ChuWi Vi10 Thoughts

About a month or so ago, I purchased a ChuWi Vi10 tablet.  Now that I’ve had the device for a bit, here are my thoughts on the tablet.

First of all, dual booting is not a joke nor is it a novelty.  It really runs Windows, and it runs Windows pretty dog-gone well, even with just 2 GB of RAM.  The tablet does have a four-core processor, which helps some.  Now, when running in Windows, it can stutter and drag every once in a while.  I also haven’t pushed it beyond running one or two applications at a time.  Normally, I’ll run Firefox and Windows Live Writer, but not too much else.  It obviously won’t play real games, but streaming on Twitch is smooth and graphics are good enough for my low-rent web surfing.

In Android, things are pretty zippy, but the screen is blurry and out of focus.  It’s something you can ignore when page zoom is relatively high, but if you’re trying to read small print, you’ll notice the weakness.  Fortunately, you can root the device and fix the display problem.  After following these instructions, my screen is noticably crisper and I can read ebooks in Android.

As far as size and form factor go, this is a landscape tablet; it’s not something you want to try to carry around and read in portrait mode.  This means that it’s good for webpages and video, but not as good for technical books.  I’ll admit that I haven’t done much reading with this device, especially because I have a 7” tablet which is much better designed for reading.

The big benefit to the device is its keyboard.  When combined with the keyboard, the Vi10 is basically a low-price Surface Pro.  It’s not as powerful as a Surface Pro 3, not by any stretch, but it’s also about a quarter of the price, and because I don’t have laptop money to throw at a tablet, I’d much rather have the ChuWi.  As far as the keyboard itself goes, I’ve had problems with the touchpad.  It’s right in the middle of the keyboard area and you can easily move the mouse and click somewhere you didn’t mean to.  I end up turning the mouse off when I start typing blog posts or longer messages, and instead use the touch screen.

Touch screen precision is OK, but I’ve had some problems.  My fingers aren’t particularly fat, but I do seem to need to double-press or triple-press because I’m ever so slightly off.  If I lowered the resolution, I’m sure that would fix a lot of the problems, and I might end up doing that.  It runs in 1366×768 resolution, and maybe bumping magnification to 125% is the smart play.  I’m going to try that out and see if it’s the answer to my problems or if losing that much screen real estate isn’t worth it.  For precision work, I just use a mouse.

My biggest concern with this device is that the keyboard scratches up the glass—I see scratches all along the edges of my screen.  There haven’t been any deleterious effects and I haven’t tried buffing them out, but it does leave me concerned about the tablet’s longevity and whether it can withstand my…rough habits with devices.

All in all, if you can get this tablet for $150 or less—and right now you can—it could be a very good purchase.  There are rumors of more powerful ChuWi tablets coming out soon, so you might possibly want to wait, but I’m glad I made this purchase.

Advertisement