So this Apollo Lake powered laptop is the T book 4 and it's undoubtedly
the best-looking one that I have looked at so far because it isn't that ugly
champagne gold color and it's not the silver it comes in this nice darker gray
which looks really quite decent it weighs just 1.3 kilos it's very slim now
it has a logo on the back here which is a little bit ugly unfortunately it's not
a sticker this can't be removed right here so the lid has a little bit of flex
to it and one thing that annoys me slightly as you see the lid doesn't
quite close properly it's moving a little bit there there are no magnets in
here to keep it shut perhaps to reduce the weight but I find that to be a
little annoying now this spec is pretty standard here
we've got 6 gigabytes of RAM 64 gigabytes of EMC 4.5 spec storage there
is an SSD slot on there so you can expand that you can put in your own SSD
to improve performance and increase the storage capacity now Windows 10 on the
model came in Chinese so I had to install English and the CD key that they
have used in here didn't want to activate either so I had to supply my
own one which isn't really good at all now the battery capacity comes in around
10,000 milliamp hours or 3738 what hours so there's a bit of a deal-breaker on
here for a lot of people now I bought this thinking that it was going to come
with wireless AC that was what was in the listing from geek buying calm where
I bought this but as you can see it has the realtek wireless end chipset so
we're going to be limited in speed so I can't get the full advantage of my fiber
optic line here I have in the studio which is a real shame and for me
personally is a deal-breaker so for ports on the left side first
there's a status LED then a micro HDMI port that does not even work now other
owners in my forum also have the same issues so it seems the first batch the
port just does not even work at all so that's very disappointing full-size USB
3 port now it will power external hard drives right side a DC port for charging
which is 12 volts 2.5 amps or higher the three point five minute head phone jack
which doesn't have any static over it it seems to be pretty clear which is good
another USB 3 port which will again power external hard drives and then the
microSD card slot so that microSD is they fit in there nice and flush they
should not fall out now I do have a complaint which is quite frequent that
the port spacing here is a little too close together so the 3.5 millimeter if
you want to be using that and then plug in on the right side here a very large
USB 3 pin drive or something like that then you won't be able to do that
because it's just too close there you have to use the port on the other side
now the touch pad on it is one of the larger ones you'll find on these are
polar lakes and it is one of the best ones is a big surprise here it's a
precision touchpad so it supports all of the windows team gestures you've got
full control so if you don't like some of the gestures or you want to have the
swipe up and down with two fingers reversed you can control all that and
the accuracy up for finer movements is really quite good and overall I would
say and the stage is probably the best maybe equal the same with the cube I
work 5x which also has a precision touchpad and a very decent one so
keyboard is a bit of a mixed bag we've got decent key travel over our 1.25 4
millimeters the feel of the keys themselves isn't too bad now we've got
media control shortcuts at the top even screen brightness print screen button
home page up page down and end which is all great to see the power button
location I find that I don't accidentally trigger now I do have a bit
of an issue with the space key you will see it on the left there it is slightly
higher than on the right and now I'm pressing it it just doesn't register I'd
say one out of ten presses it will not register so that's a little bit annoying
and can cause typos and I have noticed that sometimes this is probably about
one out of 10 or 20 times you're pressing the keys one of the keys will
not registers so it is definitely not as good the keyboard as the one that I've
been using in my easy book 3 Pro show you how far the lid can recline so that
some it's actually not too bad one of the positives of the T book four is we
have this easy access flaps you don't have to go around removing all of these
outer screws to get access to the SSD bay the slot on there simple one screw
this comes up then you put your SSD in here now it must be 22 by 42 millimeters
and there's no screw inside here because the screw of the lid is what keeps that
in place there so really well designed and I wish all of the Apollo 8 laptops
and all future ones would have the same flap on them because it just makes life
easy so at the top of that fourteen point one inch screen we have two
microphones left and right of the webcam which is two megapixels 720p max 30
frames per second but it seems to only record in windows camera app at around
15 frames per second but looks choppy but when I was using this webcam and
Skype I found the quality to be acceptable it's not a bad webcam and I
have seen a hell of a lot worse there are ones out there that only run in VGA
resolution so the bias it has is completely unlocked to us but it does
not have that sitting which can really boost the performance which is the of
course advanced CPU setting the power management sorry not power management
about the power limit but that's not too much of an issue now because there's a
way to bypass those power limits that are set by stock which is six watts and
we can increase that to ten or fifteen what's even unlimited to boost the
performance now it will boot Linux all you need to do is insert a Linux
pendrive make sure it is formatted correctly the USB pendrive you use and
then you can boot to that just from this menu right here which is the save and
exit menu find it boot it and Linux will work but what doesn't seem to work
correctly or if we don't have any drivers as the touchpad apart from that
everything else is working so the screen that's on here and the t book for is a
anti-glare coated screen so it's not susceptible to reflections really good
to use in bright environments even though the maximum brightness is only
258 Lux which is okay borderline but at the maximum setting it is perfectly fine
you can even you outdoors so that is fine however I've
got a few complaints with the screen on my unit I sometimes see these vertical
lines that I mentioned in my unboxing video and it turns out that the reason
behind this is that the refresh rate the Hertz that it's running at is only forty
eight Hertz so it's not running at the full sixty Hertz like you would find on
any other Apollo Lake notebook now the reason why the T book is like this I
think is because I've said it to save on batteries so it gives us a boost in
battery life which I'll talk about later in this video I can pick up on that
flicker now shown this laptop to a couple of other people and people like
my wife for example she doesn't actually see this flicker so it's something I'm
more used to using PCs and gaming at our 60 Hertz or even higher at a hundred and
twenty Hertz and then coming that now to fully eight Hertz
it's definitely noticeable to me now for some people this again might be a
deal-breaker but for I feel that a lot of people probably won't even see it so
the screen quality itself it's got really good blacks as an IPS screen the
viewing angles are fine and you can see this is better video 4k Noah she's
playing this and it does run vp9 a TVC codecs with ease that's part of the
hardware decoding that the Apollo Lakes can handle
so overall the screen is okay it's just not the greatest panel definitely not
and I'll show you the brightness very quickly to that 75% on 100 and the
dimmer sitting there I feel should be a little bit dimmer so for memory we've
got six gigabytes of double data rate three RAM that is running at 1600
megahertz this is the fastest speed that it supports so that is correct they
haven't clocked down the round speeds or anything like that and is running in
dual channel now if you look at the internals of it you will see they're
actually just two three gigabyte chips on there which seems like a strange
setup but Samsung do produce these and that is what they're using those at the
low power double data rate three so here we have a couple of benchmarks that I
went through so the first up is Geekbench for now these scores are
perfectly fine you can get a little bit higher if you
tweak the power limit which I will not do in this review but I have a separate
video up if you want more information about that check down in the description
that's how you can boost the performance greatly mostly the GPU and these polar
lakes is just a recent breakthrough we had so that Wireless is that real tech
chipset and here you can see the maximum speeds far below what I can get from
wireless AC however I will give it one thing and that is the range on this is
exceptional really it is really really good I've not seen this kind of range
normally out of these cheaper laptops that I can go right to the other end of
the studio and the signal is still on full and it still gets quite decent
speeds as well so that's one positive out of this limitation here so if you're
someone that's got very slow ADSL or you're not moving files to a file server
then wireless n probably won't affect you that much there that it would for
someone like me that I've got a fiber optic line with 300 meters per second I
really want to be able to use that speed so and to to score one hundred and
twenty thousand this is more or less exactly the same as any other app ole
ole ole 8 in the cell run n 3 4 50 and the emmc speeds so it is a toshiba drive
and it is 4.5 specs so not emmc 5 that we have been seeing so the speeds there
reads it ok I mean it pretty good 150 is good 50 right mm you know a little bit
low there for case also low so I recommend going with an SSD if you
can and then you will get full set of 3 speeds so a lot faster up to 550 read
sequential and 550 writes depending on what drive you use but you're limited on
that size because it's only a 22 42 so you probably a somewhere a little bit
lie when it comes to the write speeds now battery life is where the t book 4
really excels here I can get up to 10 hours of light web view so if you set
your brightness to about 25% and I was in chrome and edge I managed to get
close to that now this test here that I'm showing you you can see I've got
almost 7 hours here now this was continual
Street in 1080p and YouTube using Chrome for
the whole six hours I think it did really well to get almost seven hours
and I still had 19% left so this is probably the best battery life I've seen
on the Apollo's in fact it is and the reason probably is because of that
refresh rate that we have on the IPS panel so it's only 48 Hertz which is
saving some power there because it's not refreshing at 60 now charge times it
takes almost three hours just under three hours to fully charge farm right
down on seven six percent when I ran my tests there so the easy buck 3 Pro which
is in the background here then heads down with phone speakers on the bottom
here and there but you can see on this one that hang on where the speaker's so
they're actually located just below the screen just up here there's a little gap
up there little grill and that is where the sound is transmitted so let's have a
listen to those speakers
okay so they've got a decent volume if I can even call that decent really but
they distort a lot at 100% it's a lot of vibrations coming through that area I
think the keys on the keyboard is what is vibrating causing that distortion
there so these speakers are quite poor in this notebook now to touch on
performance here the Apolo legs a lot of people I think it quite confused and
mistaken by the fact that yes it really is a successor to the Assam but the GPU
is a lot more powerful and it's got some native codec support as I mentioned
before with video so you can run things like Adobe Photoshop here you can do
some minor edits now wouldn't get too crazy on layers and filters it will
really start to bog down quite quickly on this chipset but I am doing a bit of
multitasking here so I've got some tabs open in chrome if you're a heavy chrome
user you can use up to about five or six tabs and even more before you start to
fill up the RAM and you'll notice the speed will slow down there so you can
get away with I think up to about 10 tabs it all depends on if you're viewing
flash websites or heavy widgets websites so scrolling is smooth and the
performance there is good now 4k streaming and YouTube will not work well
in Chrome but it's perfectly fine in edge and
overall the performance of the Apollo Lake is good for light tasks so watching
videos YouTube chrome Doc's excel as long as the spreadsheets and like
massive huge heavy spreadsheets you really want the SSD for that probably
because that's going to speed things up too when it comes to loading things up
loading applications running it off the SSD so the performance a lot of people
are surprised with them but a lot of people as I mentioned get a little bit
confused now you can't play battlefield 1 on this but we'll have a look at some
gaming now and check out and see what kind of frames per second we do on some
light games popular online ones like Counter Strike global Offensive and
League of Legends so counter-strike you can see is only running about 20 frames
per second even lower than that so not really playable this is 800 x 600
lowest settings and you're going to see that a lot that doesn't need dying all
the time so that's just too laggy too choppy too
even be playable at all yeah and I got a head shot so let's see what happens when
I tweak the power limits and put it to 15 watts so now with that tweet we're
getting around 40 to 45 frames per second it's a lot smoother and a lot
more playable but it hasn't improved my gameplay as you can see it's still
absolutely terrible shocking League of Legends so this is
running 1080p the native screen resolution very low option so the
visuals on the lowest setting we're getting around 55 to mid higher 50s
which is great but bear in mind I do have that power limit tweak applied so
without that tweak it had probably around 40 frames per second so if there
was a really good on this laptop the T book 4 only gets up to around 66 degrees
maximum and that's after about 58 minutes or so that I've had it running
been doing a bit of gaming as well now if you game for long long periods and
you're charging at the same time then it will get up to around about 75 degrees
but even so that is still really good for a passively cooled laptop and
surface temperatures are the hottest on the top so just on the left hand side
we're getting up to a rather warm 38 degrees palm rest a lot cooler there
around 35 so it does get warm to the touch but it's nothing alarming nothing
to worry about I feel ok so end of the day I cannot really recommend this at
all unless you can pick it up for a really low price like 180 u.s. or
something the biggest disappointment for me is the
lack of wireless AC I expected to get wireless AC because that is what was in
the listing I disputed that with geek buying comm and I managed to get a 15 us
refund which is at least something but they can't take advantage of my full
Wallis the speeds that I had here on my fibre optic but the wireless in range is
really really good that's probably one of the best I have seen in terms of
range that's great same goes for the touchpad this touchpad
very good say precision one and I can control those gestures I can disable the
ones I do not like and really you can tweak it just a slight speed tweak it
seems very accurate and very usable this one now the keyboard is a disappointment
because we do sometimes have issues with the spacebar and other owners are
reporting the same problem that the space part just doesn't seem to work
sometimes and I feel like I have to work it a lot harder to get it to work 10 out
of 10 times otherwise it's only going to work 9 or 8 times out of 10 which is
just not good enough is it no another real disappointment is the micro HDMI
port is completely dead it doesn't seem to be wired up properly or it's a fault
with the first batch so that is not good so this green runs at 48 Hertz also not
good it should be running at 60 Hertz because some people will see some
flicker there now I myself personally do but I know others do not so maybe it's
not going to bother everyone and another pro here is the thermals really good and
the battery life again very good the best I've seen yet you can get up to 10
hours if you run it at 25 percent brightness and you're just doing some
kind of light work so using edge that is possible so that's positive and of
course I love the color of this the darker kind of grey looks really nice it
makes it look a bit more professional so I recommend going for the easy book 3
Pro which is sitting in the background there even though that has a worse
touchpad the keyboards better it still gets around 8 hours battery life to
screen runs at 60 Hertz and itself for around 240 230 us end of the day much
better because the port's work on HDMI is working and really I feel that is the
one to beat still even I'm looking at all these new Apollo Lake laptops I
think it's going to be hard put to beat that one so I will be back with some
more Apollo 8 laptops I've got the cube I work 5x to check out and possibly the
3l Pro which is another easy book one and then the easy book or m3 powered 3
plus very confusing naming system so have to catch it in if you do have any
questions please let me know down in the comments catch you soon