The Chuwi Lapbook 12.3 is the first laptop around to use the Surface Pro screen. 12.3″ 3:2 aspect ratio. This screen has 267 PPI with its so images are very sharp, and no individual pixels can be seen unless you get out a magnifying glass. The screen is let down a bit by these dated looking 19mm bezels either side that gives the laptop a 2010 look about it like an old Macbook Air. Which is a real shame considering the Lapbook 14.1 has some very thin bezels either side.
The build is all metal apart from a few areas like the screen bezel and the SSD bay door, which mean no more removing the whole rear panel to access the SSD slot like other models. This is great, but we’re limited to using the smaller (And slower) 22mm x 42mm size SATA3 drivers. And I highly recommend using an SSD as the eMMC seems to run much slower than expected, especially write rates.
The keyboard is one of the best if not the best I have used now on an Apollo Lake Celeron N3450 laptop, the touchpad is decent but not a precision one. It is at least better than the EZBook 3 Pro’s. Overall the Lapbook 12.3 is a quality Apollo Lake notebook with 6GB of RAM, the best screen you’ll find on any laptop in this price range. It’s only let down by a slower than normal eMMC, slightly weaker Wifi range than others with the Intel Wifi 3165 AC chip and it does heat up when gaming becoming warm to the touch.
The Intel Celeron N3450 performance is decent for a 14nm low power chip. It’s balanced for battery and not raw power. So light tasks, like web browsers, videos, docs, emails and they like is where it’s fine. Even multitasking running various tabs in Chrome is fine. Light Photoshop editing is possible and very small minor video edits (I’m talking just short 1080p clips) Encoding times are very slow. For serious work you’re better of with Core i5 laptop.
Overall if you can get over those large bezels and slightly lower battery life the Lapbook 12.3 is a great 6GB quad core laptop for the price.
