Talk about niche. Emdoor, a Chinese ODM and OEM partner, is producing an 8-inch Windows 11 tablet with, get this, an unspecified 8-core ARM processor. @Desertlap, can you speak to this? I am genuinely intrigued. Putting aside its rugged, thick factory-floor exterior, this looks like the closest 2020s-era device yet to a Surface Mini (sans penabled tech) that I have encountered in the wild.
Interesting. I haven’t seen or even heard of this one and if it made any kind of appearance at CES I missed it.
So based on the description, it’s likely a MediaTek chip which, with exception of the Dimensity line, are fairly vanilla ARM designs.
Two things that give me pause are one (and I just reconfirmed this) the Windows licensing currently specifies a minimum of 10-inch display. And in fact, we tried as recently as mid 2020 to license a custom 7.8-inch device and were denied by MS.
Second is that of course it’s not a Qualcomm chip and to date the only WOA devices have had Qualcomm chips and we’ve heard that with the Pro 9 5g MS and QUALCOMM reupped on the exclusivity.
So given that its looks to be coming from a Chinese Whitebox lower tier company and that we know for a fact that WOA runs on almost all ARM compliant designs they certainly could produce such a device, but I suspect they will have trouble when they actually try to sell/ship it.
I did ask one of our best sources in China if they could get us additional information though as we have a couple of customers that would be interested in such a device.
Fascinating! So given Microsoft’s restrictions on non-Qualcomm and sub-10" ARM Windows tablets, this has to be a gray/black market item then. I see that their 10"+ Windows tablet with a Qualcomm processor has FCC approval. However, this one has not and only appears to have made it as far as the EU in the distribution networks.
As a quick update, I confirmed with Emdoor that the processor is Qualcomm but is Atom-class, meaning the SC7180. The price is not too bad all things considered at $360 for 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD. However, I do not need a factory floor device and I realized a faster device is already available from Microsoft that ticks all of the boxes: the Surface Duo “Uno”. Using Capital One Cash Rewards (not credit card rewards but a online cash savings program like Honey), I was able to order a new 256GB model from BuyDig on eBay, which normally sells for $334.99, with a $50 instant rebate coupon making it just $284.99! The plan is to run Windows 11 on this puppy!
