So a couple of months back I reviewed this this is the civil top air also
known as the Tbook air now it's not a bad little 12.5 and inch Apollo Lake laptop
it's got a decent keyboard on it it's super light and portable this thing
weighs about 1.8 or 1.08 sorry kilos so really light very thin as you can see
but it's got one major con for me even though I love the performance of this
it's the fastest I have actually tested yet out of the Apollo Lakes because it's
got really fast RAM on it the big con is this all you have is just a 3.5
millimeter headphone jack on there and then a type C port so not really that
great now I've been using this docking it to my monitor here my TV sorry that
I've got here in the studio and then my monitor at home and it's been good using
it like that but when I'm out and about and I wanted to access of course say a
micro SD card to have a look at some drone footage go to plug it in and
realize I left the adapter at home for the type C pod so that's a bit of an
annoyance but this is where the under showing the 21 comes in it's basically
this exact model I believe it's the same ODM that has manufactured for on those
of course we're leasing it and putting their brand on it but we've got two
times USB 3 ports on there micro SD card and a micro HDMI out it still has Type C
on there but only for charging and data so you can't get any video out of it
apparently so let's see if this one is going to be the improved version of the
T book air and hopefully the performance is going to be just as good as this one
so this one I picked up from geek buying comm seems to be reasonably wrapped
hopefully there is no damage and it's going to be in that champagne gold color
again which I'm not particularly fond of they seem to love it in China for some
reason so put the notebook aside for a second I've got a user manual here that
is all in Chinese
in the left compartment here is our type C charger now this is rated to 12 volts
3 amps so should charge it nice and quick so before I get started we'll just
weigh it again to see how much it weighs so it is 1.09 grams so it's about 10
grams or so heavier than the t book air
alright so it looks just like the other model of course I have expected this
because it really is the same pressing down on the lid there there is hardly
any flex a little bit but it's quite rigid quite solid or made out of metal
and on the bottom see on the markings on there showing between t1 and 4 rubber
feet now you see here as an access slot here which is really good so undo this
one screw don't have to remove the whole rear back like you have to on the t book
air that I've got this will give you access to the SSD slot on the right side
under the de sensible thing and they decided to put the type C port micro
HDMI and a full sized USB 3 port here on the right side which is great because on
the T book you can see on the right here you've only got the 3.5 millimeter
headphone jack and on the right side yes you noticed where's the 3.5 millimeter
headphone jack it's missing why do they always have to do that and always have
something missing from his laptop's so full-size USB 3 port and then a micro SD
card slot which is great to see I will have to find out if I can use a type C 2
3.5 millimeter adapter if that will work and let us listen to audio okay so it
cannot be opened up a one-handed and the screen is a anti-glare coated one so
that is good to see I mean it's the same actually on the t book ear if you remove
the glossy screen protector that comes with pre-applied out of the factory then
you'll have an anti-glare screen matte-coated of course now the touchpad
is identical in size however the fingerprint reader hopefully it's going
to be working is now located on the right side and the keyboard layout is
the same but you can see they've got different
shortcuts so they've decided to have a function then f12 for print screen and
there's no controls there for the screen brightness this time at least I'm not on
this model but on the T book err you'll see it is two microphones up the top
status LEDs and a dedicated power on button and the Delete key is here so
that's actually a good move you can see the difference I do like that they've
put the power button up there here's the civil top and you can see there we get
dedicated brightness controls without having to use function keys or anything
like that and a dedicated print screen button however the power button
difference that you can see so there we have the power button which you could
easily hit and now that's now the delete so hopefully that's going to be good
now this keyboard is very firm there's literally no flex on that really good
keyboard I do like it I've been typing it on a bit it's not bad at all one of
the better ones you'll find on a Chinese laptop now the bezel around the outside
is quite slim on the left and right it's made out of metal and the front facing
webcam is 2 megapixels but it only records in VGA if it's exactly like the
civil top is now one thing to notice is that their microphone location I believe
is in a better place on the earlier model on the civil top as you see here
those microphones are located either side so you don't get that noise of the
keyboard as much okay so it has an account already created and the screen
brightness I think and hopefully this is a hundred cent now it's 50% it looks
quite good and that is 100 ear which is bright enough to me and zero very dim so
that's going to be great for nighttime use of course the keyboard is not
backlit not in this price range let's have a look at the device manager
hopefully there's no issues with the fingerprint reader on this model
so that took a little while to load in but not too bad so network adapters this
should be the typical Intel dual band wireless AC three one six five which it
is we see that on all the other models quite a good chipset performs quite well
and I'll just drive as an emmc so this is a Toshiba 0-60 4G 30 of course later
on in the video I will show you the the a SD slot so I opened that up and you
can install an e 50 if you want better performance and more storage space and
I'll think a print reader is an eland one it's the wbf fingerprint sensor and
it has no problems it seems to me like it's going to be working just fine okay
so we time to test out the ports on the right hand side so the type C port with
a adapter here this is an adapter that goes type C to three point five
millimeters that works and it gives us audio now wallet power an external hard
drive I know it actually thinks I plugged in an audio device no power
whatsoever to my hard drive no light has come on so that means that it's only
handling charging and audio that's it that's all that that port does and have
a look and see if the USB 3 port on the right hand side will power an external
hard drive blue light and yes it's going to handle that which is great I can see
here that the microSD cards protrude a little bit approximately one and a half
millimeter so those stick out so in a backpack or in a case you might be able
to accidentally knock that and have it click out but it should be ok it's quite
stiff and firm the click in the field to that so it should hold that in place
let's have a look now and see if that's USB 3 port is going to access hard
drives oh ok white light means USB 2 so that's actually a USB 2 port that's port
right here and not USB 3 ok so a quick little typing test on the keyboard and
it's really the same kind of experience as the civil top is keyboard so it's
quite firm good travel on the keys I do like the keyboard but I'm going to say
that I like this one better because it has the Delete key in the right place
here and not the power to move the power up there which is a very wise choice and
a really good move from under now the memory is running at the fastest
supported speed which is 1600 megahertz and they've reserved a little bit there
for the GPU so you've only got around 3.8 or something gigabytes when you
first boot it up we're not going to have that free of course because windows eats
into a little bit of that so the free at the moment I've got is 2.5 gigabytes
alright so onto our audio test here the typical test they do a track from
carbon-based life-forms who normally don't give me any copyright issues so
these speakers are internal just like the other model the t book ear
all right so the volumes okay but it's got no base really mostly treble and
mids and a little bit of distortion coming from the housing because it's
transmitting the sound through the keyboard we had a quick look inside the
bios here it's fully unlocked to us so we've got full control and I recommend
not messing with any of the settings so just here I had a look at the
Northbridge under the memory information and it does report that they have used
for one and gigabyte low power double data rate three chips so it's going to
be in dual channel so we should see the same high performance just like the T
book here which is a really good thing here now under boot here I am going to
try and boot over now into Linux I'm just going to change the boot order
actually I think I can jump straight to it and we'll see how Manjaro performs so
here we are this is Linux Manjaro build 17 running off my USB pen drive in the
USB 3 port touchpad Works wireless works the battery is being detected there
brightness controls also work on the display you can see they're tweaking it
down or up and last check is the audio which also works so everything's working
there but bear in mind it's running off the pendrive it's not fully installed
onto the emmc or the SSD ok so just like the civil top here the camera is rubbish
it's 480p only so square not even sixteen by nine to match the display and
thirty frames per second is what Windows can record there but the viewfinder is
really quite choppy seems only about fifteen frames per second to me so you
wouldn't be buying this a laptop here for its webcam performance you'd
probably want to use an external Logitech one to get better quality so
here are the emmc speeds that Toshiba drive it's not the fastest as you can
see there with the sequential read of 150 and then writes over 104 I mean it's
not too bad but it's not as fast as those MMC 5 spec ones so you probably
want to go and install an SSD like this one here I have which is a transcend and
I'll show you how to do that in just a second but there's two other things I
wanted to point out that I know people will be interested in and that is
hwm foe here so the battery it's reporting the capacity as our 47 what
hours which I don't believe it is that we'll find out later on when I do my
full test and just use this for a week or so to get my battery life figures
I'll let you know more about that and the full review of course now the weir
level there's reporting 5.1 percent now this could be an error but I doubt it's
going to be one two five point one percent out of the box if it is then
that's bad but really I don't think it is and the monitor is a chi me it's the
model CM n twelve thirty nine which I believe is I could actually be wrong on
this but I could think it could be the same screen used in the me notebook here
so in order to install your own SSD you just need to buy a set of three twenty
two by forty two one undo this screwed you can see I'm doing on the bottom so
screw that out and then you just have to somehow get this out I think it'll flick
up there we go that comes out and you can see that's all we have room for
there's one more screw that needs to be removed this one here so take that out
and then slaughter and screw down your sata3 is fifty then the last step is to
go into the bias of course and set that as the boot device clone or copy or do a
fresh install of Windows 10 and you're done this will increase the performance
and of course your storage but really great to see them putting these little
slots on here however I wish they had room to put in I can see on this device
they wouldn't have had room to put the 22 by eighty in but they somehow managed
to squeeze it into the civil top here but if they had that will be a lot
better and then we can install faster set of three drives and why not here is
a quick look at the internal so very large battery cell that looks to me like
it's made up of two cells there and we do have an internal metal frame well
this is plastic here that everything is screwed into that is glued in place with
the the top metal parm rest and the keyboard area and this is the internal
support metal backing that is behind the keyboard those are
the two loudspeakers which actually are located up on the top there's a sound to
be coming up through there so not through the keyboard as I thought at
first and we've got a large metal heatsink here which is great that's good
news that should stop this from having any thermal throttling that is the Intel
Wireless 3165 dual band AC chip dual antennas those internal cables go up
into the screen area so hopefully good range and reception on that I will check
that out later but so far seems good now when it comes to the SD slot you
probably could get a dremel cut this plastic down and you would be able to
fit I would say by just looking at it at least the 22 by 60 in there if you
wanted to of course mess things up a little bit by cutting that out and then
you probably just have to tape it in place but overall the internals look
really good to me and not bad here considering this is Anandi okay so there
we have it the Shona 21 is shaping up to be a good laptop now there's a few
compromises of course that you're going to need to find one of these a 3.5
millimeter to type C adapter which is a bit of a pain I wish they'd put that
port on there now I can clearly see they've made some compromises they
didn't have space in there so they made a choice to go what what do we want do
we want to lose the micro HDMI out or we put a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack I
kind of think they've made the right choice but even so really would like to
have that 3.5 millimeter jack on there and why have they not included one of
these two three US dollar parts and the Box really beats me so the left USB 3
port is in fact a USB 2 port or it's not for working at Sawle speeds there and
the micro sorry micro SD card slot yes sticks out a little bit but it's very
minor complaint there it's great to have that SSD slot on the bottom so very easy
access just one screw then another screw so two screws in total to put your SATA
3 is 50 in there it's the shame that it's not the full size 22 by 80 that we
have of course on the civil top ear here keyboard is great to type on it's the
same as this one I prefer this keyboard because they've done I feel a better
design choice of moving the power button right up to the top there means that if
you go for the Delete key right in the corner there
you're not going to accidentally tap the power button which sometimes happens
although me personally I find I don't do that on this one now this model when I
got it out of the box the fingerprint reader does not work and I still cannot
fix it this works winner ten activates this here Windows
10 is using a temporary license and you need to supply your own so that's a bit
of a con there but I do like the full type C port it has on here because I use
this which is a type C dock and when I connect that up and I've got my monitor
and everything else connected it's very easy for me to use a mouse it's just one
port being in there but was this of course to connect this up to a PC to use
it as it sorry the desktop to connect up to a monitor then I need to plug it in
my mouth the HDMI cable and then the type C pulled in there to charge so I
prefer when you've just got this poor here but overall nice machine of course
it's so thin it's super light it weighs 1.09 kilos super light really good
screen on it too it's a great 1080p IPS the brightness isn't super bright but
it's efficient enough really because it's got that anti-glare coating on it
now you see that here the screen is glossy of course as mentioned that this
one's got a screen protector on it so pulled out screen protector off and it's
the same exact panel underneath now gaming performance battery life and
further benchmarks will be coming in my up and coming full review but I can say
straight away that the battery life will be better on this because I can see it
does have a physically larger battery inside when we looked at the internals
symbols on this I don't believe we're going to be a problem because there is a
decent copper heatsink Annette just like this model here so if you're going to
choose between both of these clearly I would go for this one because the
fingerprint reader works but I don't know if it's going to have the same
performance as this model the civil top air which is the fastest upon lakes so
far so hopefully I will see you back with the full review of this model thank
you so much for watching bye for now