okay so I'm virtually with the onda shoma 21 this is yet again another
seller on M 34 powered a laptop and my quest to try and find the best one out
of China now this thing straight up spoilers here came very close to being
the best what I would call an an ultrabook super portable notebook
because it's really like the funny ways 1.09 kilos and it is under 13
millimeters thin so really portable now just to quickly summarize here it has
one deal-breaker that I think a lot of people are going to be put off by have
you seen my unboxing video that none of the ports on it includes an audio 3.5
millimeter headphone jack it's got type C and as soon as you plug
anything in type C it will automatically divert all the audio output to that port
and that also means the speaker's will stop working so if you want to listen to
audio and then charge at the same time you can't which is absolutely crazy that
a machine like this has that kind of design flaw so let's check it out here
in greater detail go over the design benchmarks a little bit of gaming
performance battery life all of that is going to be covered in this review you
can see some time codes that should be popping up on this side or that side if
I get it right one of these days the build of the laptop is really good it's
all made out of this alloy just like the civil top air or the T Booker that I
looked at the top of the lids if you see now on boxing already covered this that
it doesn't have any flex there it feels quite solid so I don't believe that the
little bit is going to press in and have the screen press up against the keyboard
and be damaged the underside is also all made out of metal and there's a little
slot here that you just need to undo two screws in order to install and SSD if
you want to find out how to do that just check out my unboxing video on the left
side of the show me 21 there is a USB 3 port now this is actually a USB 2 port
in my testing it will not run at full USB 3 speeds but limited to USB 2 speeds
there the micro SD card slot as you can see the
now that I've got in at the moment is actually fully inserted so it sticks out
and protrudes by about two millimeters and it did actually come undone well
click out in my bag like this a couple of times so there is a risk of losing
micro SD cards I feel because it doesn't sit right in nice and flush and on the
right the second USB to report now this one will work at full USB 3 speeds
however I've noticed that with external hard drives now and then it will
disconnect and it's not working 100% perfect all the time with hard drives
but with flash drives it's perfectly fine HDMI out there which works up to 4k
30 Hertz and then the type C port which is audio out and charging now connected
up a 3.5 millimeter to type C adapter and the audio output from it does sound
very clear there's no static or hiss to be expected being digital but I feel
it's a bad design choice not to have the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on this
laptop at all that is missing there always seems to be something with these
Chinese devices keyboard isn't a full sized one but it is good to type on it's
got good key travel of about 1.3 millimeters and a nice feedback from the
individual keys there there are media shortcuts but it does like shortcuts for
the screen brightness controls on the very wisely move the power button above
the keyboard and not in the place of the Delete key which we often see so there's
no accidental running the laptop into sleep like some models now right about
here you can see these two little dots those are the microphones there so due
to the location they do pick up noise and feedback from the keyboard if you
happen to be in a Skype call and chatting using the keyboard
our front-facing webcam is 2 megapixels now when you use the windows webcam
camera application the video quality is about 15 frames per second if you see my
unboxing but I've noticed that in Skype calls it does work and 720p 30 frames
per second and the quality is okay as long as you're in good light well it's
not a huge touchpad I find it works well we've got two fingers scrolling the
sensitivity is okay it is not a precision one so you
cannot disable the gestures on there without a registry hack now you'll
notice that on the right side here what that little square there that is a eland
brand fingerprint reader so you can unlock it just using your finger and it
works quite quickly using Windows hello and haven't had any issues whether it's
accurate it's fast it does the job the screen on
to used is a 12.5 inch 1080p IPS panel maximum brightness is 430 Lux which is
very good considering the fact that it does have a matte coated anti clear
cover over the whole top of the screen I've got nothing but praise for the
screen really it is really good a very nice panel that they have used really
good colors deep blacks no complaints with it whatsoever
fantastic screen and out of the box the calibration of the white seems to be
pretty much spot on the show-me 21 is powered by the intel celeron m34 50 it's
otherwise known as the Apollo Lake chipset now this is the one that
replaced the much slower and some cheery trails so we have four gigabytes of RAM
running at 1600 megahertz it is fully activated Windows 10 no problems with
the activation unlike the civil top ear or the t book air that I reviewed which
only used a temporary license so you had to supply your own which was of course
not great at all we never want to have to do that so Wireless is the Intel dual
band wireless AC three one six five with good performance I'll show you a
benchmark of that in a second and then the Toshiba 0-60 4G 30 is our emmc which
is the default configuration I recommend going with an SSD if you want to get
better performance now it is a emmc 4.5 spec drive and not emmc 5 which is the
faster ones that we typically see on the apollo lakes so here are the speeds of
it you can see it's not actually too bad for e MMC 4.5 spec good sequential right
there and very good sequential right for case random for case so
not too bad considering I also benched much my internal SSD that I have now
which I'm using at the moment is a transcend 256 gigabyte one and those are
the speeds there which are pretty much the maximum that this particular SSD can
do so there's no limitations on the SATA 3 port the micro USB card reader is
unfortunately like most wired up via a USB 2 hub so these speeds are limited
there we cannot get the high capacity or the high speed cards at the maximum
performance out of them this is the geek bench for score great speeds here for an
apollo lake in 3450 no complaints whatsoever very good it does feel
cooking snappy windows the overall performance now it can play and stream
4k video in edge you can play for kh2 point 6 v codec natively and also vp9
natively without any issues even high bit rates if you're running off the
internal SSD slot so here are the wireless speeds very good speeds here
now the range of it seems to be good but I wouldn't class it as being the best I
have seen probably because of the all metal housing it depends on what way you
have the screen facing you the kind of speeds you're going to get out the
further you get away from your wireless router so in general you it's quite fine
the Apollo Lake I find this is perfect for people that just want to do light
things so internet use watching videos documents stuff like that in anything
that's light now you want to be editing videos on this you won't be playing
top-tier grade a games on this from 2017 isn't
designed for that you can see Start menu pops in quite well no the reason I'm
showing you this that some of the Apollo Lakes had quite a bit of lag when doing
that but not the case here windows edge still has that animation lag you can see
it's a little bit sort of stuff read away it maximizes which isn't the
greatest now I've got a few tabs open in chrome now I'd like to run normally
around 5 or 6 and there really isn't any problem switching between them you
can see now the two fingers scrolling let's have a look at that is very smooth
even in chrome here now a ninja's smoother and slightly better but I find
that performance to be very good acceptable and even demanding websites
they have a lot of images really not a problem at all you can see there that
smooth now one thing that doesn't work on the touchpad is the pinch-to-zoom for
some reason does not seem to be enabled and neither does that annoying minimize
and maximize gesture which I'm glad they have that disabled so getting in and
around it and using it if I find the performance is really quite good now
let's load up here now and image just an edit here for some ways thumbnails and
Photoshop so let's have a look and see how fast it's going to take to load up
now bear in mind unloading us off my SSD and not the default included storage
which is the 64 gigabyte emmc which would be a little bit slower but not
that much so you can see it is loaded up but it's going to take a little while
for things to all pop in now it can do these basic image it's just fine but the
more filters you start to apply the more larger images the slower things are
going to get you can take a move around that image is not very high resolution
at all and it handles that fine but I wouldn't do anything too complicated on
the Apollo Lake you also have to bear in mind that we've got four gigabytes of
RAM to play with so once you go over that there will be some SSD swapping
happening to stop you getting those low Ram warnings so here is a quick 4k demo
it's running this as a shot on a samsung galaxy note and it's running at
perfectly fine there is no problems you can skip ahead no lag a great screen to
for watching video and just general content because it is anti glare we
don't have all those annoying reflections then it's a bit of a funny
analysing effect happening on the screen you don't see that in person
just on camera and it's to do with the anti-glare coating I feel on the screen
so this is another area here where the showman 21 really shines this is battery
life so in my tester Iran Chrome with about six or seven tabs open I was
listening to a little bit of music using the type C the 3.5 millimeter depth that
I have and sometimes just the speakers by themselves in WordPress editing I did
a whole day's work on this and I managed to get 8 hours and 26 minutes and I
still had 15% left now your mileage is going to vary it's always going to
depend on how close you are to your wireless router during this test I was
very close to it so the signal strength would probably be a lot lower the power
consumption but really this is the best result I have seen doing similar tests I
can normally get around seven to seven a half on other Apollo Lakes but for some
reason some of the power saving features they have enabled with the screen like
the self refreshing things really helped here so very good now it charged times
if you can see just down here we're looking at around three and a half hours
to fully charge it went on now if you power it off that brings down the charge
time to about three hours and my testing so it is very quick to charge to now the
audio is by far the most disappointing part of this notebook and a real deal
breaker as I pointed out there's no 3.5 millimeter headphone jack to start with
but the speakers also have this annoying hiss over them with whenever any sound
is played you will hear constantly this noise emanating from it which I find to
be distracting so let's have a listen to how loud the speaker's sound
so they completely lack any basis just mids and treble and the volume at 100%
does distort so they're not great and when you plug in the charger the audio
will cut out completely which is just a deal-breaker it's so stupid you cannot
charge and listen to audio at the same time so I'm going to test out a few
games now but before I do that I want to show you here the setting that I believe
is related and directly linked to the increased GPU performance we're seeing
on this particular model and the civil top ear why they are the fastest by
about 30 to 40 percent frames per second more than other a polo league so not all
the polo legs are the same down to BIOS or RAM speeds or settings the way
they've configured things but I believe it's related to this so I found here
that has the power limit one disabled now if yours is enabled just disable
down here to get the maximum performance here what this allows is the CPU to
consume more power than it normally would with those enable those limits so
the internal graphics integrated GPU will end up clocking higher speeds and
perform a lot better and consume more power now this will probably generate
more heat on other laptops this option is disabled like the Chui let book 14.1
or the 12.3 and having this to say but I feel is the best way to go that
hopefully most manufacturers are going to go with the setting and let us get
the maximum performance we can out of the little a polar lake and another
thing that I always do here for gaming is to make sure you go into the Intel HD
graphics control panel and where it says global settings make sure this is
disabled here the extended battery life for gaming because having that enabled
which is set by default will lower the GPU performance so here we have
counter-strike at 800 x 600 resolution this is on the lowest settings and the
frame rates a lot better than what I've seen on other apolar legs like they're
chewy lab books 12.3 around forty to fifty frames per
second the server has around sixteen players on there I think at the moment
so all in all it's not actually doing too bad and definitely one of the better
ones not quite as fast as the civil top air however older titles like half-life
2 can run in 1080p so the native screen resolution with playable frame rates but
you will see the occasional little frame dip down there that will drop down to
about 50 frames per second
and lastly League of Legends 1080p lowest visual settings is running
perfectly fine over 60 frames per second with this BOTS match here so I've got
two BOTS on the opposition and one on my side so temperatures top out at 81
degrees after 30 minutes of gaming now I did test it with one hour of gaming and
charging at the same time the maximum temperature was 83 degrees which is
still perfectly fine there is no thermal throttling it does get quite hot the
case just around the right side where the power button is and underneath 238
degrees so quite warm to the touch but that's to be expected for a fanless
laptop so there we have it what could have been perhaps the best portable tiny
12.5 inch laptop turned out to be mediocre with that huge deal-breaker
when it comes to the audio the fact that when you need to charge you can't listen
to anything no output from the speakers there and this of course I'm just being
a little bit blind here and I can't find the proper setting but I've gone through
it over and over again and I see no way to do that maybe there is an adapter you
can plug in it allow us to charge and have audio out at the same time still
don't like their design choice on this though they should have just given us a
3.5 millimeter headphone jack and then DCM for charging wouldn't have been a
problem I feel if they had to make a compromise there they could just drop
that type C port besides that battery life is really
big thumbs up there it can get about eight hours depending on your brightness
setting of what you're doing of course gaming performance we're seeing yet
again that the integrated GPU there until five hundred HD is performing
really well better than literally 80% or 90% of all the other Apollo legs out
there because they have done some tweaks in the BIOS they have disabled the power
limits in there allowing the to CPU ready to stretch its legs consume all
the power at once but it doesn't seem to really affect the battery life so I
don't know why other manufacturers and doing what these guys are doing allowing
us to really maximize performance of the Apollo Lake
so overall with the touchpad its decent the fingerprint a lock unlocking is good
but I personally would not buy this one here because of that deal-breaker when
it comes to the audio thanks a lot for watching this review and I hope to see
you back in the channel shortly with more up-and-coming reviews