Upgraded Chuwi UBook goes for Surface Go's throat

Chinese hardware manufacturers CHUWI have surprisungly upgraded their Chuwi UBook 2-in-1 to create a more cost-effective Surface Go alternative.

Originally unveiled through the company’s Kickstarter for the 2-in-1 system, which raised an impressive $450,000, the UBook has always been pitched as a competitor to Microsoft’s Surface Go.

With a smart change in components, Chuwi is aiming to make their offerings more efficient and cheaper than Microsoft.

Firstly, this comes with a change of CPU. While the original UBook launched earlier this year with an Intel 6Y30, Chuwi is upgrading to the Intel N4100. The new processor features a quad-core die with four threads; the highest frequency reaches up to 2.4 GHz.

Alongside a bost in performance, upgrading to the Intel N4100 has a different benefit: lower power consumption. Chuwi has used this gap in power draw to swap out the GPU from the Intel UHD 515 to Intel UHD 600, which can decode 4K video easily.

Storage has also been improved. While the original model sported eMMC memory, Chuwi has instead decided to include the storage combination of 8GB LPDDR4+256GB SSD to make UBook more efficient in dealing with multiple tasks.

Chuwi is banking on this improvement to storage in its competition to beat the Surface Go.

“At a similar price, compared with UBook 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage space, Surface Go has only 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage space, which is poorer not only in the speed of reading and writing but also in the storage,” reads the press release.

In what is another strong move for the Chuwi UBook, the manufacturer has improved the number of IO on their device. For interfacing, users can use the interface of versatile USB Type-C, USB 3.0, headphone jack, DC charging, Micro HDMI and Micro SD.

As Chuwi is keen to tell us, “Surface Go only has USB-C, headphone jack and Micro SD to interface with. With only one USB-C interface, it is unable to charge while doing other operations. Instead, the user has to buy Surface Dock which is specially designed for Surface Connect interface.”