The Chuwi LapBook 12.3 Review: Premium Feel, Budget Price

Battery Life

Every mobile device with a battery is going to be held back by it’s battery life, and there’s always trade-offs to be had. Larger batteries cost money, and add weight, so smaller batteries with higher efficiency can be the way to go. Chuwi has only outfitted the LapBook 12.3 with a 37 Wh battery, compared to the larger 45 Wh battery in it’s larger LapBook 14.1 sibling, so expectations are that it won’t be able to live up to that device for outright battery life.

Battery Life 2013 – Light

Our older 2013 battery life test opens a set of four web pages every minute, using Edge. It’s gotten to be that it’s far too light for almost any device, so it’s been replaced with an updated test, but since we have a large backlog of data to work with, we still run this one as well.

This is why you have to test things. Going in, with a higher density panel, and smaller battery, it would have seemed there was no way the LapBook 12.3 could keep up with the decent battery life of the LapBook 14.1, but in fact, the smaller laptop actually outperformed the bigger one. Pretty impressive start.

Battery Life 2016 – Web

Our 2016 web test is much more CPU intensive, so the scores have dropped for most devices compared to the 2013 test, unless the laptop was a gaming laptop where the CPU only makes up a fraction of the power draw. That’s not the case with the Chuwi though, and it was only slightly beaten by the LapBook 14.1. This is a solid result as well.

Normalized Battery Life

To look at the device’s efficiency, we remove the battery size from the equation to get a minutes per Wh result. The LapBook 12.3 does much better here than the 14.1 model did, coming in ahead of the much lower resolution HP Stream 11, although it can’t quite match some of the most efficient devices we’ve ever tested, especially the discontinued Surface 3. It’s still a good result, and really makes the smaller 37 Wh battery last.

Movie Playback

Movie playback can be offloaded to fixed function hardware, so it generally makes the battery last longer than our 2016 web browsing, and that’s the case here as well, but the difference isn’t huge. Still, our Tesseract score lets you know you can watch The Avengers three times before the laptop will shut down.

Charge Time

The laptop ships with a 24-Watt AC Adapter, which is 100V-240V. The review unit shipped with the wrong cable, but since it’s a standard PC cable, it wasn’t difficult to dig up the proper North American plug, which is no issue because the adapter itself handles both voltages.

With a smaller battery than it’s bigger brother, it does charge a bit faster, but it’s not going to set any speed records here.