A number of people are already familiar with Chinese chipmaker Allwinner, a competitor who even undercuts the famously frugal MediaTek. Allwinner’s chips normally end up in things like Android TV sticks and gaming tablets with built-in controls from companies like JXD. They have, of course, dabbled in Android laptops. For the first time, it would seem, their silicon is going to end up in a laptop running Remix OS, Jide’s interesting fusion of Android, Windows and Chrome OS. The laptop, shown in the video below, seems somewhat average in build quality and, at a glance, seems like it would make a good backup unit, portable workhorse or first laptop. On top of the OS on offer, the laptop is set apart from the budget crowd by its bottom of the barrel price – $79 will net you enough computing power to accomplish the basics, along with a fairly passable laptop to do said basics on.
The show runs on Allwinner’s A64 quad-core ARM Cortex-A53, a reasonably powerful piece of 64-bit kit with a low-end Mali 400MP-2 GPU, not well suited to any tasks beyond everyday browsing, and a mind-boggling price. The chip only costs about $5, leaving the rest of the budget to go to better components for the rest of the laptop. In this respect, it winds up, for the most part, matching the average budget Chromebook that may be found in the $100 to $150 range with a decently spaced keyboard, 11.6-inch LCD screen at a 1366 x 768 resolution and a front-facing webcam. The basic model, shown in the video, comes with 8GB of storage and 1GB of RAM. Options with 2GB of RAM and 16 or 32GB of storage are also available. For a bit more cash, you can also score a backflipping 2-in-1. This design is said to come under $99 for the base model, in the same boat as a somewhat more nicely built 14-inch model.
This particular Allwinner chip has already hosted Remix OS, but not in a laptop. The ultra-cheap Remix Mini featured the 64-bit silicon. Through the Remix Mini, Jide has already shown their platform to be incredibly stable and pleasant to run on the somewhat understated hardware, as well as capable of receiving timely and mostly, bug-free updates. The prices given for the laptops are estimates recommended by Allwinner, but may be close to or right on the money for the final retail prices, depending on which retailer or reseller a user goes through and what models are on offer. A release date was not announced, but the laptops shown in the video seemed fairly complete, if not ready for release, which means you may be seeing them online or at local retailers in the very near future.