Robo & Kala Laptop Review – The $799 Surface Pro 9 Alternative!
so there’s someone else now taking on Microsoft when it comes to their two-in-one tablets and it’s great to see in this space this here is very similar to the Microsoft Surface Pro 9. it is the Robo and Kala two-in-one so it’s powered by the Snapdragon 8 CX gen 3 with 16 gigabytes of RAM 512 gigabyte SSD and it comes with this removable keyboard here you can also operate it separately because it has a Bluetooth function a active stylus so this digital pen here has 4096 pressure sensitive levels and the best part for me is the
screen so 12.6 inches it’s an AMOLED screen up to 600 nits brightness supports 10 touch points fully laminated does look really good and more on that later on in this video and then the build of it all the total weight with the keyboard is about 1.04 kilos and the tablet itself is just over 660 grams making it low right here is our box and just under that is the box for the keyboards which I do have so the charger very small it’s a gun charger and this has a two-prong style to it so you just
need to pull that down now considering the size of it the output is very decent 65 Watts type c output only with it and we do
uses a magnet on the top just to keep it closed and they also did include a screen protector for the tablet the robot car is using an AMOLED screen here and it is very good this panel here more on it soon and I will measure it for you the color gamut the coverage it does have but it’s 16 by 10 aspect ratio 2560 by 1600 is the resolution for it and very slim bezels you can see on the left and the right top and bottom a little bit larger but not too bad so we’ve got
a five megapixel camera here at the front that does support Windows hello to log in and 1080p video then the rear of it here you’ll see we’ve got an alloy build to it so this is CNC machined unibody antenna lines here 13 megapixel camera and there are two microphones in total we’ve got two speakers two as well either side I’ll show you those shortly the robo and color branding here on the back and this is our kickstand so you can use this to prop up the tablet and you can put it all the way back
like so so if you’re going to be using the stylus on this perhaps this is more comfortable you’ve got it just the angle up a little tiny bit for you and I do find it’s a sturdy kickstand and and when I do press on the screen I don’t find that it wobbles around either so it’s a very nice build quality to it and just under this kickstand here too you will find the slot where it does have the SSD So currently installed with this model I’ve got 512 gigabytes of storage and it does take the
22 by 42 sized nvme drives the smaller one so it’s pcie 3.0 spec with this model now the battery within it it is 41.4 Watt hours so it does have a fantastic build quality this finished rounded Corners here very slim too so the thickness of this model care is only just 7.3 millimeters so that’s one of the two loudspeakers there’s this little pad here which wirelessly charges our stylus so that fits on with a magnet like so holds it into place and it’s very firm it’s quite strong the magnet so it’s not that easy to
knock off this stylus here and more on that side is later on I will give it a quick little test and then over you’ll see on the left hand side we’ve got the other speaker antenna lines and two USB type-c ports here so unfortunately there’s no type A they didn’t manage to squeeze one and now both of these ports here do support power delivery charging you’ve got your USB data and also video out of both of them along the top there are the two microphones there’s a jewelry mics our volume up and down and the
power on button right there along the bottom connector so you’ve got the two holes there for the keyboard stays and the Pogo Port pin connector and the keyboard which is very nice the build quality of it so it’s plastic here we’ve got a touch pad that does have a very smooth surface to it I find it works well even with finer movements the cursor does not skip all over the place delete key home end right here uh page up and down they don’t seem to be here they haven’t made room for it and we do
have the half sized up and down Keys now this is a backlit keyboard here too as well it’s got four levels to it and it’s got 1.3 millimeters of travel the keyboard now the other side of it has like the synthetic leather finish to it which feels very good and it’s really high quality every single thing to do with this particular model here is high quality exceptional build quality really to it so this moves independently you don’t normally see this kind of style here see how it spins around where the connector is so magnetically this
will just clip into place you just need to hold it up and then it Clips in and there’s a whole sense of course in the tablet so it does know when you close the lid it’ll turn the screen off or put it into sleep mode if you want it to do that now it’s a dual mode keyboard as well because it does have a battery within it you can run it in the Bluetooth mode right here so this is to cycle on the backlit keyboard so we have those different stages okay and you can also
use that to turn on the Bluetooth mode so you can have it disconnected and still be using this as a portable Bluetooth keyboard which is rather handy and this is what the keyboard looks like now in a dimly lit environment so this is great if you’re say on a long-haul flight you’re using it the cabin has been dim in the aircraft but you’re still able to see this keyboard type away in it and I like the back lighting it doesn’t shine under the keys either that much at all depending on the angle you’re looking at
it you don’t see that so it’s not going to annoy you and then typing on this keyboard too as well is very nice the feel of it it’s not a noisy keyboard I do like the feel the feedback we get from these keys and they don’t sound real clackity either when you’re typing away on it so overall it’s a fantastic keyboard and I’d rate it as the same kind of level as the Microsoft type covers Rob ankala has selected a fantastic AMOLED screen than this particular tablet now it is fully laminated it’s 60 hertz only
but I don’t find that to be too much of an issue 90 Hertz would have been better or even 120 but of course that does have an impact on the battery life so very good colors really good blacks of course being AMOLED you can barely distinguish the difference between the Border here and then the black bezel now the reason we do have the borders top and bottom with the 16×9 aspect ratio is of course because it’s a 16 by 10 screen so the resolution is 2560 by 1600 touch accuracy and the response has not been
a problem at all for me and it seems to be very fluid this is just here in YouTube using Chrome and I can easily minimize things and the accuracy has not been a problem for me now the color coverage the gamut here we do have absolutely fantastic and this doesn’t surprise me being an AMOLED so we’ve got 100 srgb coverage ntsc 96 percent Adobe RGB is 98 very good and then P3 100 coverage so very good screen in this model you will not be disappointed with it and it is fully laminated so you don’t see
any ugly gap between this digitizer glass here on the top and then the AMOLED screen below it a front-facing camera which is five megapixels so 1080p with this one this is what you’re looking at now and I find the quality to be pretty good now I do have a 100 watt light on that’s one of my studio lights at the moment so the lighting is reasonably good but it’s darkened patches because it adds more of a focus kind of light but I like the fact that we’re seeing here 30 frames per second the Dual array
microphones as well those dual microphones do sound good so it’s going to be a webcam that is good for things like Skype your video chat needs and the 13 megapixel rear camera this is a sample of its 4K video including those microphones again so you can see the video quality is okay it’s not the best your phone will probably shoot better video but it’s a nice option still to have with a tablet and it does have auto focus now with the display scaling I am using 200 I’ve found that that is ideal for the screen
size the 12.6 inches now you might or may not know that this is an arm chip so this is not your typical Intel chips in here this is in fact the Snapdragon it is the 8 CX gen 3 now which is good and this is three gigahertz it’s got eight cores so four of them are the performance the other four are the efficiency and you’ll see here 16 gigabytes of RAM now it’s a 64 gigabyte operating system Windows 11 that it is running here Windows 11 you’ll see right there at home okay and I’ve updated
it and can you run the x86 and x86-x6 for applications yes and I have been running them in fact I showed you one just before okay so the only thing that I’ve sometimes noticed is that some apps might not even run at all and it’s very rare for that to happen geekbench 6 is one that just won’t run for me however geekbench 5 does run and these are the results here so you can see promising looking performance not bad at all this ran and it’s emulated so you do you notice that actual emulation well not
really and I don’t even think the apps know that it’s emulating that via arm and the only thing I’ve I do pick up on sometimes is you may see a delay that when you launch a certain application and it is x86-x64 it may just have a split second delay because it needs to emulate it needs to load that engine in first but normally you don’t even notice it apart from not being able to run some applications like geekbench six so the storage speeds in fact I’ve already run that already you can see for the drive
this is a pcie 3.0 drive very good no issues there with them at all now the only Benchmark I will show you is this one here so cinebench I managed to run it but do bear in mind this is going through the engine it’s been emulated so it doesn’t really reflect the actual performance of this and I will tell you it feels something like a bit between like a core i5 uh like a seventh or eighth gen the general kind of performance in and out of everything here so I do find it is normally very
quick and snappy Chrome I showed you a little bit of that before so the scaling the scrolling sorry performance is very good there and you can run various different other apps which I will be showing you a couple of those now too so for example if you decided that you wanted to load up steam well you can you can load Steam on this and even have Counter-Strike there now this of course again is going to be emulated so we have a very brief look at that and see what the performance is going to be like
you know to match your course at 16 by 10 ratio and the performance is not amazing considering I’ve got it on the lower kind of settings here but it is playable it’s around 50 frames per second so you can do these kind of little light tasks like this but I see more this two-in-one tablet I’ve really been a tablet that I would use for more lighter kind of tasks nothing that’s too heavy and especially because it is emulating this now I’m just going to die here of course going out straight away but it was just
to show you that it can handle these lighter titles but just don’t expect amazing performance still this is so much better than I thought it would be so after that round of Counter-Strike you do feel that it gets a little warm around this area on the back so it gets a little hot to the touch but the temperatures they aren’t anything alarming there are two copper transfer uh heat pipes within there that help dispersing that heat and of course completely fanless zero noise it’s one of the things I really do love about it now for
simple things too like this so imagine you need to use spreadsheets you’ve got um various information for work that you need to light up so it’s going to be a handle these kind of tasks they’re really good although what I’ve noticed is this is office sorry LibreOffice here that I’m using it can sometimes feel a little bit laggy and again it’s probably because it’s emulating this application which is x64 so you need to try and find apps that are native um which can be sometimes a little tricky to know something really is now going through
the Play Store you can use that option to find them or you can find different builds you’ll find that some applications will be specifically designed for architecture to run off that instead of using the instruction set for x86 or whatever so that will vary Now video playback there’s something that okay this is a demanding file right here too how is it going to handle that so let’s take a look now this is a 140 meters per second hevc and you’ll see that it’s native to coding care too so very smooth no drop frames in fact
this is handling it a lot better than some of the Intel counterparts their chips even with the native decoding they sometimes do a big stutter at the start that isn’t happening the only thing was probably just a little bit slow to load in first up and I’ll try this as a 4K 60 frames per second okay same deal it is running absolutely fine just skipping ahead there’s no slowdown really good performance there not dropping either any frames and that was an HDR Clip 2 as well that was playing so good for video playback light tasks
Chrome spreadsheets media emails all of that kind of stuff runs really well despite this being arm-based the robo and Carla does have stereo speakers so there’s one here one on the other side volume is good they don’t distort at maximum volume there’s a little hint of bass to them and overall I’m pleased with the speakers for a Windows 11 tablet so give you a sample of them now and this is going to be at 100 volume just to give you an idea of what they do sound like which is pretty good I think foreign which
as I mentioned before this Clips aren’t really well it’s a nice strong magnet and you don’t accidentally really knock this off now if you put it into a bag with the type cover keyboard on it that’s already closed up and then the stylus it shouldn’t come off I don’t really see it coming off it’s not that easy to knock off unlike some other models out there so it’s got a very good accuracy to it it’s got 4096 pressure sensitive levels and you do get the hover function that you’ll see now now this is approximately just
looking at it about I’d say one centimeter away from the screen and palm rejection to there of course now with the pressure sensitive levels I’m in bamboo paper which should support it so just pressing very lightly here seeing a thin line to how do I start to press the thicker course the line is coming through so that is working well now the stylus will work right up to the very edge not quite actually you can see it leaves about one maybe almost two millimeters there is the limit where it will actually work and then just
cut off and that seems to be the case around the whole screen there when you are using it of course I should actually go full screen with this one now I’ll just quickly right here to see what it’s like with handwriting it’s not too bad you can see that was actually my own fault there I should have lifted up the stylus a little bit more between my Strokes there let’s try that again there is you can detect a slight delay there too so it’s not instantaneous I won’t say this is as good as say the
S pins that I ride on with my Samsung Galaxy S8 Ultra that seems to be a lot quicker the latency in fact I don’t know the latency on this particular pin the exact figure of it so there seems to be a little bit of a delay there I do that just a quick little scribble you can see there’s a bit of delay but I like the accuracy the pressure sensitivity seems to be working well Palm rejection I’d wait rate as average it just doesn’t seem to be the fastest stylus out there when it comes to
when you write that delay there it seems to be just a a bit slower than other pins out there on the market and then battery life for a 41 watt hour battery it does fare really well because if this was running an Intel chip like say a core i7 or core i5 you would not be able to get the kind of battery life that I can get out of this so with the screen brightness set to normally around 40 to 50 percent just light tasks so mainly just an edge Chrome a bit of Gmail YouTube
videos and the Netflix application I can get around 10 to 11 hours so that’s fantastic all day kind of performance out of it if you stick to light tasks now if you’re doing something that’s a little bit demanding which you probably wouldn’t really do so much on a tablet like this as I showed you it’s not really built for those demanding tasks then that battery life will reduce quite a bit or drop down to probably about eight hours maybe seven but it still should be a full day’s use with it so the keyboard quality very
good to type on and the touchpad as well as excellent I would rate the keyboard to be as good as Microsoft’s type cover equivalent equivalent there cameras seem to be all right we do have the one megapixel Windows hello camera that’s separate from the five megapixel camera there to log Us in so you don’t need your passwords and everything the general performance is quick and snappy as long as you’re sticking to the native arm applications there I did notice that some of the x86 the dash x64 when it does the emulation can sometimes be after
a bit of a slow start and then it does load up so it’s emulating things the performance won’t quite be like native of course but still it can run pretty much everything but there are a few apps that I did encounter while geekbench was one of them they just simply could not run so there’s some minor little things there still when it comes to Windows um compared to your typical kind of Windows and it’s still of course 64-bit here it’s a 64-bit chip plenty of Ram with the 16 gigabytes the speakers don’t sound too bad
a slim a light package overall I really do like it I think it’s going to be ideal for people that are just after a all day a work laptop or study laptop that’s going to be great for those light tasks I’ve pointed out and mentioned just before what I would love to see in another version is 4G 5G support would be good and I wouldn’t mind to see one that does also have a full-sized USB type a port I know you can plug and adapter in they don’t include one in the box but they’re very
cheap and easy to Source but it wouldn’t be nice to have it built into the tablet so it’s a fantastic two-in-one right here thank you for watching this review
