A bunch of mini-laptops are set to ship this year, including the GPD P2 Max and One Mix 3 Yoga which are currently sitting on my desk, along with the Chuwi MiniBook which is up for pre-order through Indiegogo.
Chuwi’s first foray into the tiny laptop space is an 8 inch notebook with a 360-degree hinge, a touchscreen display, and a relatively low price tag: $430 and up for a model with an Intel Celeron N4100 processor and $530 and up for a Core m3-8100Y model… at least during crowdfunding.
But one thing setting Chuwi’s MiniBook apart from the new GPD and One Mix models is that Chuwi didn’t have any models with 16GB of RAM. Now it does.
Here’s the deal: if you want a Chuwi MiniBook with 16GB of RAM you can head over to Indiegogo, choose a model with an Intel Core m3-8100Y processor and then choose the RAM upgrade option.
But you’ll probably have to do it fast — Chuwi is only offering a limited quantity of RAM upgrades and they’re almost sold out.
The company launched the promotion overnight, with the first 50 RAM upgrades going for $10, the next 100 priced at $20, and the last 200 priced at $30.
As I publish this article, the $30 option is the only one left. That’s not a bad price for an extra 8GB of memory. It only takes the starting price of a Core m3 model to $560, which is still pretty competitive.
Update: The $30 option is gone, and now Chuwi is offering a $35 upgrade for the next 200 people to back that option.
Update 2: There’s now an option to order a Chuwi MiniBook with a Core m3-8100Y processor, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $629, which is said to be 20-percent off the suggested retail price of $790 for this configuration.
Keep in mind that the mini-laptop won’t ship until September and it has a few shortcomings when compared with the competition. It has eMMC storage rather than a speedier NVMe SSD. It has an 8 inch, 1920 x 1200 pixel display rather than a larger 8.4 or 8.9 inch 2560 x 1600 pixel display. And there’s no support for an active pen.
Update: It appears that models that ship with more than 128GB of storage will have PCIe SSDs.
On the bright side, there’s an empty M.2 slot that you can use to add an SSD.
This is by far the sexiest pocket computer and cheaper than all the competing products, dont know why anyone would buy anything else. I am not even in the market and I almost bought one. 🙂
The cheapest, okay… but the sexiest?
Yeah, the sexiest surely goes to either the black or the platinum One Mix 3S… Also the keyboard layout on this Chuwi looks a bit of a compromise…
You got that right….
🙂
Empty m2 ssd tho… no hope of external gpu attaching?
What’s the max RAM you can get for the smaller One Mix 2S?
So far, it seems the One Mix 2S is the one getting my interest this year. It’s closest to a UMPC while these other devices are more netbooks which I’m not in the market for.
Wow, this is an impressive little UMPC.
Does this have an SD card reader?
I just would like to say, it’s a useless keyboard, at least GPD P2 MAX was did update to show they are really redesign it, so what Chuwi did？