Teclast F7 Air Laptop Review

[Redaktion]

The Teclast F7 Air is a sleek and well-crafted laptop that is sure to turn heads. However, the low-powered processor, mediocre keyboard, and lackluster trackpad leave room for improvement.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Teclast-F7-Air-Laptop-Review.517640.0.html

[Boomba]

Sam, you're being ridiculous.
How in the world does this piece of cr*p "look a 1000 dollars"?
"Sure to turn heads". Well yeah, - if away from it.
I can totally see a Patrick Bateman kinda guy, being asked by his suited-up pals: "Te... Tech-last, wow, very nice, where'd you get that?" 8)
Hahahah

[Sam Medley]

@Boomba:
Style and design are definitely up to personal taste. In person, the F7 Air is very thin, and its golden finish is reminiscent of the MacBook 12.
I'm not saying that you should run out and buy this laptop. I am saying that people may mistake it for a much more expensive laptop than it really is at first glance.
If someone wants a nice-looking laptop and doesn't mind putting up with slow performance, this isn't a bad option considering the price.
Just because it doesn't have a recognizable logo doesn't mean people won't think it's a beautiful laptop. Speaking from experience when I brought it to a coffee shop to work on this review. I had someone ask me what company it was because it looked really nice.
Again, design is up to personal taste.

[Peter Zeftel]

Thanks for being the first to review this interesting laptop.

But I find your criticism of the processor here really out of hand. Firstly: anyone buying a passive-cooled laptop knows the performace is not going to be steller, it simply isn't a factor for ultrabooks.

Secondly, for a similar laptop by acer, the Swift 1, notebookcheck praised the performance of the N5000 laptop, yet your own tests show that the N4120 processor in the Teclast F7 Air  has almost identical marks.

[Rider1221]

I wonder if performance is really that bad, I still have a 2013 windows tablet with an intel atom (baytrail) and 2gb of RAM, performance is adequate for simple tasks, and when it's not it seems to be because of low RAM and not because of the CPU. 

Considering that this laptop has a much newer and powerful processor of the same performance line, 4 times the RAM and a proper SSD I think it should be quite fast on paper, I don't know why this is not the case.

Benchmarks aside I think most people would be perfectly fine with a laptop like this, unless you want a game machine or do very heavy tasks, I handle all my work (even somewhat demanding tasks) on my pentium gold laptop and I've never felt the need to get a much more powerful CPU.

[Sam Medley]

Review author here.

@Peter Zeftel:
That's a fair criticism of the review. I was perhaps a bit harsh on it, but I'm basing it off a mixture of benchmarks and my own experience. Compared to a cheap Core i3 or Ryzen 3 laptop, the F7 Air is sluggish both on paper and in practice.
Prime example: When trying to write this review, heavier webpages (such as the content management system for Notebookcheck) take 5-10 seconds to load per page. When you navigate as many pages as I do for a review, that time adds up. Compare that to even a Skylake Core i3 or even an Ivy Bridge Core i5 machine, both of which are easily in this price range. Those machines load the same pages in 1-2 seconds, all other parts equal. That's partly due to the slower WiFi chip, but it's also partly due to the slower SoC.
However, as you point out (and as I did in the review), this machine is perfectly fine for lighter work and web browsing. I will say I was very impressed at its 4K streaming capabilities; I'm not sure that my awe was adequately conveyed in the review.

Rider1221: Similar comments as above. This is a fine laptop for simple work, but my main point is that for a similar price, you can nab a Core i3 8th, 9th, or even 10th Gen laptop that will run circles around this one.
It's not that it's unusable. It's that the F7 Air is noticeably slower than similarly priced laptops on the market now. It's definitely a "form over function" laptop.

[Shiny]

@Sam Medley,

You mentioned that this device can be charged via USB-C port twice in your article, but I haven't found any information about that anywhere else on the Web.
Can you please confirm if you tested this feature or is it just your assumption?