A decent tablet, but a terrible dock
The Chewi Hi12 comes in two parts: the tablet itself, and the optional keyboard attachment. The tablet itself looks and feels pretty nice, approaching premium in some ways. The front is a single piece of smooth glass with a black bezel. That bezel itself is comically large, around an inch, but one side is put to use as a clickable Windows button. The back is a single piece of smooth aluminum in one of two colors: silver or gold (ours was the former). The texture material feels good, and the curves are designed with intention.

The front face measures 10.31 by 6.59 inches, and the entire tablet is only 0.35 inches thick. It also weighs only 1.15 pounds, which is considerably lighter than the Surface Pro 4 (1.73 pounds) and only slightly heavier than the current iPad Air (0.96 pounds). But it seems Chuwi put all its effort into the tablet. The keyboard looks and feels great on its own, with an easy-to-grip rubber texture. But the tablet doesn’t attach to the keyboard so much as sit on it, bound only by magnets and hope.
There is no latch, which you’ll notice immediately — because this thing wobbles. Users walking around with a docked Hi12 should be careful: the unit actually fell out for us during testing. Things aren’t much better on a table. Pull the screen forward gently, then let go, and the entire unit will rock back and forth before it falls flat on its back.

This top-heaviness happens despite how hefty the keyboard unit is. Docking the tablet to the keyboard nearly doubles the weight and thickness of the overall device. This is necessary, because a lighter keyboard would have even more trouble balancing, but it’s still makes everything a lot less portable. We’d be more willing to put up with this if the balancing act actually worked. It doesn’t.
Lots of ports for a tablet The Hi12 offer a USB 3.0 and a USB 2.0 port on the tablet itself, and the keyboard dock offers two more USB 2.0 ports. That’s a generous heaping of connectivity. A headphone jack means you can connect your speakers, and a micro HDMI port enables external displays. There’s also a MicroSD slot, which can help supplement the 64GB of internal memory.

Power is handled by a MicroUSB port on the side of the tablet itself, inexplicably placed between the two full-sized USB ports. This means that, in order to use the tablet while it’s charging, you’ll need to connect a cable to the side of the display (a display that, you’ll remember, is prone to wobbling.) The 32-inch cable that comes with the Hi12 only reaches so far, meaning plugging in is impossible if there’s no plug on the table or desk you’re working on.
Bluetooth and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi are offered by the Realtek RTL8723BS wireless card. The Hi12 documentation points out that Wi-Fi lets you "swim the internet,” which we assume is more immersive than surfing.

A decent touchscreen, a terrible touchpad
This tablet has three main input devices — touchscreen on the tablet itself, and the touchpad and keyboard on the optional attachment. The touchscreen worked well for us, correctly identifying input and supporting multi-touch gestures. The surface is smooth, and using it feels great, as you’d expect from any tablet.
The input devices on the keyboard attachment, however, are awful. We can’t overstate this. Using the Chuwi Hi12 keyboard dock is a nightmare.

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Let’s start with the touchpad. It’s only an inch and a half tall. Scrolling happens in short spurts because there’s so little room to work with. One gesture is not enough to move the cursor from the top of the screen to the bottom. Adjusting sensitivity to compensate makes the touchpad too jumpy.
But size is just the beginning of the issues. It didn’t take long for the entire touchpad on our review unit to get stuck in the clicking position, meaning the mouse automatically clicked everywhere the pointer moved. Flexing the unit caused everything to snap back into place. But the problem re-occurred several times.

And even when the touchpad wasn’t stuck, false positives were disturbingly common. Clicking and dragging a window is an adventure, because half the time windows would spastically jump between all corners of the screen. Clicking and dragging files is insanity, because you’ve no way of knowing where they might end up.
Typing wasn’t much better. The keyboard itself isn’t awful, per se. The keys are well spaced considering the size restrictions, and there’s a satisfying (if chintzy) click with every keystroke. But the faulty touchpad made typing a nightmare, with false positives moving the cursor seemingly at random. We usually write reviews on the devices we’re testing, but with the Chuwi Hi12, we had to give up.

Overall, it’s hard to recommend the Hi12’s keyboard attachment. It’s so bad that the Hi12 can’t be thought of as a true 2-in-1.
On to happier things, like the display. Its resolution is 2,160 by 1,440 pixels, which is great for a 12-inch screen. Images are sharp and there’s plenty of on-screen real estate.That’s not the only good news. The contrast ratio is 530:1. That’s not spectacular, but is perfectly respectable. So is the maximum brightness of 318 lux, good enough for outdoor use on a sunny day. Color quality is better still. In terms of gamut, the Hi12 offers 74 percent of the AdobeRGB scale. That closely rivals the significantly more expensive Samsung TabPro S. Watching videos, you’ll notice that colors are vivid and greys are easy to make out. Watching the trailer for the Jungle Book, it was easy to make out where snakes begin and branches end, which can be tricky — and the more colorful animals looked great. At least, they did when video performance managed to keep up with the display (more on that later).

The Chuwi Hi12 is powered by an Intel Atom processor, specifically the 1.44GHz quad-core Z8300 chip. The Atom line is designed for low energy usage, not peak performance, so no one should expect it to perform well on benchmarks.
And sure enough, it didn’t. Geekbench showed a single core result of 664, and a multi core result of 1,856. These are among the worst results we’ve seen in recent memory, worse than 2014’s underpowered Acer Aspire Switch 10, and barely keeping up with the Asus Flip TP200SA. Considering these are both tablets we criticized for poor performance, that’s not an endorsement.

Modestly powered laptops like the Dell Inspiron 11 (3000) do laps around the Chuwi Hi12, showing just how bad this performance is. And it gets worse. These scores are lower than the $130 Intel Compute Stick, a device we called tragically underpowered. Even for day-to-day tasks, like web browsing, the Chuwi Hi12 feels sluggish at times. Online videos rarely showed what the display is capable of, because the tablet itself couldn’t keep up with the demands of playback. And even browsing the start menu sometimes caused noticable lag.

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