Chuwi Hi9 Air; 10.1-inch tablet with huge battery backup

Known for its proficiency in manufacturing notebooks, laptops and tablet PCs, the Chinese company, Chuwi will finally release one of its latest product, the Chuwi Hi9 Air tablet into the market this January 2018. The Chuwi Hi9 Air was unveiled alongside many other products of Chuwi (a TV Box, the LapBook Air and convertible Surbook) at the IFA 2017 event.

The tablet has been available for pre-order across many online store but should be officially released anytime soon as it was earlier slated for a January 5, 2018 release; though not official.

The tablet isn’t really a new device, so to speak. It’s more like a chip off an old block. The Chuwi Hi9 Air is an upgrade of the Chuwi Hi9 tablet and it sports better and beefed up features when compared to its predecessor. Lets have a peek at what Chuwi is offering on the Hi9 Air tablet.

DESIGN AND DISPLAY

Heads up – the device is one helluva big tablet! Available only in Black colour variant, the Chuwi Hi9 Air has a dimension of 239mm x 167mm x 8 mm and weighs 550 grams. Now that’s heavy! But that however is the price to pay for its huge battery pack. You want a tablet that can run for more than a day? Then you gonna have to be ready to carry it. It comes at a price.

The Chuwi Hi9 Air comes with a bigger super-sized 10.1 inch display with a FHD resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels but loosely packed pixels (218 pixels per inch). Compared to other tablets out there, the Chuwi Hi9 Air may not be the best but it would give decent image quality and produce bright and cool images and colours.

The Hi9 Air uses the One Glass Solution(OGS) display technology which, to some extent provides some level of protection against scratches and shattering to the screen of the tablet.

PROCESSOR, OS AND STORAGE

The Chuwi Hi9 Air is powered by a tablet focused SoC, the MediaTek MT8173 processor. Though old, the processor comes with four high performing Cortex-A53 cores that can clock up to 2.0GHz. The device comes out-of-the-box running the Android Nougat OS (v7.0).

Moving on to storage, there is 4GB of RAM aboard to ensure smooth and flawless multi-tasking on the Hi9 Air tablet.The 64GB built-in storage should do well to keep hold enough files, documents, multimedia, app data and more. If the internal memory doesn’t satisfy your storage needs, there is a dedicated memory card slot that allows you double the internal storage.

CAMERA AND BATTERY

Regarding the device’s optics and camera shooters of the Hi9 Air, Chuwi retained the same camera sensors as those on the Chuwi Hi9. The tablet sports a 5 megapixels shooter on the rear with features like digital exposure, autofocus, continuous shooting, geo-tagging and many more. The front camera is a meager 2-megapixels camera which like the rear camera, doesn’t come with LED light of any sort.

On the Chuwi Hi9 Air seem like the battery capacity was the most improved feature and one to look out for the most. The tablet rocks a Lithium Polymer battery with a capacity of 8,000 mAh; almost twice that of the Chuwi Hi9.  The battery is surely gonna last more than the average tablet out there but what I really can’t seem to fathom is why the tablet wouldn’t support Fast/Quick charging. Charging the device for 3-4 hours before getting a full charge is such a turn-off.

Chuwi Hi9 Air Specifications

PRICING AND AVAILABILITY

The Chuwi Hi9 is scheduled for a January 2018 release and is speculated to cost between $300 – $350.

VERDICT

The Chuwi Hi9 Air is an awesome tablet. Great display size, monster battery backup, Android Nougat operating system, 4GB of RAM, decent internal memory capacity and micro SD card support. These features are catchy and makes it a worthy tablet to buy.. but not for $350. There are tablets that are way cheaper and even come with fingerprint scanner and other features that trumps that of the Chuwi Hi9 Air.

All in all, it is decent tablet perfect for work, fun and play.