes it very easy to grip, and you have to twist quite hard before there’s a hint of give where the corners meet the sliver metallic rim.
The rear cover sports Cube and Intel Inside logos, while there’s a plastic piece at the top where the 5-megapixel camera pokes through.
The i7 is an incredibly promising tablet when it comes to connectivity. It has a 3.5mm headphone jack, a Micro SD card slot, a Micro-HDMI port for an external display and – best of all – a micro USB 3.0 port as well as a Micro SIM card slot. With these two, it can connect to any USB 2.0 or 3.0 device that will run on Windows 8.1 and access the internet almost anywhere. Fortunately, the i7 is charging through an independent DC port, and I personally prefer this design rather than charging through the Micro USB 3.0 port because we often need to use the USB port to connect to other USB devices such as a mouse or external storages. What’s more, with Bluetooth 4.0 and dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi, it couldn’t be better equipped for wireless connectivity. The only negative I could think of is that the Micro SD card slot featured on the i7 only supports cards up to 32GB, which could potentially be a pain in the ass in the time coming.
There are only two physical buttons – the power/standby key and the volume rocker, both hosted on the top edge of the tablet.
The Touch Windows Key is located on the front panel, below the display. And the front facing 2MP camera is in the middle of bezel above the screen.
Look at the bottom of the tablet and you’ll also spot another connector which connects its keyboard magnetically. Sadly, the keyboard cover, although already on sale as a standard accessory which is included in the retail package, isn’t available for test. That’s a shame. With a keyboard cover attached Cube i7 could rival the Surface Pro 2 as a convertible ultrabook-style device.
The Cube i7's build quality is solid - it has to be at this thickness to ensure rigidity - but not as altogether epic as the Surface Pro 3's look and feel. Cube's use of a blue metallic shell gives the tablet decent premium feel, but it doesn’t offer multi-color options like the Microsoft Surface does.
Screen and sound
Cube understands well that 1920 x 1080 is the new baseline standard for a high-end tablet, despite the operating system it runs. So we get a full HD 1080p 11.6-inch screen on the i7. That’s tangibly larger than the screen on your average tablet, and 1-inch larger than the screen on the Surface Pro2. That’s bad news for pixel density, but good news if you plan to get some work done, as that little extra bit of screen real estate makes it easier to see what you’re doing if you’re working on Office documents, browsing complex web pages or using the Windows Snap split-screen view. With that said, I personally prefer the 12-inch display on the Surface Pro 3, the 3:2 screen aspect ratio makes better sense for business use, which is the ultimate selling point of Windows tablets.
Quality of the i7’s display, meanwhile, is extremely good. Text still looks smooth and crisp, and while the display isn’t the brightest we’ve seen – particularly when you compared it to the ultra-bright panel on the Acer ICONIA W700 – it does have wide viewing angles and an impressive richness and depth of color to compensate. It’s an excellent screen for entertainment, but a good screen for productivity, as well.
Audio is a mixed bag. It’s clearer and much more detailed than you generally get from a tablet, with a wider stereo sound. Unfortunately it’s also a little thin, a little bit wearing and doesn’t offer much in the volume department, particularly if you’re playing music or watching some Action films. The Cube i7 is nowhere near what the Dolby enhanced Acer ICONIA W700 can do in terms of the volume of the speakers.
As with the vast majority of tablets, we’d recommend headphones if you want decent sonic experience.
Performance
Cube has equipped the i7 with an Intel Core-M CPU, which has a base clock of 0.8-1.0GHZ and a Turbo clock of 2.0GHZ, Aided by the incredibly beefy Graphics HD 5300, 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 128GB Solid State Drive, it is surprisingly fleet of foot. For those who don’t know much about Intel’s Core-M processor, it is a new 14 nanometer processor which matches the horsepower of the Intel Core-i5 Haswell series CPU yet doesn’t need fan cooling!
As a standalone tablet, the i7 delivered, with good on-screen typing, an accelerometer that wasn't too sensitive. Volume controls on the top edge, along with Micro-USB and Micro-SD card slots make it reasonably easy to use this as a standalone device. Startup and application load times are swift, and the SSD is much faster than the eMMc drive we've encountered with budget Windows tablets. Sequential read and write speeds of 504MB/sec and 139MB/sec respectively in the AS SSD benchmark are respectable. To make it short, you won’t be needing any more performance if you use the i7 as a tablet, full stop.
Of course, for a more all-day experience, you'll want to add a keyboard and touch pad or mouse. Cube makes it easy, with a snap-on keyboard dock that transforms the combined system into a traditional clamshell laptop. Although our test unit doesn't come with the customized keyboard base, we had no problem connecting the i7 with different Bluetooth and Wireless keyboards.
Unlike the entry-level Atom Bay-trail powered Windows tablets, which normally struggle with heavier desktop applications. The Cube i7 is built for serious tasks, most of the heavy desktop apps worked brilliantly.
If you find benchmark testing more convincing, the i7 was returned some impressive scores by various benchmarks, beating similar devices such as the Acer ICONIA W700 in most of the benchmark tests.
In the Cinebench Release 10, the Cube i7 was returned a score of 8,616, which didn’t match the 9,324 notched by the Surface Pro 3 (i5, 4GB RAM), but trumped the Acer ICONIA W700 and those entry-level Windows tablets such as the ASUS A100T and Cube iWork 10.
OpenGL is not a strong suite of the Core-M series processor, yet the Cube i7 still managed to get a score close to the test results of those i5 powered tablets in the Cinebench Release 11.5’s OpenGL test. Its CPU performance, according to the Cinebench CPU test, is somewhere between the Surface Pro 3 (i5, 4GB RAM) and the Acer W700.
The Fritz Chess Benchmark returned a score of 3,877, which was indeed far behind the 4,899 by the Surface Pro 3, but still quite ahead of the 2,983 by the Acer W700.
The web browsing performance of the i7 was exceptionally good. In the Sunspider test, the Cube i7 was returned a score of 82.5ms, which was the best I have ever seen on a tablet.
However, in the more graphic-intense Peacekeeper test, the i7’s scored less than the Surface Pro 3 and the Acer ICONIA W700.
Ludashi benchmark focus on the overall performance of a PC, and the Cube i7 also got a decent score running this test.
The HD Graphics 5300 embedded in the Core-M Processor is a slightly more powerful GPU than the HD4000 or HD4200 embedded in the 3rd and 4th generation of i-series processors, and even beats some entry-level discrete graphics, however, it still doesn’t match the performance of the HD4600 and HD5200, both of which have a higher voltage.
The i7 is clearly not a system designed for heavy 3D game lovers, although it is able to run most of the 3D games in acceptable frame rates. But as it is fanless, the heat could be overwhelming if you keep running graphic-intense games for a long period of time.
But if we are talking about business and everyday use, the Cube i7, when paired with a keyboard and a mouse, is a nearly perfect choice. I received the Cube i7 before the Chinese New Year break, and have done a lot of travelling since. I have been using my i7 to check emails, set up meetings and prepare business presentations. I have almost given up the desktop PC in my office because all the most updated business files and emails are now stored in my i7. I only need to connect it to a monitor when the 11.6-inch display feels too small for those complicated Excel sheets.
Even though the Cube i7 is a little more business-focused, but let’s not underestimate its potential for entertainment use. My Samsung Galaxy Tab has also been left unbooted for days as I have been using the i7 to stream my favorite TV shows and entertainment news. With the Windows 8.1 OS, I don’t need to worry about codec support for different formats of video files, like I normally do with Android tablets and iPads. It is true that Android and iOS have more multimedia applications and games designed around a touchscreen, but the number of apps in the Windows 8 store is also growing fast. And neither Android nor OS comes anywhere near Windows 8.1 when it comes to the total number of applications.
Many readers might be concerned about the heat dissipation of the i7’s fanless design like I did upon receiving my unit. The truth is, the i7 does get a little warm after a few hours of consecutive use, but never to a point where you want to get your hands off it.
Overall the i7 excels as a workhorse Windows 8 slate tablet. It's got a lot more performance potential than those Atom BayTrail-equipped Windows 8 tablets. Plus, a detachable keyboard base, which is included in the retail package, can turn the i7 into a full ultrabook. Therefore, the i7 can replace both your tablet and laptop. But if you only want a device for intense 3D gaming, it makes better sense to get a desktop PC with high-end discrete graphics and cooling fans.
Connectivity
Like we mentioned earlier in the review, the i7 offers a great deal in connectivity. Besides the USB port, Micro SD card slot, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth we normally get from a Windows tablet. The i7 also includes a Micro SIM card slot which supports both 4G FDD-LTE and TDD-LTE data services.
Internet access via the 4G and 3G networks is swift. And the Bluetooth 4.0 on board means you don’t always need the OTG adapter if you want to connect your tablet with input devices or an external audio system. With an SSD inside the shell, data transmission through the Micro USB 3.0 port is several times faster than through a USB 2.0 port on a laptop with HDD storage.
Keyboard Base
The keyboard base, which is included in the retail package, can easily be attached to the i7 through the magnetic connectors, instantly turning the i7 into a full laptop. Sadly, the base can only make the i7 stand with a fixed angle, which can be uncomfortable for the users sometimes.
Here, the keys aren't as squished as the ones on the Microsoft Surface Type Cover. The i7’s keyboard is more expansive, with no shrunken or undersized keys. It didn’t take me long before I was typing at my usual brisk pace.
The keys offer decent press depth, with every keystroke, I make a loud "clack," letting anyone around me know I'm getting stuff done. Just so you know, I'm typing this sentence from the i7. The thing is sitting on my lap, even. And you know what? I'm doing quite alright. This isn't my favorite keyboard, but I do feel comfortable enough. Also, the i7’s keyboard base is not as flimsy as the Surface Type Cover, Instead it is as sturdy and comfortable as most laptop keyboards.
The Cube i7’s keyboard base brings a touchpad as well, and that's a good thing, because the latest Windows 8.1 update made the OS much more mouse-and-keyboard friendly. Even though the touchpad is pretty precise and responsive, it's still many steps behind the sort of glass touchpad you'd find on the MacBook Air or many Windows Ultrabooks. It sometimes takes multiple tries to get two-finger scrolling to work. Ditto for clicking and dragging windows and other objects around the screen. Other times, I accidentally navigated backward out of a web page when I was really trying to do some other sort of gesture. If you intend the i7 to be your daily driver, you are better off with a wireless or Bluetooth mouse.
Besides the standard functions a keyboard is meant to offer, the i7’s keyboard base also provides the users with two additional full-sized USB ports, making it easier to connect the i7 to a mouse and storage devices while saving you from the burden of always carrying the OTG adapter.
Battery Life
What's funny about the Cube i7 is that it has a chipset which produces as much horsepower as most of the ultrabook systems, along with a 1080p touchscreen -- precisely the sort of thing that would normally suck the life out of a battery. And yet, the 7.4V, 5,000mAh battery lasts several hours longer than bigger touchscreen Windows 8 systems with similar internals. Specifically, we got 9 hours and 13 minutes of runtime after looping a video off the local disk with Wi-Fi off and the brightness fixed at 50 percent.
The i7 looks even more impressive when you compare it to lighter-weight, ARM-powered tablets. You wouldn't expect that to be the case -- this really isn't a fair fight -- but in fact the difference in battery life isn't as drastic as you'd imagine, especially if you take into account tablets that offer merely average endurance. The, for instance, the Xiaomi Pad lasts only about half an hour longer than the Cube i7; and most of the Android tablets we tested before were beaten by the i7.
We'll admit, the iPads or the Samsung Galaxy Tab S offer more longevity in the battery front. But here's the thing: we don't know of any Core-i5 tablets that can even come close. Take the Dell Venue 11 Pro for instance: it merely lasted 6 hours in the same battery run-down test, and also the Acer ICONIA W700, which I have used for more than 2 years, offered an average of 5.5 hours screen time on a charge. Compared to that, the Cube i7's battery life would seem much more exceptional. After all, those are the real competitions of the i7, at least as far as key specs go. It's incredible, then, that the i7's battery life is more typical of a low-powered ARM device.
Cameras
Photos taken by the rear camera
Like most of the tablets on the market, the i7 has dual cameras. The front-facing 2MP camera is decent enough for video-conferences on Skype, but you wouldn’t want to use it for selfie. The rear-facing 5MP camera is arguably the worst 5MP camera we have encountered. Even with decent lighting, it still cannot shoot photos clear enough for Instagram updates. With that said, who would actually use an 11.6-inch tablet to take pictures?
The Competition
We get what Cube was going for here and really, it's an intriguing proposition: a hybrid that can be used as a standalone tablet, but is powerful enough to be your next laptop. As we said, it's fast and offers awesomely long battery life, however, let's not forget the cost: with a connectable keyboard, the i7 is priced at RMB3,599 ($574.4), which is pretty aggressive pricing for a tablet with a Chinese brand attached to it. We suppose you'd feel more comfortable researching a few similar options before shelling out 600 bucks.
We mentioned the Surface Pro 3, which has already been on sale for a few months. It starts at $699 for the i3, 64GB model, with the Touch/Type Cover keyboard sold separately. All versions of the Surface Pro 3 support pen input, which the Cube i7 doesn't. For only $489.99, you can get a Dell Venue 11 Pro with a 10.8-inch display, a Core i5-4210Y processor, 4GB RAM and 128GB SSD; for $723, you can get the more updated version of the Dell Venue 11 Pro, the Venue 11 Pro 7000, which features the same Core-M 5Y10, 4GB RAM and 128GB SDD as the Cube i7 does and, if money is less of an issue and you want an even more future-proof tablet, you can get the most advanced Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 with an even more powerful Core-M 5Y71 processor, 8GB of DDR3L RAM and 256GB of SDD. However, whichever Dell Venue 11 Pro you choose, you will need to spend another tad of money for Dell’s keyboard.
If we take a look at Cube’s fellow Chinese competition, there are also a few options. One of them is the RAMOS M12, which made its debut appearance at CES, 2015, features a more powerful Core-M 5Y70 processor, an 11.6-inch 1080P display and 4GB RAM and, most of all, an adjustable stand as well as a full USB3.0 port. Another one is the PIPO K2, which is powered by the same hardware as the Cube i7 is and also includes a Micro USB 3.0 port. However, neither the RAMOS M12 nor the PIPO K2 is available now, even worse, their prices and release dates are still unknown.
Wrap-up
Upon unboxing the Cube i7, I instantly fell in love with this slate a lot. After a few weeks spent with it, I still do, and I think you might too, but you'll have to get past some surface flaws in order to truly appreciate it. The i7 is heavy, even for a tablet with a capable Core-M processor, and though it's slim and solidly built, it has a plain look that can be off-putting. The good news is that it's fast, even among Windows 8 PCs, and offers surprisingly long runtime. If I am being honest, after my experience with the Acer ICONIA W700, which consistently disappointed me on the battery life front, I didn’t expect much longevity from a tablet with so much horsepower under the hood, so it's impressive that the i7 succeeds in being powerful while still lasting eight-plus hours on a charge. Most Core i-series tablets don't have that going for them.
The problem, though, is that the Cube i7’s overall design doesn't make the best sense. The inclusion of an adjustable stand would have been a more versatile solution, as you could be able make it stand when you use it as a standalone tablet. And the fact that it only has one Micro USB 3.0 port means that you need to remember bringing the OTG adapter whenever you decide to take the Cube i7 as your travelling company.
The Cube i7 may not have surpassed the Surface Pro 3 in terms of quality, design and performance just yet. But it is among the highest ranks of enterprise-ready tablets. If you want something designed specifically for the business user (as opposed to the consumer-focused iPad Air 2), but you don't want to spend $500 extra bucks on the Surface Pro 3 and its keyboard, then you can't go wrong with the Cube i7.
The good:
Well-constructed metallic body which feels not only solid, but also premium.
The 11.6-inch 1080P IPS display is excellent for both productivity and entertainment.
Solid performance powered by the impeccable Core-M processor.
Fanless, the Cube i7 is quiet, I tested this device for many days and never heard a peep.
An average of 8 hours’ battery life.
The bad:
The Micro SD card slot only supports cards up to 32GB.
It normally takes minutes to reboot the tablet, even without the system upgrade.
The i7 tablet doesn’t have a kickstand.

No one is interested in this tablet?

It's too expensive, :/ for that price i Prefer getting a Surface 3 to be honest.
I'll personally wait for Pipo K2 and Ramos M12 , prices won't be that high with them.

ShizukoZ said:
It's too expensive, :/ for that price i Prefer getting a Surface 3 to be honest.
I'll personally wait for Pipo K2 and Ramos M12 , prices won't be that high with them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I really doubt that the RAMOS M12 or PIPO K2 should be any cheaper.

jupiter2012 said:
I really doubt that the RAMOS M12 or PIPO K2 should be any cheaper.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Pipo have annouced a core M tablet that will be priced at 400 $ (in China so surely it will be a bit more expensive for us )
and we all know Pipo have good quality products

ShizukoZ said:
Pipo have annouced a core M tablet that will be priced at 400 $ (in China so surely it will be a bit more expensive for us )
and we all know Pipo have good quality products
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The $400 tab isn't the PIPO K2, but another tablet with only 64GB eMMc storage, which is clearly no match for the 128GB SSD used in the Cube i7. Also, the PIPO tablet comes without a keyboard, but the i7's retail price covers the keyboard base. For the storage alone I wont even consider buying the PIPO tablet.

There have been other Core-M powered tablets announced.

Thank you for the review. I seen this tablet and wanted to see if it really is worth while. Its funny seeing people say "I'd rather get a SP3" because they seem to forget that you have to be over $1k for the SP3 that competes with this tablet.

the Ubuntu variant
Thanks for the work in writing this up! I was curious if anyone had seen this tablet running the Ubuntu variant. I have been considering importing one and this might have swayed me a bit more.

Driver pack
Yesterday I have received this tablet and wow its great value for money. I've been stupid enough to download and install Windows 10 Tech Preview without copying the drivers from the old 8.1 x64 installation. Does anyone has the driverpack for this device at his disposal? I have asked Cube support too. The good news is that it is running WTP 10 build 9926 and build 10049 is downloading now.

Drivers
I also need the wireless drivers. Any ideas?
Jerome! said:
Yesterday I have received this tablet and wow its great value for money. I've been stupid enough to download and install Windows 10 Tech Preview without copying the drivers from the old 8.1 x64 installation. Does anyone has the driverpack for this device at his disposal? I have asked Cube support too. The good news is that it is running WTP 10 build 9926 and build 10049 is downloading now.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Windows/ Linux Drivers
And another poor bastard who has no drivers anymore...
I also installed the Win10 tech preview without saving the drivers. To be honest in the last years, drivers haven't been that much of a problem anymore so I wasn't careful enough.
So yeah I put Ubuntu 15.04 on it. It detects the touchscreen at least but also no Wifi, which is probably the most important part...
So if anybody, who has the original software, could extract the drivers and upload them, i'd be very happy!
Not only the Windows drivers but also the Linux drivers.
Thanks a lot in advance!
P.S.: I also contacted Cube and two different shops on Alibaba. In case I get a useful answer, I'll let you guys know!
---------- Post added at 06:36 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:24 PM ----------
Ah guys I found at least the windows drivers: http://techtablets.com/downloads-drivers-roms/
Techtablets definitely are good guys and hosted them! Find them under Cube - > i7. (Not Cube -> Cube i7).
So it looks like i'll go back to the Windows10 Tech Preview now and put Linux on my main laptop.
But still: If anyone orders the Ubuntu version of this tablet, please extract the drivers!
My shop actually asked me, if I want Windows or Ubuntu preinstalled. I figured, "yeah sure, I won't say no to a free Windows licence. I can put on Linux myself..."
Unfortunately it's just the Windows installation without a demo and now I don't have Linux drivers.

DerDave said:
And another poor bastard who has no drivers anymore...
I also installed the Win10 tech preview without saving the drivers. To be honest in the last years, drivers haven't been that much of a problem anymore so I wasn't careful enough.
So yeah I put Ubuntu 15.04 on it. It detects the touchscreen at least but also no Wifi, which is probably the most important part...
So if anybody, who has the original software, could extract the drivers and upload them, i'd be very happy!
Not only the Windows drivers but also the Linux drivers.
Thanks a lot in advance!
P.S.: I also contacted Cube and two different shops on Alibaba. In case I get a useful answer, I'll let you guys know!
---------- Post added at 06:36 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:24 PM ----------
Ah guys I found at least the windows drivers: http://techtablets.com/downloads-drivers-roms/
Techtablets definitely are good guys and hosted them! Find them under Cube - > i7. (Not Cube -> Cube i7).
So it looks like i'll go back to the Windows10 Tech Preview now and put Linux on my main laptop.
But still: If anyone orders the Ubuntu version of this tablet, please extract the drivers!
My shop actually asked me, if I want Windows or Ubuntu preinstalled. I figured, "yeah sure, I won't say no to a free Windows licence. I can put on Linux myself..."
Unfortunately it's just the Windows installation without a demo and now I don't have Linux drivers.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Great, thanks a million. Meanwhile I also contacted Cube support and they came with this link:
http://pan.baidu.com/s/1kTMMpAB I'm checking your download since that seems to be a newer date.
Furthermore, there is also a recovery image posted to win 8.1 x64.
http://pan.baidu.com/s/1gdmxKC7
Has anyone experience with the Cube keyboard? Is it really fix as it looks? Not foldable I mean? Are there alternative keyboards that suit this model, for instance the Onda V116w?

Jerome! said:
Great, thanks a million. Meanwhile I also contacted Cube support and they came with this link:
http://pan.baidu.com/s/1kTMMpAB I'm checking your download since that seems to be a newer date.
Furthermore, there is also a recovery image posted to win 8.1 x64.
http://pan.baidu.com/s/1gdmxKC7
Has anyone experience with the Cube keyboard? Is it really fix as it looks? Not foldable I mean? Are there alternative keyboards that suit this model, for instance the Onda V116w?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Those drivers are a dump using doubledriver from my Cube i7 64gb model. I did a fresh Windows 8.1 install and restored using those drivers so I can confirm it works. Do you have a Cube support email or contact ? Can you please PM me their details?
I have an issue with the USB 3.0 port, I wondered if yours is the same? I can't get anything over max usb 2.0 speeds from it. I planned to run usb 3 hubs and even a usb 3.0 displaylink docking station, but I can't.
Please use any usb 3.0 drive or memory stick and see if you can get over 40mbs read or writes.
As for the keyboard it's both good and bad, the fix one position, non foldable is at a perfect angle for a desk. And the bad part, is the the touchpad (If you can call it that!) is worthless. It's the worse touchpad I've seen I think. Lucky for me I always use a wireless mouse, but for touchpad people, its best avoided. The keyboard does fit down nicely into the keyboard for travel etc.

I uploaded this video to Youtube today explaining the issue to my stubborn Ali Express seller who clains there is no issue and to cancel my dispute.
https://youtu.be/m0z3vbTydZo
It's a great tablet, but I expect the advertised usb 3 port to run as usb 3, not a usb 2 one. And sometimes I cannot even get the port to work with portable hard drives or USB sticks.

Thanks for the heads up on the keyboard. Will see what alternatives I can find.
About the USB 3.0 all my USB disks that I have laying around are all USB 2.0 ones, so sorry, cant put them to the test.
---------- Post added at 03:43 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:17 PM ----------
There are new drivers uploaded dated 24-04, maybe this will address the issue with USB?
http://pan.baidu.com/s/1kTj7Wwf

Another new set of drivers for the I7
http://pan.baidu.com/s/1jG3nvWq
Update drivers from 08-05 http://pan.baidu.com/s/1nt1LvZF now available

kr8r said:
Thanks for the work in writing this up! I was curious if anyone had seen this tablet running the Ubuntu variant. I have been considering importing one and this might have swayed me a bit more.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Cube did provide the Ubuntu ROM on their official forum.

Hendrickson said:
I uploaded this video to Youtube today explaining the issue to my stubborn Ali Express seller who clains there is no issue and to cancel my dispute.
https://youtu.be/m0z3vbTydZo
It's a great tablet, but I expect the advertised usb 3 port to run as usb 3, not a usb 2 one. And sometimes I cannot even get the port to work with portable hard drives or USB sticks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
How come, mine works perfectly fine with portable hard drives. And with the keyboard you get 3 USB3 ports in total.

dualboot
is it possible to dualboot windows and ubuntu (or some other linux) on this device?
first i did not like the cube i7 because it has no real usb-ports. but i saw in this thread that there are usb3 ports on the keyboard.
i think i will order this one instead if the teclast x1 pro (which is not available atm)

Cube i7 Stylus review: a Core-M tablet with Wacom pen

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With the help of Intel and Microsoft, many Chinese companies based in Shenzhen have been transformed from budget Android tablet makers to PC manufacturers. Cube, as one of the front-running Shenzhen brands, released in January, 2015 their first business-focused tablet – the Cube i7, which is also known as the first Core-M powered tablet from China. The Cube i7 was proved to be a huge success for the Chinese company. It won numerous awards and got more than 99% of positive feedback from the buyers on JD.com, the largest Chinese online shopping mall. With this much confidence, Cube released their second Core-M tablet recently, and this time it is paired with a Wacom pen.
The i7 Stylus, which comes with a much lower price compared to the original i7, has attracted lots of attentions since its announcement. The domestic price of the i7 Stylus is RMB2,099($338), and the price for oversea buyers is $499, but Cube will host many sales event where buyers could get the tablet for only $299 including shipping, the first event held on Aliexpress on July, 23rd was extremely successful, 3,000 units were sold in just one day.
Cube i7 Stylus Specs
OS: Windows 8.1 (will be updated to Windows 10 soon)
Screen: 10.6-inch IPS, 10-point multi-touch, IGZO
Display Resolution: 1920 x 1080 (16:9)
CPU: Intel Broadwell Core-M 5Y10c
CPU Frequency: 0.8GHz (Base clock) – 2.0GHZ (Turbo clock)
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 5300
RAM / Storage: 4GB DDR3L / 64GB SSD
Function: WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, 4G, USB Host, HDMI
WiFi: 802.11 b/g/n, WiFi hotspot
Camera: 5MP back camera, 2MP front camera
Battery: 9,000mAh
Ports: Micro SD Card Slot, Micro USB 3.0 Port, 3.5mm Headphone Jack, DC Charging Port
Size: 273.77*172.03*10.5mm, Weight: 690g, Color: Black front and blue rear
Retail package
The packaging of the i7 Stylus is very nicely designed, inside we found a i7 Stylus tablet, a DC charger of 12V-2.5A, an OTG adapter, a user manual, a warranty card, a VIP card, and a quality certificate.
Design and build
If you’ve seen the Cube i7 in the flesh, the i7 Stylus looks utterly familiar. The similar sturdy but sleek metal body, the similar gently curved corners and wide black bezel, the same subtle Windows logo on the front. The i7 Stylus consistently feels great in hand, and shrugs off smudges well. With the proper screen protection, it could easily survive the day-to-day rigors of a traveling professional, and even the occasional drop. The Cube i7 is once remarked as one of the best built non-mainstream devices on the market, and we believe that the i7 Stylus could get the same rating in this particular area.
Although the i7 Stylus is not really a light tablet, the weight is evenly distributed, and no points flex or creek under moderate pressure.
The front of the tablet is dominated by the screen and relatively big bezels, below the screen you will find a touch-sensitive Windows key, and above the screen is a 2MP front-facing camera for video chat.
The i7 Stylus has a Micro SD slot, a Micro USB 3.0 port, a Micro HDMI port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a DC charging port along with the power button and volume rocker on its outer surface.
The magnetic connectors on the bottom edge instantly catch hold of the optional keyboard base, so that you never really have to guide them in. And once they’re in place, you can dangle the tablet from the keyboard if you want — that thing is staying put. Although the i7 Stylus has a footprint different from the i7, but it does have the same magnetic docking seen on the i7. As a result, it is compatible with the keyboard base designed for the later.
My only complaint about the design is the absence of a full USB port on the tablet. You always need to carry an adapter or the keyboard base if you want to connect the tablet with input devices or storage via USB. Compared to the design language of the i7 Stylus, I really do prefer Ramos’ approach with the M12, which comes with a full USB 3.0 port and an adjustable kickstand.
Display and Speakers
The Cube i7 Stylus has a 10.6-inch IPS display, with a 1920 x 1080 resolution and 16:9 aspect ratio. In terms of pixel density, the i7 Stylus has about 208 pixels per inch, whereas the Cube i7 has about 189 PPI.
As expected, the i7 Stylus’ screen looks great. Viewing angles are wide, colors accurate, and it shrugs off glare quite well, definitely much better than the LCD panels on average laptops.
Even compared to superb displays such as the one on the Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro, the i7 Stylus’ screen still holds its ground. I admit that I do prefer the somewhat over-saturated colors on Samsung’s PLS screen most of the time, but there are people more comfortable with the slightly more true-to-life colors on the i7 Stylus’ IPS display.
If there is a complaint, it’s that things can feel a bit tinnier on the desktop side compared to the Cube i7 and Microsoft Surface Pro 3, owing to the slightly smaller screen. Though it supports touch, users will likely turn to a mouse, trackpad, or pen for navigation here, as the desktop requires a good amount of precision.
The speakers are very well placed on the right side of the tablet. The sound is flat, but it’s balanced well enough with little to no distortion, and the volume is acceptable for watching videos in a quiet room. If you plug in a pair of high-end headphones or nice speakers, you will notice that the i7 Stylus in no average Chinese tablet in terms of sound quality, thanks to the wonderful Realtek ALC269 sound card used in the tablet.
Pen and touchscreen
The stylus is a big point of differentiation from most other Core-M powered Windows 8 hybrids. The good news is that the pen paired with the Cube i7 Stylus is based on Wacom technology, which means it is snappy and super responsive, and a genuine pleasure to use on the tablet’s high-resolution screen, the bad news is that you won’t find it in the retail package of the i7 Stylus tablet because the pen is sold separately for $32.
Unlike the tiny pen hidden in the back of the Samsung Ativ Smart PC Pro, the pen that’s paired with the i7 Stylus is the size of a normal ink pen, with an eraser button on one end and a large button placed comfortably on the side. Click it and you have a right-mouse button with a beautifully positive action.
I have seen Wacom pens which have shallow, flimsy buttons that make it hard to tell when you’ve pressed them, but no such problems occur to the pen that comes with the i7 Stylus. Turn it over and you can wipe out what you just wrote or drew.
Writing with the pen in applications such as OneNote for Windows 8, in the Microsoft Office programs or in the handwriting recognition panel of the on-screen keyboard is smooth and accurate.
And while the handwriting recognition isn’t perfect, it’s accurate enough to make notes searchable or to let you write in a URL. Certain applications can even make use of the pen’s 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity. For example, it makes the pen very much of a joy for working in Photoshop or in natural media painting tools such as ArtRage or Fresh Paint.
If you’re using a watercolour brush or a pastel crayon on a textured surface, drawing with your finger gives you a single, solid weight – more like a felt-tip pen or a bucket fill. With the Wacom pen, you can stroke lightly to get a thin light, light wash or gentle crayon stroke, or scribble fast and hard to get thicker, heavier lines.
The pen is also very accurate for selecting small icons in a complex interface such as Photoshop, or opening a link on an heavily loaded web page (much easier than the small touchpad on the Keyboard base, or your finger on the screen).
The combination of pen and touchscreen makes i7 Stylus extraordinarily versatile for drawing, sketching, painting, image editing and note taking.
Cube claims that the keyboard base designed for the i7 Stylus will feature a slot for the Wacom pen, so when you are not using it, you can just push it into the keyboard. But as we have neither received the keyboard nor seen one, we’re in no position to say whether it is a smart design or not.
In an ideal world, we’d prefer to have a permanent place to keep the pen on the tablet itself, instead of on the keyboard base. As we do often use the i7 Stylus as a standalone tablet, and only need to connect it to the keyboard base when we need to do a lot of typing.
Software and interface
The i7 Stylus ships with licensed Windows 8.1 with bing, and will be updated to Windows 10 within August. Unlike the Cube i7, the i7 Stylus does come with 1 year of authorization of Microsoft Office 365, the most important productive tools for any Windows tablets. Both the Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 are something of a hybrid, with both desktop and the Windows Store apps, touch and keyboard, the control panel and the finger-friendly PC Settings app.
On the i7 Stylus, as long as you’re comfortable with gestures such as swiping to open the charms bar, switching apps and closing an app you don’t want, the two fit together almost seamlessly.
You can swipe across the Start screen fluidly, pinch for semantic zoom, swipe up to get rid of tiles you don’t want, snap two apps (including the desktop) side by side – that’s great for chatting on Facebook or Skype while you work in one or two office programs.
I often read my business Emails and signed some of the attached PDF files with the Wacom pen at the same time.
All of this works on any Windows 8 PC with high enough screen resolution, but it is extremely smooth on the i7 Stylus – as the slate is powered by one of the stronger processors.
Performance
The Cube i7 Stylus is powered by a Core-M 5Y10c processor. The dual-core CPU has a base clock of 0.8GHz and a turbo clock of 2.0GHz, while the GPU is a mighty Intel HD Graphics 5300 running at 1GHz. There is 4GB RAM on board to take care of big productivity programs and multi-tasking, There is 64GB SSD internal storage as well as a Micro SD card slot which supports cards up to 128GB.
As you’d expect from an Ultrabook that just happens not to have a permanent keyboard, the i7 Stylus is fast. It boots in less than 10 seconds, and takes the same time to resume from hibernation, thanks to the high-speed SSD.
If you haven’t used the Core-M powered tablets or Ultrabook and don’t know what to expect from the i7 Stylus. Well, it’s almost on par with the latest Core i3 processors in terms of processing power. If you want us to compare the Cube i7 Stylus to the Atom Bay-trail powered Windows tablets such as the ASUS A100T or the latest Microsoft Surface 3, the i7 Stylus is definitely much, much faster. The benchmark scores above tell the story.
When running Photoshop and applying complex filters, editing 15GB raw images in Lightroom, rendering HD videos in Premiere Pro, watching 450 fish swimming at 60fps in the FishIE benchmark, the Core-M 5Y10c in the I7 Stylus shows its speed and power.
You’ll have no problem transcoding audio and video, running Visual Studio or using modelling and CAD software.
Unfortunately, as the i7 Stylus is fanless, its metallic rear side did get quite hot when we were running big applications and benchmarks, sometimes even to a point where I want to get it off my hands.
Battery Life
The i7 Stylus packs a 9,000mAh Li-Po battery, with the screen at a comfortable brightness (around 30%) for working indoor, running several desktop programs and Windows Store apps at the same time, with Wi-Fi on and the keyboard base in use, browsing the web and receiving and sending email, we were routinely able to work around 6 hours.
Depending on what you do, this is going to vary the way it does on any other notebook or tablet. Play games or browse complex web pages that use the GPU more, and you’ll get shorter battery life. Turn off Wi-Fi and turn the brightness down and unplug the keyboard and you’ll get longer battery life.
In our standard cngadget battery rundown test, we loop a 1080P video on the i7 Stylus with 50% screen brightness and 50% volume from the built-in speakers, the tablet lasted 5 hours and 12 minutes until automatic shutdown. This result put the i7 Stylus behind most of the fanless Windows tablets we’ve tested. It is also less screen time than what the Surface Pro 3 or Surface 3 are able to offer.
Connectivity
The i7 Stylus offer many connectivity options: it has dual-band 2.4G/5G WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, a Micro USB 3.0 port for hosting input and external storage, a Micro SD card slot which supports cards up to 128GB, and a Micro HDMI port to output the visuals to a larger display. With the keyboard base connected, you will have two extra USB 2.0 ports, which frees you from the awkward OTG adapter. The i7 Stylus doesn't come with a Micro SIM card slot seen on the i7, but it isn't really a letdown since most of the Windows tablets and Ultrabooks don't have one. And the fact that even the cheapest budget smartphones now come with 4G data access and Wi-Fi hotspot functions makes the SIM card slot on a tablet even less of a selling point.
Cameras
We’ve seen outstanding camera performances on some of Cube’s flagship Android slates such as the Talk 9X and T9, but with the i7 Stylus, it is a whole different story. While the 2MP front-facing camera is decent enough for video chat, the 5MP main camera is really bad, probably one of the worst we have seen on any tablet.
Even with decent lighting, the photos can still be very noisy and not clear enough for Facebook or Instagram updates.
Summary
Even with a pen-enabled high-resolution screen, a capable Core-M processor, 4GB RAM, SSD and a well-built keyboard base, the i7 Stylus still struggles to provide the same experience as a full-blown laptop: the standing angle is not adjustable; the 64GB internal storage is too small for a PC; without a left and right button, the touchpad on the keyboard base is not always easy to use….
However, if you’ve ever wanted a lightweight tablet PC for taking handwritten notes and sketching on, and prefer not to spend as much as $600 on a Microsoft Surface 3 or to tolerate the somewhat sluggish performance of the Atom based Windows tablets, the i7 Stylus could be what you’ve been looking for.
The good
The 10.6-inch Full HD IPS display has wide viewing angles, true-to-life colors and amazing brightness.
The Core-M 5Y10c processor and 4GM RAM are more than capable of dealing with heavy business tasks.
The i7 Stylus is shipped with Licensed Windows 8.1, which will soom be updated to Windows 10, and there is also one year of free subscription of Office 365.
With a Wacom-made digitizer layer under the touchscreen, the i7 Stylus works wonderfully with a Wacom pen, which further enhances its productivity.
The SSD in the i7 Stylus is fast, many times faster than the eMMc storage in the PIPO W8 and Microsoft Surface 3.
Priced at only $338, it is arguably one of the most cost-efficient business-focused Windows tablets out there.
The bad
The battery life of the i7 is below the average of Core-M powered tablets.
The rear side gets quite hot when the CPU is running at full load.
The rear-facing camera is low-quality and not useful at all.

That looks nice!

good review thank you very much

Great review!
Can you install linux on that tablet?

p3rand0r said:
Great review!
Can you install linux on that tablet?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think it is possible, but I am no fan of Linux.

ahmed1994 said:
good review thank you very much
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Thanks for reading it.

Hi,
also got this tablet. Quality is very good. Compared do Pipo which i've got its big improvement.
But got two questions:
Made update to Win 10. As I see Cube come with 1 year Office.
I don't see that option in W10. I know - i should firstly activate it on W8.1
Is there any image to recovery to W8.1 ?
Second question - ordered with Pen - but didn't get it.
Has any one know which wacom pens are compatible.
I got Wacom Bamboo and it for sure is not compatible.
Thanks
Bartrek

bartwaw said:
Hi,
also got this tablet. Quality is very good. Compared do Pipo which i've got its big improvement.
But got two questions:
Made update to Win 10. As I see Cube come with 1 year Office.
I don't see that option in W10. I know - i should firstly activate it on W8.1
Is there any image to recovery to W8.1 ?
Second question - ordered with Pen - but didn't get it.
Has any one know which wacom pens are compatible.
I got Wacom Bamboo and it for sure is not compatible.
Thanks
Bartrek
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
the windows 8.1 preinstalled on the i7 Stylus is Windows 8.1 with bing, but the image you could find on Cube's official website is Windows 8.1 professional, you won't be able to activate the Windows license once you flash that image. Cube has yet to fix this issue,.so mu answer to your question now is no, but i will keep u posted and let u know as soon as they fix this issue.
Sent from my LG-F460K using XDA Free mobile app

Hi,
Thanks for the review! Could you please confirm if the WiFi chip supports 5GHz networks? This review says the tablet only supports 2.4GHz.
Perhaps they're shipping this model with different wireless connectivity chips?

ToTTenTranz said:
Hi,
Thanks for the review! Could you please confirm if the WiFi chip supports 5GHz networks? This review says the tablet only supports 2.4GHz.
Perhaps they're shipping this model with different wireless connectivity chips?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No the Chip is a Realtek RTL8723BU which only supports 2.4GHz 802.11ngb upto 150Mbps + Bluetooth 4.0. Which is insanely slow as all my devices are hooked upto gigabit links.
The chip performance is really bad and you probably have to do a mod to the antenna to get 3MB/s+ as I can only achieve 2MB/s maxed out.

Damn... what's up with all chinese devices getting terrible wireless connectivity?

hi what happend to the pictures? i cant see any of them... all broken

Hello Jupiter2012, I would like to ask whether you could edit 1080p video smoothly on Premiere pro using the Cube i7 Stylus?
Thanks!

Ditto. I'm curious to see how well Cube i7 can handle premiere pro. I will need editing 1080p short videos as well and having no lag preview playback would be nice. Or would you recommend other cheap windows tablet for this application?

Great review.

cherremvp said:
Great review.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for reading it.
来自我的 LG-F460L 上的 Tapatalk

K koo

I could buy this tablet (with keyboard) in like new conditions for a price of 180 euro.
Does it worth or for less than 250 euro it's possible to find a better tablet/2in1/convertible ?
Thanks.
Sent with my Huawei Nova Titanium

TapaSte said:
I could buy this tablet (with keyboard) in like new conditions for a price of 180 euro.
Does it worth or for less than 250 euro it's possible to find a better tablet/2in1/convertible ?
Thanks.
Sent with my Huawei Nova Titanium
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think I paid € 230 for a new one. (without keyboard)
The performance is very nice. Battery runs fine for about 4-6 hours. (Watching movies, Surfing, installing, updating ... )
But I think with keyboard 180 it is not too bad. I do not know any tablet for € 250 that is faster.

peterl30 said:
I think I paid € 230 for a new one. (without keyboard)
The performance is very nice. Battery runs fine for about 4-6 hours. (Watching movies, Surfing, installing, updating ... )
But I think with keyboard 180 it is not too bad. I do not know any tablet for € 250 that is faster.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As alternative I've found a surface pro 3 (4/128) that I think could be more reliable
Sent with my Huawei Nova Titanium