Review of Hi8 Pro after several days of usage

[Hans]

I took some photos from the outside and also opened the tablet. I wanted to search if it possible to connect power somewhere inside. Sadly it is not easy to figure out, there are no obvious test points. Somehow I would need to fiddle around at the USB-C connector.

The mainboard looks to be glued onto the screen. There are two screws, but they seem to offer some support for the connector. There are pins for a second speaker. Around the Realtek sound chip there is place for a few other ribbon cable connectors, I don’t know what they are for. Next to micro SD slot there seems to be an unpopulated slot and an area around it. I think this could be a place for a SIM card plus mobile data modem. The R+ R- pads have no connections, there is no component to attached to it.

At the top there is one WIFI antenna and two unused mounting spaces. One could be for example for an ambient light sensor. If Chuwi would relocate the speaker e.g. to the top or the other side, I would be possible to have a bigger battery inside.

I would love to see what is under the cans, but I don’t want to risk damaging it. The smaller contains the WIFI chip, the antenna is going there. The bigger one must be the CPU + some interface chips + eMMC.

If someone wants to donate me their faulty one, I can do a full teardown and post high-res photos.

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[Dave]

Hi!
Thanks for the pictures!!!
I have a question, have you tested if your tablet recognise a microphone as installed? Because mine doesn’t and if I am not wrong, in the last photo there is one soldered to the motherboard (lower right side of the photo).

[Hans]

yes my microphone works. It is located at the bottom right corner. There is a small groove in the case.  If I open the Windows mixer for recording device, I can see a Intel SST microphone and the mic level.

I tried recording with Audacity, it works without a problem.

[Dave]

Hans wrote:

yes my microphone works. It is located at the bottom right corner. There is a small groove in the case.  If I open the Windows mixer for recording device, I can see a Intel SST microphone and the mic level.

I tried recording with Audacity, it works without a problem.

Well, with that and the information in the other post in the forum (“Hi8 Pro dual boot os is here”), I think the conclusion is that the tablets with a serial number between 0 and 2000 might have some different hardware inside, and therefore a different BIOS. Mine is one of them, what makes me wonder now if it will end up receiving any BIOS update.
I am not sure, but I will try to open the tablet in the future to check if any different component is visible in the inside.

[dawei]

Why I bought it / usage
shame on me

Battery runtime
as expect but terrible. shutdown at 40%

Boot time and eMMC speed
slower than dv8p

Audio
worse than dv8p

Cameras
never use it

WIFI and Bluetooth, HDMI output, micro SD
after rebuild the system the sd is working

Screen
good the screen with little problems(flash screen) I have to restart.
x265 does not work

Summary
pos
shame on chuwi

 

sn 2xxx

[Vedran]

dawei wrote:

x265 does not work

 

It didn’t occur to me to test x265 playback on Chuwi, so I tried a 1080p x265 encoded video, played it with VLC from Windows Store and it was (surprisingly?) just fine. What kind of issues are you facing?

[Pete Scoffield]

Not too bad! I found the dual boot version on geekbuying at $99, seems like a good price for what it offers.

[Ryan]

I got this tablet directly from china in recent sale , dual boot win10+android 5.1 system. Not much complain for a tablet at this price.

Mainly i use this for surfing, reading articles and checking some documents.  The screen was bright and sharp .

However, the only annoying thing to me , the backlight is too strong in the dark ( even at zero percent brightness).  Have to use app like night screen, lux to filter down the brightness.

Also, the battery drains out quite fast if you running video or games. It don’t last long .

 

 

 

 

[Pete Scoffield]

If anybody’s still interested in this tablet, geekbuying’s fb page just posted a $20 coupon. I’ll leave if here so you can save some time: 20CHUWIHi8Pro

[Author]

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