Review on CHUWI GemiBook Lightweight Notebook Keyboard Computers & Tablets by Charles Adelaja

I bought this laptop for light audio and general Linux use and was blown away. Laptop for 700-800 dollars? Absolutely not, but if you want a good laptop that charges with USB-C PD, good battery life (5-12 hours depending on how hard it's pushed and whether it's using Linux or Windows) and a nice display has is what you need. computers for you. The quad-core processor is actually a pretty decent little chip, but while it outperforms the Celeron N-series chips in most budget laptops, it obviously can't compete with a laptop with a Core i5 or Ryzen 3 processor Doesn't require a lot of CPU or GPU, this is a fantastic laptop and nothing beats it for the price. It's a pretty good Windows laptop and has no issues with anything other than lots of Chrome tabs, but Firefox works. very well with the modest specifications of this laptop. I installed Pop!_OS Linux a few days later and the difference was pretty impressive. Battery life improved by around 20-50% depending on the workload, and CPU utilization was also lower when idle or doing light tasks. The BIOS can be hard to find, but hitting the delete or exit key at startup will take you to the menu, and for those interested in installing Linux, you'll need to go to the southbridge settings (yes , it has a southbridge) to change the operating system you are looking for from windows to linux. The screen is obviously the star of the show here, and it's really amazing, especially in the 3:2 aspect ratio, but I'll focus on a few other aspects that might be less clear. The top of the laptop ie behind the display is made of aluminum and feels pretty solid, but the rest of the body is made of plastic. I'm not usually a fan of plastic, but it matches the color well and feels almost as good as aluminum, while protecting the parts you touch from heat even better when the laptop is actually running. The touchpad is plastic, but it's definitely on the larger side, big enough that there's no room for complaints that it's not big enough. It feels a bit rough for the first few days, but after that the touchpad is pretty smooth and comfortable to use. So if it's your first time trying to use it and your finger is skipping across the surface, don't worry, it will get better. The left and right buttons are below the touchpad, so you press the bottom of the touchpad and it clicks. I don't like the one/two finger click style. The keyboard is also plastic, and while unsurprisingly, it feels like a $500-$600 laptop keyboard, not a barrel-bottom keyboard. A big part of what gives that good feeling is tactility. It has good key travel, probably a little more than average for a laptop, and the keys aren't entirely soft to the touch. They have a hub that lets you feel when a key is pressed. It's not fully linear as it has a tiny drop at the bottom of the press that helps you feel when something is being pressed. The keys can move slightly with lateral force, but that's certainly not the worst thing I've felt and definitely a good thing considering the $349.99 price I bought it for. There is more than enough RAM and storage to get you going and it even has an M.2 2280 expansion bay which I have yet to test but will try to update the review when I do, to confirm if it works with NVMe drives or only with SATA M.2 drives. (I tried the 1TB WD Green 2280 NVMe and Linux couldn't see it on the computer, although the slot is technically NVMe friendly. I'm not sure if it works with Windows.) Note: the built-in storage is a SATA III SSD. , not NVMe, although I wouldn't expect that at this price point, and not the much slower eMMC storage that many budget laptops unfortunately use. Also, I still need to use more than 4.5GB of RAM at a time, so 12 is definitely overkill for this class of laptop (I once hit 6.2GB on Windows). Speaker. Some of the praise isn't quite as high here, although you have to make compromises somewhere with such a low asking price. The stereo speakers are far from terrible, bordering on "decent" and "normal". They fire from holes in the bottom of the laptop and are muffled when you have it on your lap. They've gotten really loud lately and you can hear at least a tiny hint of bass, so I'll give them to them. The headphone jack shows that the headphone listening experience is actually quite good. I'm an audiophile with decent but not crazy gear, and the onboard DAC works well enough that I have no complaints, although the sound does get a bit thin at high frequencies. High notes sound good, just a noticeable lack of some detail. I've heard audio from PC motherboards for half the price of this laptop that sounds a little worse than what this laptop's audio jack has to offer, so 9/10, great job Chuwi! The fan on this laptop (it has one) peaks at 26-27 or so DBA, which means a light whisper of conversation will drown out the fans at full speed. I've only seen the fans turn on twice, and both times I've stressed the CPU and GPU for hours, so while it technically has a fan, it's very quiet, so quiet it's practically fanless. When fully tilted for several hours, the chassis directly below the fan heats up enough to be felt, but the rest of the laptop stays impressively cool. I use my laptop on the go a lot and it never gets hot enough to notice, even when sitting on my lap for long periods of time, which I think is a huge plus. very very bad. Like the budget Android phone of 2012, bad. This is NOT for video calling, it looks awful on any video calling platform. PLEASE do not use for zoom! Buy a USB webcam. The camera is just here to tick the box. Hinge: I've heard some conflicting things about the hinge design while researching this laptop, so I'll try to clarify things a bit. Incidentally, the long centered hinge is also plastic, and while it's not very strong, it doesn't seem to break all that easily. However, I would still open and close it with a reasonable speed rather than slamming it shut as obviously this is still a budget laptop but is a good hinge overall. And that's all I have! We hope this review has been useful to you, and if so, please click the 'Useful' button. I will continue to update this review as I use the laptop more often. This rating is currently based on 1 month ownership.