So this little 12.5 inch laptop is the civil Book Air according to my box but
it's also known as the t book air and the Xiaoma 21 from under but that model
has two USB 3 ports on it and a micro SD card anyway it's very light this thing
is only one point zero eight kilos so super portable full middle design and it
is around about 13 millimeters thick as you can see very thin but before we go
any further it's got some rather large deal breakers on you should know about
on the right hand side we just have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and on the
left a type C port that is it port wise is nothing else so if you're summer that
hates carrying around adapters even though they do include it in the box
then this isn't going to be clearly the laptop for you the included adapter they
give you is just a USB 3 then HDMI out and power and that's it you only got one
USB 3 port but you can use adapters like this one I've got this habit that I'd
rather like and that gives me full-sized HDMI to display out type C in for
charging and three USB 3 ports not only that also a SD card reader and because
it's a Type C hub that does support continual data charging and display out
all at the same time it can be used as a 1 port hub which is what I'm doing so
all I needed to set this down on my desk got my monitor already connected up my
USB mouse and keyboard plug that in and straight away I've got everything and
charging all at the same time but I must admit it is quite a hassle to have to
always carry around and adapter for this if I want to access my micro sd card or
a USB pendrive so it is powered by these super common cell Ron n 3450 witches in
a polo like CPU it's got 4 gigabytes of RAM comes with Windows 10 home but
there's another con here straight away that it doesn't have a valid license
with it so it keeps asking me to activate windows so you need to supply
your own CD key with this model which is not good straight off the bat we should
never have to do this it's also got wireless AC and 128 gigabyte SSD once
you first boot it up you have approximately 106 to 105 gigabytes free
on that M.2 SATA 3 SSD so the screen there's
a 12.5 inch IPS panel that is glossy what I felt it was at first but it turns
out it's got a screen protector on it once you move that remove the screen
protector its then mat underneath so you can decide where do you want to keep it
on for the glossy panel or remove it if you get sick of the reflections now the
panel itself has a maximum output of 430 Lux which is very decent of the bright
screen and the calibration of it I'm fine to be quite good the whites are
neither warm nor too cool and offers good colors now you're seeing on camera
a little bit of flicker here but that only happens on camera to the naked eye
looking at this now I can't see in event flicker so it's got a very nice screen
on there now the keyboard on it even though it's 12.5 inches is reasonably
spacious pressing down hard there is very little flex on that keyboard firm I
like the response of the keys they've got 1.4 millimeters of travel and
overall not a bad keyboard or one of the better ones on the Apollo Lake laptops
however the power button could be in a better location it has the exact same
resistance as the other keys but so far I haven't accidentally triggered it palm
rest has virtually no flex the whole thing is really solid made out of metal
you only get a bit of plastic on the rear for the wireless antenna reception
now there is a big problem with what is hard to see on camera right here there's
a fingerprint reader now this is an eighth land fingerprint reader and I've
searched on the official website I've downloaded I've tried driver updating
software whatever I do I cannot get this damn thing to work and I've wasted a
good hour or so trying to fix it got a problem with the drivers on there
maybe it's hardware related maybe it's another driver conflicting with it
but I cannot get it to work the touchpad itself though is very good it's decent
I like it I don't have to resort to using a mouse which is great because
we've only got that one port on the side here and you don't want to have to give
that up using an adapter and a USB mouse it does support gestures and it is a
precision touchpad so we have full control over those gestures you're able
to disable the ones that you don't like so the front-facing camera is a two
megapixel one according to Windows even though these stats on the website claim
that it's only VGA but it's telling me they can record 720p 30 frames per
second but when I have recorded images using the webcam here it is really quite
poor and not a good webcam at all that's on this now the microphones as you can
see those two little dots left and right of the webcam right here I like the
location of them because normally the microphones down on the keyboard you get
a lot of vibration and feedback from the keys but they aren't particularly good
mics either so webcam and microphones I would rate as about a six out of ten on
this particular laptop so the frame around the screen has a little bit of
flex to it but overall it's quite solid and even the lid pressing down so if
you're going to put this in a backpack with some books pressing up against it I
don't believe that the screen and the keyboard are going to be pressed up
causing scratches on the screen here because it seems really quite solid to
me so when it comes to speakers there is no visible speaker grille on here so
they're not either upwards or downwards buying speakers but I feel that they're
coming through the keys so they're just internal speakers here let's have a
listen to how they sound
overall there aren't too bad I have heard worse and I ever better the
loudness of them is okay there is a little bit of distortion and vibration
at 100% volume now the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack which is on the
right-hand side here outputs clean audio there's no static over it and it seems
reasonably loud too so I've got here an example of the battery life that we get
out of it it's got a 30 watt hour battery in there which equates to 8
thousand milliamp hours more or less now at the screen on 100% brightness and
just internet use and you can see that it's going to tell me I've got around 4
hours so that's not good at all that is bad but it is 100 cm bonus now if I chop
the brightness down to 25% 50% I can squeeze around 5 and a half hours out of
this so the battery life is really not good at all it should be so much better
considering how light and portable this is it is just leading it down I would
love to have all-day battery life or lift 7 or 8 hours that you can get out
of other Apollo 8 powered laptops like the easy book 3 pro or the chewy lap
book 14.1 so I needed to confirm a few things the exact size of the SSD and the
exact location of those speakers and the only way to do that of course is to open
it up and have a look so very good build quality here everything's screwed in
place battery is screwed down we can see the wireless AC chip there at Intel 1v
31 and 65 now we've got a full sized set of three m2 SSD here so it's the 22 by
80 millimeter one and there's a nice heatsink copper heat sink on top of the
Apollo Lake in 3450 the Celeron branded one there so really good here two four
thousand milliamp hour cells as well so the CPU is a quad-core it's the Intel
Celeron n 3450 with a maximum to about 2.2 gigahertz we have four gigabytes of
RAM that's running at 1600 megahertz which is the high
we'll go and they've allocated 167 megabytes to the GPU I have a few
benchmarks here I want to quickly show you so first up is the end to to score
of 120 1000 which is decent this is what other devices would this chipset are
getting so nothing really wrong with that at all and the Geekbench score
again very similar scores to other devices so perfectly fine here it even
comes up as you can see as the t-bolt e-book air and the bios boot logo is the
same so and doesn't even mention in civil top here which is interesting
now the wireless speeds good download speeds from the wireless AC reasonably
good range definitely better than wireless in real tech chipsets we've
typically used to see in the old atom devices but the upload speed that should
be faster around 61 it should really be up around about 260 plus 250 plus so not
sure what's up with that I did test it quite a few times at different times of
the day and I was always getting about that maximum so it could be the way the
antennas are not really too sure about that so if I go into any of my videos
here because I shoot them in 4k just have a look at the easy book 3 this is
edge and it streams 4k just fine and that is actually Auto 4k already now
unable the steps here and we've got no dropped frames performance really good
buffer buffer health there is 25 seconds great so no problems with that
performance of streaming 4k now for us to do the same in Chrome no not as good
it drops frames but the performance overall this is my website here with
lots of images quite smooth and chrome you see not perfect it is a little
smoother in edge overall the performance awfully a laptop I find to be really
quite good considering the chipset you can do a better multitasking getting
around things boot up quick thanks to that SSD that it's got
course now the SSD speeds read speeds here are good but the write speeds are a
little bit slow now you can of course improve on that if you wanted to put a
larger SSD in there you have to use the 22 by 80 specs so the longer MDOT to set
our three issues DS taking a look at gaming performance here this is a failed
extreme Windows Store game you see the performance is quite good it's running
I'd say a little bit smoother and faster than other Apollo tech devices I've
looked at really quite good seems to me that they've put some faster RAM in here
perhaps but it is one of the smoothest this is 1080p on the default visual
setting now look at counter-strike so this is on 800 x 600 resolution on the
lowest settings what I mean testing on all the Apollo Lakes and you can see the
frame rate is really good over 60 frames per second here at the moment and I've
got around I think it's about 1215 people on the server there and yes I
cannot kill people all I managed to get a headshot that was a fluke and another
one another fluke and even another one three flukes in a row
no but the frame rate is really helping here because it is over 60 frames per
second which is really good I've never seen it this fast on an Apollo Lake look
at the head timing and that means I can kill people a hell of a lot easier here
so it does sit down so you can see around 40 frames per second but back up
to 60 again and this is dota 2 on 800 x 600 resolution lower settings scraping
just above 20 frames per second it's a bot map so I've got four BOTS on my side
four on the opposition so bear that in mind that if you are
playing a multiplayer game that so it's not calculating the bots it should run I
would say a lot faster than this it's just when you get into the action here
of course that taking a tie I think on the CPU but really this performance is
not ideal this game is too slow League of Legends here now this is
running the native screen resolution so 1080p the lowest visual settings but as
you can see the frame rate is good now this is a BOTS match with one bottom my
team two on the opposition and the frame rates hovering around 60 frames per
second so really good this is probably the fastest I have seen the Apollo late
in 3450 run this game so very good performance out of this civil top ear or
the Tibor gear or whatever you want to call it so after all of that gaming the
thermals are very good here so 74 degrees is the top it gets up to maximum
temperatures that's on the GPU and the CPU doesn't ever seem to go past 73
degrees so very good results here because we do have that copper heatsink
inside and that's transferring all that heat away now does get a little warm
just around the palm rest area on the left hand side so just down this area
here get a bit of heat here but it's not too bad around 38 degrees of measured it
to thee so not scorching hot or anything like that not enough to be a problem so
does a Linux boot and run on it yes it does check my unboxing and video for
that but it will run everything apart from this right here which is the
touchpad there's some problems with the drivers you're going to have to hunt
around and find the touchpad driver but everything else seems to be fine I
haven't installed it onto the hard drive so I'm not too sure whether that it's
going to work or not but it did run from my USB pendrive
so to recap my findings now I love the size of this thing it's so light it's
portable it's got a really nice screen decent keyboard good touchpad and the
performance of it too is excellent but there are some major cons straight out
of the box the thing print reader does not work and it
doesn't have a valid Windows 10 license they've used some kind of demo install
one which you should never have to do when buying a new laptop is have to pay
for an additional license so is a huge error there and I think the hardware on
the fingerprint reader is either broken or there's some impossible to solve
driver conflict there and the lack of ports isn't obvious this really is not
for everyone because I would love to have a micro SD card on there at least
and even I've got that type C port means I can have data charging display out all
at the same time I would probably give that up me personally to have two USB 3
ports DC and charging and the micro SD card slot so the battery life is also
another con here it is disappointing it's only about five five and a half
hours and that's really not enough because they're advertising this well
it's made to be a portable little laptop but you want really a full day's use out
of it and you're clearly not going to get it so can I recommend it end of the
day no I forego for the Shona 21 I haven't reviewed that one yet but I do
hope to get hold of that in the future and check that one out as it looks
promising and hopefully a lot better than this one here thanks a lot for
watching this review here and I do have to see you back in the channel so with a
lot more future up-and-coming reviews that I have planned and if you do have
any questions let me know down in the comments