Hahaha, so Chuwi gets into the 2-in-1 market too! Not really that surprising seeing as most Chinese manufacturers both does and will. I actually own a Chuwi product I imported via AliExpress, my fabulously and extremely cheap Chuwi Hi8 Pro(120$). It has come in handy a few times, especially the dual boot Android/Windows option, and if I remember correctly it even came with a year of Office 365! Basically gave me a free tablet along with the office package(as the office package is kinda mandatory nowadays professionally).
Anyway, the Surbook actually looks like a decent device, but there are a few things to take into consideration when you’re buying such a cheap device. First of all, Chuwi is known as a cheap technology company(despite them saying otherwise) and the quality of their products are most often described as “mediocre at best”. For example, with my Hi8 Pro I got what I paid for, a dirt cheap tablet that actually both feels and looks great(sluggish performance though) and I knew what I was getting into when I bought something with an Atom processor. However, the tablet can’t sleep properly, and I think I had to do a few firmware updates for it to not have a Sleep Of Death issue. When it sleeps now however, it works, but it still drains the battery in a day. Meaning I need to turn it completely off when I’m not using it. Also the SD card adapter bugged out due to the dual OS thing and eventually broke down all together. Still, I don’t regret the purchase as it was so cheap.
Chinese manufacturers are also known for exaggerating. Read through the IGG campaign and you’d notice how they say it’s so “powerful” and that it can run 3D games. I tried playing league once on my i5 SP3; never again. It’s simple, you won’t get good gaming performance in such thin devices because of size and thermal limitations. The Celeron N3450 performs below the M3, even though it specwise boast two more cores and higher clock speed. To be frank though, and to its credit, it has 90% of the M3’s multi core benchmark score(but less than half single core performance). The N3450 also has a TDP of 6W compared to the 4,5W of the M3. The 10 Ah capacity given can also be arbitrary as the real energy capacity is found in Watt-hours(you need to time the Ah with the voltage to get Wh. It’s unknown which internal voltage is used. I don’t know if the industry uses a common voltage so the mAh values are fairly compared to each other or not. SP4 seems to use 7,5V). The higher TDP will also create higher temperatures, which can mean that it’s likely to throttle since it’s so cheap that I doubt a proper cooling solution is installed.
See this link for CPU comparison: http://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_celeron_n3450-659-vs-intel_core_m3_7y30-657
Most likely though, the Surbook will be a totally adequate device. I’d get one to use for pdf’s if it wasn’t for the fact my old SP3 will have that job as soon as I get my V(going to uni, hopefully paperless), but I wouldn’t get it because I expected a premium device. I would have gotten it because it would be cheap and adequate to that purpose.
As also pointed out. It doesn’t have the extra USB-C, TB3 port that V has, and neither has the alcantara, colored backlit, Bluetooth keyboard either. The SSD capacity only goes up to 128GB too. There are no words on the stylus performance beside the 1024 pressure levels either, but one could assume that it’s using the N-Trig protocol of the surface line as it seems to have the same screen.
And yeah, customer support would probably also be difficult.