The $400 Ultrabook: Chuwi LapBook Air Review

[Julio Franco]

The Chuwi Lapbook Air is billed as an ultraportable 14-inch machine with a price tag of just $430. This puts it in the realm of some of the cheapest Windows laptops on the market of this display size. Chromebooks are also available for $400 or less, but let's just put those over in the dunce corner for now, because we're mostly interested in true Windows systems.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/review/1568-chuwi-lapbook-air/

 

[Digitalzone]

What I've seen the competitors at this price level has usually also some Atom-base CPU like this or Pentiums. But they have plastic body, 5400rpm HDD and 4GB RAM. So, looking at the price, the negative for me would be bad trackpad.
Sadly, the retail price will be different and not so competitive (I mean regional webshop in europe).

 

[Uncle Al]

Actually, it's not a bad deal but I would be inclined to see the next generation to see how many of these little issues get upgraded.......

 

[yeeeeman]

It is not a bad deal and really makes you think about how much other manufacturers charge for pretty basic specs. Chuwi started their business with tablets and they had and still have some nice ones with ~ same specs as this laptop, but at 150$. So it was logical for them to move to a higher margin product.

 

[Kibaruk]

In my head an ultrabook was more on the ultra side. Although not all the specs are bad, the proc certainly is underpowered.

 

[AlexYu]

I'm really puzzled.
I read several chuwi air reviews.
Reviews are different in time, site, country and language of reviewer.

But all reviews have surprising similarities in what is not mentioned.

For starters :
1. Keyboard is good, but key row F1-F12 are media and power keys by default. Alt-F4 becomes Alt-Fn-F4. Absolutely *****ic decision
2. Nobody knows how to change this "setting". Some people thinks that somewhere in BIOS
3. BIOS.. hmm. I never saw such number of settings. It's a screen opened after screen after screen. I suppose it's some kind of debug version universal for a lot of motherboards.
4. If you made a change in bios settings - you will never see again bios setup without external display
5. Sometimes (mb everytime) after windows update you loose the sound card. You will never find what's gone wrong and you don't have normal driver setup program
6. Surprisingly Linux with fresh kernels has better support of hardware than Windows 10.
Excluding touchpad Alps001

(I can recommend it as Linux notebook if you can wait for touchpad module)

I don't understand how reviewers miss this essential topics.

I have suspicion that all reviews are written without attempt of real usage even for a day.

 

[Selden]

"Chromebooks are also available for $400 or less, but let’s just put those over in the dunce corner."

The dunce corner is where bloated, slow, unstable, insecure Windows laptops belong.

Rather than making fun of Chinese English, you might want to work on your own writing skills, such as correcting this grammatical error: "...a mini-HDMI port, an microSD card slot..." If you can't spot the error, you should be over in the dunce corner.

 

[Tanstar]

Actually, it's not a bad deal but I would be inclined to see the next generation to see how many of these little issues get upgraded.......

That's exactly my thought. I don't care about trackpads, as cheap portable mice are my control device of choice, but the slow processor is a killer.

 

[Tanstar]

"Chromebooks are also available for $400 or less, but let’s just put those over in the dunce corner."

The dunce corner is where bloated, slow, unstable, insecure Windows laptops belong.

Rather than making fun of Chinese English, you might want to work on your own writing skills, such as correcting this grammatical error: "...a mini-HDMI port, an microSD card slot..." If you can't spot the error, you should be over in the dunce corner.

How about "It's as sample as that"?