Booting into Android?

[Nayr]

I received my chuwi hi10 today , but i’m unable to boot into android i don’t see insyder anywhere so there’s a high possiblility that it’s single booted, it’s window 10 64bit though.

Any help from anyone?

 

I got it from VC lemon

[Matt Haldane]

The Hi10 isn’t dual-boot.

[kurai]

Android dual boot was only ever asserted in pre-release speculative news stories on 3rd party websites, to varying degrees of accuracy, from around August/September.   By the time the “official” news releases and specification data from Chuwi appeared in November there was no mention of it.

 

Still … I live in hope that they’ll get around to releasing an update that enables it.  Having used Win10 on the thing for a week or so I’m finding Windows in tablet/touch mode still has a lot of awkwardness and issues, and of course Windows is a huge battery hog (comparatively) even with all the power-save options in use.  I’d much prefer to have the tablet in Android mode most of the time, and boot to Win10 when I have a specific task in mind.

[T]

I don’t mind if it’s not dual boot, but I do want to know if there is at least an android image for this product now or in the future or never.

[solitwar .]

yeah the windows 10 is pretty sad, even the app store is shit, i do really want to change it to android too

[Viktor]

There are so many good android tablets out there, and prices are good too.. And there are so few windows ones… Why do you buy a Windows tablet when you actually need an Android tablet? And why do you want to dual-boot a tablet with so little hard drive capacity?

[kurai]

Viktor wrote:

There are so many good android tablets out there, and prices are good too.. And there are so few windows ones… Why do you buy a Windows tablet when you actually need an Android tablet? And why do you want to dual-boot a tablet with so little hard drive capacity?

My existing Android tablet is getting on a bit now – slow CPU & GFX, low resolution, battery is starting to fade (plus it’s a heavy old beast ;))

so I wanted a more current tech level replacement.

While I prefer Android for day-to-day & personal use I also have a need for a native Windows platform device on x86 not ARM – Android does many things well, but administration & management of large scale Windows networks and the associated tools isn’t one of them.  Ideally I wanted a device that would serve as an Android  “daily driver” plus also be capable of booting into Windows for specific tasks, which would mean I didn’t have to cart around the Android tablet plus a Windows laptop.  My laptop is currently Windows 7 – I’ve installed Windows 8 & 8.1 on it a few times but didn’t really get on with it.  Too many niggles and annoyances getting in the way, so kept reverting it back to 7.

Then I saw the Hi10 – decent size screen and “good enough” CPU/GFX/RAM and Windows 10, which was allegedly a big step up in usability from Win8/8.1  plus talk of Android dual boot “coming soon” (I only found out later that this was by no means Chuwi’s official roadmap).  At the Black Friday prices it seemed cheap enough to serve as a test bed/experiment/impulse buy.

Limited space on the primary HD is not really a concern – availability of large microSD cards & USB3 thumbdrives plus good network connectivity at home and work make huge on-device mass-storage a non issue for me.  About the only thing that would require massive disk space and wouldn’t deal well with being on slower or remote storage is games, which is something I couldn’t care less about on my mobile devices.

 

So, in summary (TL;DR time) – the Hi10 is a bit of an experiment, cheap enough to not be a big deal if it turns out to be unworkable in actual use.

 

[Laura]

well, one could always try stuff like bluestacks or duos… actually, it would be interesting to see how they run on this tablet

[kurai]

Laura wrote:

well, one could always try stuff like bluestacks or duos… actually, it would be interesting to see how they run on this tablet

I’ve already installed AMI DuOS on it – works great and performance is excellent.  Only problem there is the underlying Windows system being a battery hog when idle, compared to Android.  Windows doesn’t deal well at all with that sort of “brief use/return-to-sleep/instant-resume-when-needed” usage model.   (When in active use for longer periods of time power use is roughly comparable)

e.g. in Android I can leave the thing in ultra-low-power-drain idle mode most of the time, but still have network connectivity and instant notification of email & other alerts, quickly check them then let it go to idle again, and go 4 or 5 days on a single charge (when used sparingly).  On Windows ?  Just not gonna happen – Windows sleep-mode-with-wifi-on drains almost an order of magnitude more power than a comparable Android tab, and letting it shunt off to hibernate mode loses all the “always-on-communication-connectivity” functionality.

[Laura]

kurai wrote:

Laura wrote:

well, one could always try stuff like bluestacks or duos… actually, it would be interesting to see how they run on this tablet

I’ve already installed AMI DuOS on it – works great and performance is excellent.

 

really? could you run an antutu test? how’s the feeling? smooth or choppy?

[kurai]

Hrmmm … oddly, I can’t at present.
When I first tested it all was fine – started up OK, install of gApps apks worked, and it imported & installed all my apps and settings from an existing Google tablet profile.
Performance seemed very good – smooth and fast with no incompatibilities that I could find, although I didn’t run any actual benchmarks.

However …

I’ve since upgraded my Hi10 from Windows 10 Home to Pro edition (mainly for the Remote Desktop/Hyper-V/Bitlocker functionality). Just re-installed DuOS and now it’s giving me issues.
Won’t work with Hyper-V active at all and even with Hyper-V disabled won’t run unless in compatibility mode as Administrator (which means the gApps install won’t work, since that is done from Windows Explorer context menu, and has to be as the same user as current session i.e. not Administrator). It also seems to use a lot more CPU – on initial Win10 Home install it would drop to idle as expected and only had 1-5% CPU utilization in Windows task manager. Now it won’t drop below 40%-ish.
It also won’t complete the Antutu v6 tests. Completes the GFX steps but then crashes DuOS about 75% of the way through the CPU/Memory tests.

I’ll play some more and let you know if I get anywhere.

[Laura]

i bet that is because duos can’t run with hardware assisted virtualization when hyper-v is enabled (or installed or whatever) so you get issues and pitiful performance…

[kurai]

Yeah – running in basic non-VTx S/W emulation mode seems to be the likeliest scenario. Win10Pro must be doing something annoying, some obscure registry setting disallowing exclusivity or hooking core/kernel into the VTx pipeline, since the problems still occur with all the Hyper-V services disabled and even with the whole Hyper-V component tree uninstalled in the Windows Features & Components control panel page.

[Thomas Struer]

There is a android symbol on the side of the box.

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[Jorge Huaman]

Thomas Struer wrote:

There is a android symbol on the side of the box.

Yes, but note that the box next to the Android logo is not checked.  VC Lemon on AliExpress did tell me that Chuwi may release and Android dual boot update in the next 2 -3 months but that was just a possibility.  Nothing confirmed that I know of.

[Author]

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