Cube i9

First Intel Skylake tablet of 2016. First kickstand tablet.
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Cube i9 Review Now Online

Cube i9 Review Now Online

The Cube i9 review is now online. This one gets my thumbs up overall a very good Core M3 tablet, but not perfect. Some minor issues like the MicroSD card slot. But it has a great keyboard type cover, nice design, good build and it’s quick.

Have a look at the full review with benchmarks, game tests and more info.

What is interesting about this tablet is with a mod and tweak it will even play GTA V with around 25 fps average. Quite something for a fanless Core M tablet.

 

Video tech reviewer and tech blogger. I have a huge interest in the latest tech, tablets, laptops, mobiles, drones, and even e-scooters. Active in the tech community since 2008 days of the Omnia i900 Windows phone. Samsungi8910omnia.com, Samsunggalaxysforums.com founder from way back.

10 Comments

  1. I wanted to share my opinion.
    Screen is not glass, it is plastic. No screen protection at all, butter soft to scratch. Huge reflections. Plastic severely lowers screen quality, it is not as clear as glass. It same type of feeling like with ancient android tablets with low quality plastic screens. No oleophobic coating = all the fingerprints. Contrast seems to bee somewhere like 600:1? but thats just imo – black is by far not black, it is a bit greyish as is white.
    Cpu has worst cooling I ever seen from factory. Have to modify. Ram is good, 1866, 4 gigs..4 gigs kinda suck for a productivity tablet. I load pc and half is filled alr. (Could do 8gigs, easy.) Swap is always used. Swap on a no-brand china ssd? How long will it live. Ssd is almost not replacable – 2242 has overall 1-2 ssds with 240+ gb capacity. wtf why not normal sata, I dont get it. Plenty of goddamn space. Speeds are btw not very impressive, especially 4K speeds, which are NOT impressive.
    Battery. Battery is 8.7v 5000 mah cell, which is not 8.7 5000*2 mah cell, which cube website says. And many aliexpress sellers copied that. In fact it is 3.6v 5000mah 2cell battery with an overdrive (or how its called) to 4.35v. And that is goddamn 2 times difference to what cube says. I tested – tablet works about 2 hours with max brightness, cpu load, wlan and bt enabled. it can be extended to 3.5-4 hours, maybe more, but this is totally unimpressive.

    Overall – for 450, it is overpriced. WHy? because whom to recommend it to? If person whants premium, he can go to 600 bucks asus 305 with core m3, 256 brand ssd and 8 gigs of ram with 13.3 inch with much better glass, protected, oleophobic, normal contrast screen, with longer (1.5x) battery life and much better looking.
    If person wants a workhorse – wont any 200 bucks with a 8300 fit into that role? So basically, this tablet is apostle of being the most ridiculous thing I ve seen in a while. It is an 200-250 bucks overall tablet with a lowest tier ssd and a core m3, which in sum costs 450 (and 500+ without sale). its basically 200+ bucks for replacing atom 8*** series and emmc5 with a core m3 processor and nothing more then this.
    Let me know what you think in the comments below

    • Despite I totally agree about screen quality (I switched from MiPAd to Stylus i7 some time ago) I don’t agree its overpriced because you basically can’t find anything cheaper with that amount of features it has. Adding 200 buck more is an easy talk but it ends there – why don’t we add another 200$ and buy a Surface model? Nope?
      SSD is replaceable don’t twist it, yes not top tier ones but there are plenty of variants of affordable Chinese models and for tablet device it’s sufficient enough.
      And it is a workhorse incomparable with Atom devices, because its an m3 period.
      Personally I don’t want a premium device because its really overpriced toys imho, but I also want to do recreation stuff with it like gaming, comfortable browsing and some work I have to do sometimes (which I avoid to cause no tablet will be comfortable for real work lets face it) without my wallet sufferings.
      The only reason I didn’t get i9 is that I have i7 stylus already as I mention before so basically there are little improvements for me but it’s still a nice machine for a good value.
      To sum it up: батенька, вы зажрались.

      • Ne soglasen. What kind of features this tablet has? Core m3 processor, type c and surface-like design? I didnt find and “features”. It is as it is – a 200$-level tablet with licenced win10 and core m3 processor. Plus it has a bunch of problems and cut-offs (low quality SSD, low brightness contrast bad cooling, 1 usb port, keyboard with no usb port, no wacom support, etc). Does core m3 and win10 licenced justify +250 bucks to otherwise 200$ (because with 8300 cpu this tablet would have been in 200-250$ range wo doubts) tablet? I am not sure, decide for yourself.

        • If it had 8 gigs of ram and stylus support – I would have been quite happy with ~400$ prices. It would have been worth it 100%

    • There was a screen protector (factory installed) on my i9. Did you removed that? If not, it may gives an impression screen is plastic and gets scratches… I removed the protector and now the screen feel is much better. I believed the screen is glass.

    • get a surface pro, why all the complaint, what you trying get $10 to buy a mercedes benz?get real…..

  2. Can someone tell me if the i9 has a hall sensor? so that when it is closed up against the keyboard cover it sleeps and when opened up again it turns back on.
    I’m asking because I don’t think it was mentioned in the review.

  3. Also my Cube i9 came with different factory settings than ur sample Chris, I wrote a post in the forums about it.
    Mine got different power limit settings (4,5w only) and my Cube i9 SSD has totally different scores than ur review.

    • Yours is only 4.5W? Mine is set to 6W Power Limit stock. Increase it to 7 or 8W if your temps aren’t too hot otherwise, it will throttle. If you do the heat sink mod then you can tweak it even higher to say 9W.

  4. The latest bios version will fix the microSD-card issue. I dont have any issues, only that my card is not running at the right speeds, but that can be the card and not the tablet itself. I have bought a 512 GB USB 3.0 card reader to find out what the problem is.

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