Cube iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition review
System and apps
The major selling point of this tablet is that it runs both Windows 8.1 and Android OS. The nice thing is, Cube didn’t mess with the stock user interface, so we get a clean Windows 8.1 as well as a clean Android 4.4.4. The not so good thing is, the 32GB eMMc internal storage is divided into 2 parts. 24GB is allocated to Windows and 8GB is allocated to Android. The reason why those two systems don’t have shared storage is that it prevents the users to accidentally delete important files of an OS while running the other.
Fortunately, the Windows 8.1 is licensed and the there is even an activation code which offers the users free Office 365 suite subscription for one year, which means you can really get some serious business work done after you connect the tablet to a monitor or TV. Even better, the Microsoft Office 365 works pretty well with a touchscreen, so you can modify your presentations or excel sheets during your business trip.
Booting
You have 10 seconds to choose which system you to enter after booting the device. Simply by touching one of the two icons which respectively represent Windows and Android and you are good to go. If you fail to choose a system in the limited 10 seconds, the tablet will boot into the OS you ran last time.
OS switching
Switching between the two operating systems is easy. If you need to switch from Android to Windows, simply press and hold the power button, and then choose to reboot into Windows 8, and the tablet will do that.
If you are running Windows 8.1, you simply need to open the “Win to Android” app on the desktop, and choose to reboot into Android.
Performance and battery
The iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition is running the same quad-core, Atom Bay-trail Z3735F as the latest budget Windows and dual-boot slabs. The processor has a base clock of 1.33GHz and a turbo clock of 1.8GHZ. There is 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM on board, enough to handle all Android apps and lightweight Windows desktop apps you're likely to be running.
We ran a few benchmarks respectively on Windows 8.1 and Android 4.4.4, and we wouldn’t say that we were surprised with what we got.
The scores were pretty typical for Intel Bay-trail powered tablets, both on the Android side and on the Windows side. And those scores translated well into real world performance, as the iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition was extremely zippy running any Android application, including some of the most graphic-intense 3D games. It felt even more responsive than my Snapdragon 800 powered Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4, probably because of the lower display resolution. Navigating through the Windows 8 OS and playing media were also quite smooth, and the slate had no problem opening dozens of image-heavy webpages at the same time. Only when faced with heavy-weight Windows desktop applications did the iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition begin to struggle.
The eMMc storage inside the Cube iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition is one of the fastest we've seen in a budget tablet. You won't wait long for most apps to start, and the boot time was shorter than 15 seconds. The Cube iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition may not have an edge in processing power over its competition, but the reduced loading times will make it feel a little more powerful.
According to our previous tests, the 22nm Intel Atom Bay-trail Z3735F is as power-efficient as those ARM based processors. While the higher-powered processor doesn't hurt battery life, the battery capacity of the iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition does. The original Cube iWork 8 exceeded our expectations on the battery front with its 5,000mAh Li-Po battery, but the Dual Boot Edition’s battery capacity has been cut down to 3,500mAh, and the drop in longevity is hardly unnoticeable.
Cube estimates 6 hours of non-stop video on the iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition, but we only managed 5 hours and 10 minutes in our own looping video test before the tablet conked out -- two hours less than we got from the original iWork 8. That's with the screen locked at 30 percent brightness, and in aircraft mode. In real-world terms, we could go for about a whole day of moderate browsing, email, music streaming and socializing. But for heavier users who enjoy nonstop 3D gaming and online video streaming, charging the tablet more than once a day will become a must. Fortunately, standby mode doesn’t drain much of the battery, thanks to the 22nm process of the CPU.
Cameras
The iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition has a 2-megapixel camera respectively on its front and rear. The picture quality isn't anything to write home about, as with many tablet cameras -- it's noisy and doesn't produce vibrant colors even in daylight and has no major options outside of a panorama mode.
Other notes
The retail package includes a charging cable, a USB cable, a user manual, a warranty card as well as a Cube VIP card. The DC charger is sold separately.
Heat and Noise: This is a fanless tablet with SSD so there’s no noise at all. No heat was detected during the two-week test period.
Target customer
The Cube iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition is not purely a consumer tablet due to the presence of a Windows desktop mode which brings capability that far exceeds tablets with mobile-first operating systems. Security, networking features, user accounts, media subsystem, storage flexibility, a huge range of applications and language support allow scenarios that are not possible on other devices. Although the desktop is hard to navigate with a finger, the Windows 8 interface elements can be adjusted for size. And do not forget you can boot into Android whenever you want and get access to the tons of touchscreen-enabled applications in Google Play.
Priced at RMB499 ($80), the iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition is still just an entry-level tablet. The screen resolution is too low for power Android users, who may have already been accustomed to the 1080P or even 2K screens seen on high-end Android tablets. The Z3735F processor, although very powerful by tablet standards, still struggles with heavy-weight Windows desktop applications. The ideal customers are those who require mobile flexibility in a home and office scenario where Windows is established, and occasionally switch to Android for gaming and media consumption. The only problem for Cube is that the competitions such as the Chuwi Vi8 Super Edition and many other recently released dual-boot tablets offer exactly the same features.
Summary
Overall the Cube iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition, and this could apply to all Chinese 8-inch dual boot tablets, doesn’t quite feel like a polished consumer tablet. There are avenues of usage that can lead to problems unless the user has experience with both Windows 8 and Android. The Windows desktop isn’t something that should be exposed to the average tablet consumer. For adventurers and advanced users though this is truly inspiring tablet that offers an incredibly complete and fast browsing experience, flexible connectivity and external expansion options. Cube’s hugest mistake here is to cut corners on battery capacity, the 3,500mAh battery is barely enough to power the tablet through a day even for light to moderate users.
The good:
The Cube iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition’s manufacturing quality is superior to most of the competitions.
With both Windows 8.1 and Android 4.4.4 on top, the slate offers much more in both productivity and entertainment than single OS tablets.
The tablet offers flexible connectivity options.
Licensed Windows 8.1 and one year of free subscription of Office 365.
The bad:
The iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition delivers poorer battery performance compared to the original iWork 8.
The charger is not included in the retail package and needs to be purchased separately.
The major selling point of this tablet is that it runs both Windows 8.1 and Android OS. The nice thing is, Cube didn’t mess with the stock user interface, so we get a clean Windows 8.1 as well as a clean Android 4.4.4. The not so good thing is, the 32GB eMMc internal storage is divided into 2 parts. 24GB is allocated to Windows and 8GB is allocated to Android. The reason why those two systems don’t have shared storage is that it prevents the users to accidentally delete important files of an OS while running the other.
Fortunately, the Windows 8.1 is licensed and the there is even an activation code which offers the users free Office 365 suite subscription for one year, which means you can really get some serious business work done after you connect the tablet to a monitor or TV. Even better, the Microsoft Office 365 works pretty well with a touchscreen, so you can modify your presentations or excel sheets during your business trip.
Booting
You have 10 seconds to choose which system you to enter after booting the device. Simply by touching one of the two icons which respectively represent Windows and Android and you are good to go. If you fail to choose a system in the limited 10 seconds, the tablet will boot into the OS you ran last time.
OS switching
Switching between the two operating systems is easy. If you need to switch from Android to Windows, simply press and hold the power button, and then choose to reboot into Windows 8, and the tablet will do that.
If you are running Windows 8.1, you simply need to open the “Win to Android” app on the desktop, and choose to reboot into Android.
Performance and battery
The iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition is running the same quad-core, Atom Bay-trail Z3735F as the latest budget Windows and dual-boot slabs. The processor has a base clock of 1.33GHz and a turbo clock of 1.8GHZ. There is 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM on board, enough to handle all Android apps and lightweight Windows desktop apps you're likely to be running.
We ran a few benchmarks respectively on Windows 8.1 and Android 4.4.4, and we wouldn’t say that we were surprised with what we got.
The scores were pretty typical for Intel Bay-trail powered tablets, both on the Android side and on the Windows side. And those scores translated well into real world performance, as the iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition was extremely zippy running any Android application, including some of the most graphic-intense 3D games. It felt even more responsive than my Snapdragon 800 powered Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4, probably because of the lower display resolution. Navigating through the Windows 8 OS and playing media were also quite smooth, and the slate had no problem opening dozens of image-heavy webpages at the same time. Only when faced with heavy-weight Windows desktop applications did the iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition begin to struggle.
The eMMc storage inside the Cube iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition is one of the fastest we've seen in a budget tablet. You won't wait long for most apps to start, and the boot time was shorter than 15 seconds. The Cube iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition may not have an edge in processing power over its competition, but the reduced loading times will make it feel a little more powerful.
According to our previous tests, the 22nm Intel Atom Bay-trail Z3735F is as power-efficient as those ARM based processors. While the higher-powered processor doesn't hurt battery life, the battery capacity of the iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition does. The original Cube iWork 8 exceeded our expectations on the battery front with its 5,000mAh Li-Po battery, but the Dual Boot Edition’s battery capacity has been cut down to 3,500mAh, and the drop in longevity is hardly unnoticeable.
Cube estimates 6 hours of non-stop video on the iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition, but we only managed 5 hours and 10 minutes in our own looping video test before the tablet conked out -- two hours less than we got from the original iWork 8. That's with the screen locked at 30 percent brightness, and in aircraft mode. In real-world terms, we could go for about a whole day of moderate browsing, email, music streaming and socializing. But for heavier users who enjoy nonstop 3D gaming and online video streaming, charging the tablet more than once a day will become a must. Fortunately, standby mode doesn’t drain much of the battery, thanks to the 22nm process of the CPU.
Cameras
The iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition has a 2-megapixel camera respectively on its front and rear. The picture quality isn't anything to write home about, as with many tablet cameras -- it's noisy and doesn't produce vibrant colors even in daylight and has no major options outside of a panorama mode.
Other notes
The retail package includes a charging cable, a USB cable, a user manual, a warranty card as well as a Cube VIP card. The DC charger is sold separately.
Heat and Noise: This is a fanless tablet with SSD so there’s no noise at all. No heat was detected during the two-week test period.
Target customer
The Cube iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition is not purely a consumer tablet due to the presence of a Windows desktop mode which brings capability that far exceeds tablets with mobile-first operating systems. Security, networking features, user accounts, media subsystem, storage flexibility, a huge range of applications and language support allow scenarios that are not possible on other devices. Although the desktop is hard to navigate with a finger, the Windows 8 interface elements can be adjusted for size. And do not forget you can boot into Android whenever you want and get access to the tons of touchscreen-enabled applications in Google Play.
Priced at RMB499 ($80), the iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition is still just an entry-level tablet. The screen resolution is too low for power Android users, who may have already been accustomed to the 1080P or even 2K screens seen on high-end Android tablets. The Z3735F processor, although very powerful by tablet standards, still struggles with heavy-weight Windows desktop applications. The ideal customers are those who require mobile flexibility in a home and office scenario where Windows is established, and occasionally switch to Android for gaming and media consumption. The only problem for Cube is that the competitions such as the Chuwi Vi8 Super Edition and many other recently released dual-boot tablets offer exactly the same features.
Summary
Overall the Cube iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition, and this could apply to all Chinese 8-inch dual boot tablets, doesn’t quite feel like a polished consumer tablet. There are avenues of usage that can lead to problems unless the user has experience with both Windows 8 and Android. The Windows desktop isn’t something that should be exposed to the average tablet consumer. For adventurers and advanced users though this is truly inspiring tablet that offers an incredibly complete and fast browsing experience, flexible connectivity and external expansion options. Cube’s hugest mistake here is to cut corners on battery capacity, the 3,500mAh battery is barely enough to power the tablet through a day even for light to moderate users.
The good:
The Cube iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition’s manufacturing quality is superior to most of the competitions.
With both Windows 8.1 and Android 4.4.4 on top, the slate offers much more in both productivity and entertainment than single OS tablets.
The tablet offers flexible connectivity options.
Licensed Windows 8.1 and one year of free subscription of Office 365.
The bad:
The iWork 8 Dual Boot Edition delivers poorer battery performance compared to the original iWork 8.
The charger is not included in the retail package and needs to be purchased separately.
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