Reply To: Cube iWork 12

[SteveM]

Excellent overall review. I have the Cube iWork12 too and I would concur with your review.

Mostly I use it without a keyboard, but it works well with my iPazzPort miniature wireless keyboard. I also tried plugging it (in Windows mode) into my wireless Microsoft mouse and to one of my HD 1080p screens and it worked well there too. I fitted a 128Gb microSD and it works well with that too.

I find the battery life really good – and I count on that because one of the things I use it for is when I’m playing a gig I have all my sheet music stored on it and I need it to stay alive for a whole concert with the screen on the whole time – I also use that particular piece of Android s/w with an iRig Blue Turn device which is a Bluetooth set of pedals for page turning and that works really well too. I bought the tablet mainly for this sheet music application on Android (iGigBook Pro) and hence the choice of a 12 inch screen – I need to be able to clearly read the dots whilst playing keyboards and it’s great for that – no more problems with low lighting or with not having a particular piece of music with me.

I read the review about multi-tasking on Windows. I don’t really expect a tablet to be good at doing that so I only tend to do one thing at a time on Windows and that works really well including casting Chrome windows onto my TV.

I also stream videos on Android but can’t comment re the speakers because I usually use headphones – certainly over headphones I would say the sound is spot on though on an aircraft I’d have to use noise cancelling headphones because although it goes reasonably loud it doesn’t go as loud as my Nexus 7 Mk.2 and I reckon I’d have problems hearing it over the noise of aircraft engines and screaming kids. Usually I take my Nexus on aircraft as it’s a better size and weight for my carry on (the iWork12 is quite heavy).

For the money, this is an unbeatable device – I wasn’t expecting much but it greatly exceeded my expectations.

I would say that it appears that the 64Gb RAM appears to be divided between Windows and Android – it doesn’t appear to be the case that you can freely mix things up. ES File Explorer shows a tad under 8Gb of space on Android and Windows shows the C: drive as being 44.2Gb – so that totals 52Gb of the 64Gb available for storage but split as said into separate partitions for Android and Windows.

However, I am currently experiencing some problems – they’re not show stoppers at the moment although they might become so in time – recently, for no apparent reason, the Google Play Store updates for the Google App, Chrome Browser and for Dropbox cannot be installed – when I pick one it says “downloading” and having left it overnight it still says “downloading” in the morning. I’ve had dozens of other app updates run through with no problem whatsoever but just now, these 3 will not update.

I tried uninstalling Dropbox and re-installing it but the re-install would not complete the download either – in the end I side-loaded it by copying the APK from my Nexus 7 Mk.2 tablet.

Has anyone else come across this problem?

I also checked that I’m on the latest firmware and it appears that I am.