I would have had my Teclast X98 Air Plus today to start my review process. But DHL Spain is at it again, my shipment is on hold. Happens so often, takes 2 days to go from China, Germany and onto Spain. To then sit with DHL Spain for a week. I hope to at least have the X98 Plus this week now, but they still haven’t even called me back to at least find out what the issue is.

I also have a Cube iwork8 Ultimate, another 8″ X5 Z8300 to review hopefully next week DHL doesn’t delay this one further. It’s stuck in Hong Kong.

If you haven’t seen the TechTablets YouTube channel, I have been looking at a couple of Surface Pro 4’s, one the M3-6Y30 fanless model and the i5 6300U the new 6th gen Core i5. Amazing tablets, it’s always good to compare the best of the best when looking at these Chinese tablets. Which I use as a way to gauge exactly what a top tablet has to offer compared to these lower end and mid ranged Chinese tablets.

The new Core M Skylake M3-6Y30 is a nice step up in power over the Broadwell Core M 5Y10 seen in the Cube i7 Stylus and Teclast X2 Pro. It runs really cool with Microsofts new hybrid cooling (No fan in this model) But it still has a large copper transfer pipe, a plate between the screen and battery to aid in thermal transfer. Never seen it go over 59 degrees c or throttle when benchmarking and gaming. Which is great, I hope Cube and Teclast use the new M3-6Y30 in their new Core M 2016 tablets or refreshes. And I hope they Chinese MFG’s copy Microsofts heatsink design.

The Surface Pro Core i5 version’s hybrid cooling is definitely a huge improvement over the Surface Pro 3, the fan is almost never on unless you get the tablet really working hard. And for that to happen you need to encode videos, multitask like crazy or game.

Why the Surface i5? Well, I will be back home for a month in Auckland, New Zealand in December and need enough power to edit and encode 4k and 1080p videos while there. Unfortunately the Teclast X2 Pro I’m fond of just doesn’t quite cut it when it comes to video encoding. Like the Surface M3, it’s possible. But a 10 minute 1080p video encoded with a AVC H.264 codec at 30mbps will take around 25 minutes on the 5Y10 and about 15 minutes on the new Skylake 6Y30.

And on the new Core i5 6300U, just 5 minutes or so. And 4k editing and encoding, is painfully slow on a Core M.

FYI: Nothing new on the Chinese Weibo’s.