Pipo showcased a Snadragon 850 powered 2-in-1 laptop in fall 2019, and said it expected it to sell for around $400. But it appears it took quite longer than expected to launch the Arm Windows 10 laptop, and only now can we see PiPo W12 laptop sold on Aliexpress for around $422 and up plus shipping.
The 2-in-1 laptop comes with a 12.3-inch touchscreen display, 4GB or 8GB RAM, 256GB storage, as well as WiFi 5, Bluetooth 5.0, and 4G LTE connectivity.
Pipo W12 specifications have changed a little bit since the first announcement, notably the display resolution, and we’ve got a few more details:
- SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 octa-core Kryo 385 Arm cores clocked @ up to 2.96 GHz with Adreno 630 Visual Processing Subsystem, Hexagon 685 DSP
- System Memory – 4GB or 8GB DDR4 RAM
- Storage – 256GB flash storage, MicroSD card slot
- Display – 12.3″ IPS display with 2888×1920 resolution, 10-point touch
- Audio – 3.5mm audio jack
- Connectivity – WiFi 5 802.11ac/b/g/n, Bluetooth 5.0, 4G LTE with 3G fallback + dual-SIM card slot (supports MicroSD + SIM card, or dual SIM card)
- Camera – 5.0MP front-facing camera. 13MP rear camera
- USB – 1x USB type-C port for power, data, and DisplayPort Alt. mode
- Misc – Power and volume buttons
- Battery – 7.4V, 5000 mah (37Wh) battery good for 4 to 13 hours on a charge
- Power Supply – 12V DC/2A
- Dimensions – 289 x 255 x 9 mm (tablet only)
- Weight – Around 800 grams (tablet only)
The 2-in-1 laptop comes with a genuine Windows 10 OS, and ships with a magnetic QWERTY keyboard, a capacitive stylus with 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity, a USB Type-C “data cable”, a charger, and a warranty card. Note the “data cable” is said to add “support for connecting monitor video output”, so maybe it’s a small hub with HDMI output, but I could not see any photos to confirm this.
I was surprised by the relatively short battery life as other Snapdragon 850 laptops like Lenovo Yoga C630 claims 20+ hours of battery life, but that’s because Pipo went with a smaller capacity battery (37Wh vs 61Wh) to lower the costs. In early days, Qualcomm based laptop were reported to be sluggish possibly due to x86 to Arm translation, but as more programs may now support Arm natively performance may have increased, and user experience improved. Pipo W12 may have performance between Gemini Lake and some Core-m3 processors depending on the workload.
If Windows is not your thing, it might be possible to run Linux on the laptop using Aarch64-laptops project hosted on Github. The project provides a Debian image for the aforementioned Yoga C630, so with some efforts a port to Pipo W12 may be possible.
Via AndroidPC.es
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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