The Chuwi LapBook 12.3 Review: Premium Feel, Budget Price
by Brett Howse on September 6, 2017 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Apollo Lake
- Goldmont
- Chuwi
Battery Life
Every mobile device with a battery is going to be held back by it’s battery life, and there’s always trade-offs to be had. Larger batteries cost money, and add weight, so smaller batteries with higher efficiency can be the way to go. Chuwi has only outfitted the LapBook 12.3 with a 37 Wh battery, compared to the larger 45 Wh battery in it’s larger LapBook 14.1 sibling, so expectations are that it won’t be able to live up to that device for outright battery life.
Battery Life 2013 – Light
Our older 2013 battery life test opens a set of four web pages every minute, using Edge. It’s gotten to be that it’s far too light for almost any device, so it’s been replaced with an updated test, but since we have a large backlog of data to work with, we still run this one as well.
This is why you have to test things. Going in, with a higher density panel, and smaller battery, it would have seemed there was no way the LapBook 12.3 could keep up with the decent battery life of the LapBook 14.1, but in fact, the smaller laptop actually outperformed the bigger one. Pretty impressive start.
Battery Life 2016 – Web
Our 2016 web test is much more CPU intensive, so the scores have dropped for most devices compared to the 2013 test, unless the laptop was a gaming laptop where the CPU only makes up a fraction of the power draw. That’s not the case with the Chuwi though, and it was only slightly beaten by the LapBook 14.1. This is a solid result as well.
Normalized Battery Life
To look at the device’s efficiency, we remove the battery size from the equation to get a minutes per Wh result. The LapBook 12.3 does much better here than the 14.1 model did, coming in ahead of the much lower resolution HP Stream 11, although it can’t quite match some of the most efficient devices we’ve ever tested, especially the discontinued Surface 3. It’s still a good result, and really makes the smaller 37 Wh battery last.
Movie Playback
Movie playback can be offloaded to fixed function hardware, so it generally makes the battery last longer than our 2016 web browsing, and that’s the case here as well, but the difference isn’t huge. Still, our Tesseract score lets you know you can watch The Avengers three times before the laptop will shut down.
Charge Time
The laptop ships with a 24-Watt AC Adapter, which is 100V-240V. The review unit shipped with the wrong cable, but since it’s a standard PC cable, it wasn’t difficult to dig up the proper North American plug, which is no issue because the adapter itself handles both voltages.
With a smaller battery than it’s bigger brother, it does charge a bit faster, but it’s not going to set any speed records here.
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tipoo - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
Kind of impressive that a 3-issue core can get 70% of the way to Broadwell. Broadwell is still experientially better even with half the cores, but of course much higher power. Goldmont seems like a welcome de-crapping of Braswell.tipoo - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
When you say two finger scroll is the opposite way as most laptops, do you mean scrolling down = content goes down, or the "natural" method where content tracks your fingers, push up to get to the bottom of a document?
Samus - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
Yes, what is sometimes referred to as "natural" scrolling, opposed to "reversed" scrolling. Think of a flight sim where down is up and up is down.Personally, I find natural annoying (the default on Mac's) and always reverse it.
reukiodo - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
There is nothing natural about 'natural' scrolling. Only Mac users that have been exposed (forced) to this for a long time think this is normal. Every other human being, including kids and grandparents, by default move down to scroll down.peterfares - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Windows computers nowadays use "natural" scrolling direction.I think the reasoning is the touchpad is basically "mapped" to the screen. You drag on the touchpad just as you'd drag on a touch screen which many of these laptops have nowadays.
JoeMonco - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
Except when using a tablet or smatphone, right?pjcamp - Tuesday, November 21, 2017 - link
Because "natural scrolling" maps exactly onto how one reads a sheet of paper -- lock your eyes in a specific direction and move the paper upwards through your field of view.Oh wait . . . .
R3MF - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
Re: Linux supportAtom architectures very frequently have problems with standard linux distro's, in that they have crippled EUFI bios's, either 32bit only, or in some other way borked.
Can you install Suse or ubuntu to see if a stanard Grub2 beraing distro release can be installed on this laptop?
ThortonBe - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
I would be keen to hear the answer to this as well. It seems like a pretty tempting device, but I'd want Linux on it.abufrejoval - Thursday, October 26, 2017 - link
I didn't actually install Ubuntu, but booted it from a USB stick. The BIOS has all the required settings to make Linux work in general and Ubuntu 16.04.03 had no issue with any of the hardware parts. I'm very sure it would run without any issues, just as it runs fine on the Braswell and Baytrail Atoms I own.Didn't try SuSE, CentOS etc. or Remix either.
I returned the notebook before running really extensive tests because
* M.2 slot can only hold 4cm units (I only have 8cm ones in the recyling bin)
* space bar only worked half the time (thumb keeps hitting metal strip between space bar and touch pad)
* touch pad sensitivty is far too high, cannot be truned off or configured: It's a nightmare to type on the thing
I bought it for €400 on Amazon Germany, they raised the price to €500 afterwards--somebody must have had one too many...
It came with version 1511 of Windows 10 which went out of support the day I received it. The upgrade took almost a day but was definitely worth it: It only ever ran the CPUs to full 2.1/2.22 tilt after that and Geekbench scores became quite impressive.
Reading PDFs full screen with two pages side-by-side on that display is what it seems to have been made for: Simply glorious!
A "good-enough" laptop without any moving parts, fan or disk, remains on my wish list. They were close, but fouled up the end-game.