hey guys so it's time to continue with my quest to find the best budget
notebook the Apollo lakes out of China and right here I've got the Tbook4 for
now I had a look at the Tbook air which was a 12.5 inch in 3450 model this
one here has the same CPU about fourteen point one inches with a matte screen
all-metal build on there now this one was on sale and I think it's around at
the moment $239 on geekbuying.com where I
purchased it but be careful because it says it has wireless AC but I know now
from various different reports on users on my forum that it in fact has real
tech wireless inin here which seems to be the only downside so far so I've got
my knife here let's check this one out and see if it could be one of the best
ones apart from of course lacking that wireless AC which the others have so a
good chance now to check out geek buying packaging and how well they've wrapped
this up so got some padding around the box so there we have the box and the tea
book here packaging of this one looks almost the same as a tea book for
because it's got the same kind of scale to it there so yeah lots of damage to
the box looks like it has had quite a whack here on the corner hopefully the
notebook inside is going to be alright
alright okay this is better now they put that super bubble wrap around the
notebook itself so then it will not get damaged that's one positive here of
their packaging so user manual this will no doubt the all in Chinese which it is
and the low all of this is the power supply and they have included a u.s. to
EU adapter a very cheap one at that so this is rated to 12 volts to ants just
like most of the other Apolo legs which are either 12 volts 2 or 3 amps
so before I get into it I just wanna have a look at the weight 1.31 kilos
that's really quite good because other notebooks like the show my 31 or about
1.3 9 kilos okay so that's a nice change to see this dark what I would call gonna
metal kind of gray color now we've got the logo on the top which is a little
bit ugly isn't it - shame you've got that that we couldn't actually just
remove that or maybe it is removable have to check that out so the flex on
top of the lid that there's a little bit in the middle there but it's not too bad
it has a plastic on the top of it to protect it from scratches there's
another piece of plastic or this protector thin foam there okay oh that
looks very nice I'd like to see more Apollo late laptops like this we've got
a large touchpad as you can see I'll test that out in a second but really
good I'm impressed so far by the appearance
of this now at the top here we can see a webcam that looks very similar to the
style of the jumper easy book 3 Pro and the shona 31 and microphones either side
of it so we'll have those dual array microphones keyboard has a little bit of
flex I mean it's actually the keys all themselves moving but that doesn't feel
too bad and those keys first impressions have a nice feel to them decent amount
of travel too so we've got shortcuts for the brightness via the function key here
media controls a print screen button the Delete key is next to the power button
here but since it's in the separate row here with the homepage up and down in
end I think that most people probably won't be heading that so just above the
keyboard here you'll find a power on status LED one for the caps lock and
then one for number lock so it is a very thin looking laptop but just health then
I'll measure it it's approximately 14 millimeters at the
more thicket in there that's without the rubber feet and then towards the front
that drops down to about 12 so nice design fin and right here you can see a
status LED micro HDMI out and then a full size USB 3 port and on the right
side micro SD card slot another full-size USB 3 port headphone jack and
then our DC into charging which is the 3 millimeter plug with d+ in the middle so
I just wanted to keep that a micro SD card and as you can see they fit in
flush which is great that means they should not pop out and be lost if you
place this in a bag and just like the Chewie let book 12.3 there is a little
flap on the bottom a hatch here that we can open up which I'll do right now and
insert a set of three SSD in here now it must be set of three spec and judging by
the looks of the size of this it will be the 22 by 42 size here that I can see so
you'd slot that in there you can see and probably later on I will end up
installing my own SSD in here because the performance will be a lot faster and
give me a course more storage than this 64 gigabyte emmc that's onboard here and
you're probably wondering like me just where the speakers if they're not on the
bottom well here they are they're between the screen and the keyboard now
hopefully this location will transmit the sound up and have it reflect off the
screen towards us I will test out those speakers later on in this video so what
am i showing you here well there's tiny little bits of rubber here as a good
design choice what they've put here because that's going to keep the screen
from scratching up against the keyboard when you close it and just have a quick
look so the screen we can see it it does have some black bezels around it they're
not too large but it does take away a little from the design there I wanted to
have a look very quickly a very important setting that at least the ear
head and that was everything was completely unlocked to us and even has
to get really maximum performance out of us and no they have not enabled the
setting here which is called power limit now that is disabled it allows the GPU
to use all the power at once and in turn really
increase the performance but we've got at least a fully unlocked menu that I
can see here which is great that they've done this it's just that one sitting
that's missing and of course boot order you will need to change this if you
install an SSD so let's exit out of here and get this thing powered up so an
account has already been created and by the looks of it this is going to be in
Chinese no it's in English that's great so someone has set this and English I do
believe that some of the other first models that were sent out that people
said they got about a week ago two weeks ago what all in Chinese so at least my
unit has the English language pack already installed by geek vine okay I
think I spoke too soon this just popped up saying that my windows license will
expire soon so it looks like it does not have a valid license or it must have
that Chinese only valid license so we're probably going to have to end up
upgrading to Pro you can get CD keys now I don't know whether they're fully legit
or not but from other sources like eBay for around five us so it shouldn't be
too much of a problem to then upgrade this and keep it all in English so as
you can see here six gigabyte of RAM now it does see Windows is activated but I
just showed you that problem there so it won't last long that activation so I
need like a temporary key they use the memory is running at 1600 megahertz
which is the fastest supported speed which is great and it does say four or
four slots used so this should be in dual channel if it's saying that for us
now under the device manager of course the information I already knew that it's
only got real tech wireless-n on here so far that is the biggest con such a shame
so if you want wireless AC you're going to have to use an external USB adapter
for that now the built-in emmc is a Toshiba 0-60 4G 93 and I have a look at
what we've got for free space when you first boot into that is 41 point eight
gigabytes free and again as I mentioned just before earlier on that if you put
an S of course you can expand your storage up
to 512 gigabytes I think the 22 by 40 to support here is a benchmark now of the
emmc that's on board so we get 150 to read sequential and then almost 50 right
which isn't too bad but the four K's are quite low so if you really want to step
up the performance and just make the OS a little bit snappier loading
applications installing applications switch to an SSD which is what I'm going
to do very shortly now my first impressions of the screen I can confirm
that it is definitely an IPS anti-reflective coating that is on there
you'll notice that the colors that shifting there is more from the coating
and not because it's a TN panel or anything like that I believe because the
vertical angles would be affected which you can see now that the colors aren't
shifting it's just kind of dimming because of that layer that is on there
so the the blacks the colors and the maximum brightness looks really good
however it's not a perfect screen I've noticed that when you have a look at it
close up that you see is kind of vertical line sometimes that it's a
little bit hard to capture on camera provides a zoom in here a little now
that lines you seeing now is because of the coating it's on it that's something
that's just on camera I can honestly not really capture it but it is tiny little
vertical lines you can see it slight trembling on there so not really a
perfect perfect screen but it's okay for the price it's definitely a good screen
for the price no doubt about that so that's 30 percent brightness 75 100 and
zero which is reasonably dim I could do of it a little bit dimmer if you're
going to use it with the lights off or anything but overall yep the screen so
far remember this is just first impressions is looking fairly decent for
230 us so here's the Geekbench fourscore it's pretty much exactly the same as
what you'll get on other m34 50s it does vary a little bit on the conditions of
it's a little bit warm you probably get a slow
no score there and then the OpenCL score I've also installed battery bar pro and
it's reporting that the battery capacity is 50 watt hours which I don't think is
possible I mean there's not going to fit in it it's probably somewhere around 38
37 watt hours just like the other Apollo Lake laptops have now probably one of
the most positive things that I have encountered so far is the touchpad it is
a precision touchpad and it's large and quite good to use it supports all those
gestures but because it is detected now as a precision touchpad you're able to
go in here now and just change all of the settings you want so the two things
are scrolling that seems to work pretty good to me the accuracy good seems good
as well so if there's any of these gestures in here that you don't like
like some of those minimize ones you can simply go on there and disable those but
first impressions are really good of this touchpad I do like the accuracy the
slightly larger supplies I would almost say not at this point is too early but
it could be perhaps the best touchpad on these Apollo 8 laptops I've been looking
at to date so I've had some time on now with the keyboard done a little bit of
typing on it and it feels good not bad at all the keys as I mentioned
in this start they've got a nice feedback to them and overall I haven't
had any missed strokes that haven't registered there's a minor problem with
this space but I've noticed that it has raised up a little bit more here on the
left side but it hasn't affected the typing of every time I've gone to hit
space it has registered so no issues so far but all update you that again on my
full review once I've used it for a week or so so time to test out these speakers
now as I pointed out in the start we've got two upward firing speakers right
here
so these speakers have a okay amount of volume to them I'll test that later on
just tell me dis about that is but I've noticed it went a hundred percent volume
you could probably hear it that it does vibrate in the housing so it does
distort a little so they're not great speakers you can see I'm running Linux
manjaro here now there's a couple of things that do not work on here that you
need to be aware of that is the touch pads not working
just a straight boot from my Manjaro version 17 build and the wireless also
is not working so there's a couple of things that you're going to have 200 out
and find drivers for there if you want to run Linux on this okay so I love the
color of this I hope that Chuwi ,Jumper and anyone else in China that's going to
release some Apollo Lake laptops if we do see any more that they use this color
this darker gray just looks really really nice I mean it makes it look more
professional to me I find that really the goal is just abused so much in China
they constantly it must be very popular there they're using it releasing so many
devices mobile phones and laptops and even tablets that all have that
champagne gold on there so it's really great to see this color come out of
China so far the laptop is looking very good I like the keyboard the touchpad is
probably one of the better things about this because it's a precision touchpad
it's accurate with the finer movement and if you don't like some of those
Windows 10 gestures just go into the settings and disable them it's not a
problem so the USB ports will power external
hard drives and the wireless in on there that is the biggest con because all the
competition has wireless AC so geek buying they made an error didn't they
they said it was wireless AC and sadly it isn't maybe there's going to be a
refresh model with wireless AC I certainly hope so after looking this
model so far now the screen it's not bothering me as
much that vertical lines I'm kind of seeing it seems to have gone away I've
updated the Intel driver there and I'm not noticing it as much it seems to be
when you move your eyes around and look back at the screen you can see like at
Rimmel all these vertical lines it's it's hard to describe it I don't know if
it just the characteristics of the screen
or perhaps anti-glare coating it's not really a problem unless you look at it
really really closely so I'm over exaggerating here maybe with that it
does seem to have a very decent IPS panel on there now we get a little bit
of a bezel around the outside but that is not a problem it's only about two
millimeters and black that border you get around it so so far looking very
good I do have to get you back in the full review which will take probably
about a week or two for me to get around to fully using this and just finding out
the battery life their performance the thermals gaming or that's going to be
covered hope to see you then bye for now