Display, Audio and Stylus

The 1080p display comes from Samsung, and the good news is that it appears to be the exact same panel used in the Microsoft Surface 2. While this obviously isn’t the latest panel out there, display quality is quite good, but we would have liked a laminated display, with Gorilla Glass or similar scratch-proof material on the top.

Unfortunately, we don’t know what sort of glass Cube chose for this device.

In any case, display quality should not be an issue, especially not in this price range.

However, audio quality is an issue. We expected a lot more from a stereo speaker setup on this sort of device. Stereo or not, the sad truth is that many $150 tablets and phones ship with better speakers.

The speakers are just not powerful enough, so it doesn’t even make much sense to talk about audio quality, since the device is just too quiet to enjoy video or music. This is perhaps its biggest shortcoming and frankly we are surprised to see it fail on such a trivial feature. There is a small chance that the transition to Windows 10 has something to do with it, because we doubt this is what the engineers had in mind when they designed the i7 Stylus. So, it might be a software issue, but that doesn’t change the fact that the tablet is too quiet to enjoy South Park.

The tablet is equipped with a 5-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel front facing unit. The rear camera protrudes from the chassis and really messes up an otherwise streamlined device.
As for the front camera, it’s sufficient for the occasional Skype call, but once again, we’ve seen better cameras on cheap phones.

What about the Wacom stylus? Well, it’s a very potent tool, although it’s not as good as a dedicated stylus.

As far as Cube i7's artistic potential goes, Wacom's touch on the entire package has made this tablet quite a contender, even with Wacom's own products. Cube i7 comes with a Wacom packing 1024 pressure levels. As you can see from the picture below, transitions from subtle to hard lines are seamless. Tilt sensitivity is another thing, it’s very limited. However, this is still a mainstream product, with stylus support as an afterthought.

This is a passive stylus, so there’s no battery inside. It ships with a few replacement plastic tips, although you probably won’t need them since you’ll be working on smooth glass rather than a matte Wacom digitizer. The single button on the side of the stylus acts as the right mouse button, and there’s an eraser on the other side. When the tablet detects the stylus, it deactivates touch input, so you wouldn’t mess everything up with your palm (you can still make a mess of it if you lift up the stylus to see your artwork, but forget to remove your wrist).

While Wacom offers similar products, they are much more expensive and tend to serve a single purpose, whereas this is a good hybrid tablet in its own right. The Cube can be used for anything else when you're not letting that inner Picasso out.

Additionally, Cube i7 handled water colours admirably, pretty much the same as our desktop rig, and seeing as how they are the most difficult to pull off, we must compliment the snappy Core M processor and recommend it to anyone interested in doing so-called “tradigital” media. We are not sure an Atom would be able to deliver near lag-less performance with water colours and all other media.

And now, please don't laugh too hard, but here's a sample of what can be done. Remember, we're no artists and this was our first crack at the stylus. The "painting" is inspired by the thumbnail image in Joomla's content upload dialog box, for an added dose of geekyness. We call it Lorem Ipsum at Noon.