Before I plugged in the power, I decided to just fire the unit up and see what the story is. The manual is entirely in Chinese so there's not really any obvious first step apart from plugging in the HDMI cable, connecting it to a monitor and pressing the power button. Which I did, resulting in a dull blue LED lighting up on the unit and, to my genuine amazement, a Windows 8.1 desktop appearing on the monitor literally about five seconds later. Happily running the 1920x1080 default resolution of my test monitor, fully activated, Windows 8.1. There was even an automatically logged-on user account "minqc", which was presumably created back at the factory. The unit had been shipped in standby mode which explains the super-quick boot, but later testing showed that even a proper cold-boot only takes about 12 seconds.
In fact, here's a video of it resuming from standby:
There's another video here of it cold-booting. Anyway, I plugged in the USB dongle for my Logitech wireless mouse, which was instantly recognised. Out of mild paranoia I ran Windows Defender and scanned the unit. Then I connected it to my WiFi, at which point it noticed my media server and automatically installed my wireless printer. I changed the location and language details to Australian English, kicked off updates for Windows Defender and Windows Update, while downloading Chrome and VLC. Soon I had a keyboard plugged into the remaining USB port, some Soniq speakers connected via Bluetooth and was happily playing 720p YouTube videos while downloading a few benchmarking programs.
I realised at this point that I'd pretty much forgotten I wasn't on a normal PC. I was just doing the usual setup stuff, learning Windows 8.1 as I went along, this being the most time I've spent in this version of Windows. But the desktop and programs were responsive, the videos were sharp and smooth, background tasks didn't seem to affect the feel of things and there wasn't really anything to indicate it was all being handled by the little black box on the desk rather than a "real" PC. It was only very faintly warm to the touch and, having no moving parts, completely silent. Intriguing. Did I mention this unit is $128 AUD including shipping? I started to have an odd sinking feeling about the $1000 worth of motherboard, CPU and SSD which I had recently ordered to upgrade my main PC.
It was still running off battery power, too. When it first powered up, it was reporting 100% charge. After an hour and a half of general use it was down to 75%. I haven't done any formal battery life testing, but I had my phone charging via the USB port for an hour or so while the unit streamed HD coverage of the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
I plugged it in to do some benchmarking, then unplugged it for another hour or so. Then I turned it off and ignored it for a week or so, and when I turned it back on this morning it still had 23% left. Another couple of hours of general mucking about and waking it up occasionally and it's still showing 8%. So I'm going to go with "adequate" for battery life, but I'll probably leave it plugged in most of the time it's being used anyway.
Which brings me to a slightly awkward point in this review. I was talking about this little gadget with a friend who isn't particularly cutting-edge when it comes to technology, and he couldn't really get his head around the point of it. I was raving about how amazing it is, but I felt like I was in one of those Top Gear reviews where Jeremy Clarkson says "this is an absolutely brilliant car, but nobody will buy it". I mean, it's a tablet without a screen. It's a laptop without a screen OR a keyboard. It's super portable, but less so if you have to drag a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse around with it. And what do you do for a monitor? Hope that the hotel you check into has a TV with a free HDMI port? Maybe I'm missing the point.
But while we're here, let's run it through some benchmarks. I compared it with a mishmash of Windows PCs here: Firstly my elderly main PC, which is an i7-920 with a SATA2 SSD, 16GB of DDR3, a Radeon 4850 and Windows 7. Secondly my laptop, a Samsung 900X with i5-2537M, 8GB RAM and built-in SSD. Finally I also included for some tests my new in-progress PC, an i5-4690S with 8GB DDR3, the onboard Intel HD video and a terrifyingly-fast PCIe SSD. In fact I didn't include the new PC in the disk benchmarks because it's not really fair to include a purpose-built cutting-edge storage system in this comparison, and also it did terrible things to the graphs.
L-R: 3DMark - AS SSD Benchmark - Sandra CPU Benchmarks
I also used VLC and some test videos to see how it went with media playback. At 1080p it will consistently drop frames and not cope too well, playing from Wifi or from the local storage. At 720p it was very smooth from either source, with no dropped frames. UPDATE: After further testing, I can say it plays 1080p fine when using the H264 codec. The earlier test files were .mkv files using the Windows Media Video VC1 codec. I've also used it successfully with Netflix and even played Minecraft quite happily, fullscreen with default graphics settings.
So there's no great surprises from the benchmarks - you're not going to buy this Mini PC with the hope of using it as some number-crunching powerhouse or hardcore gaming machine. It holds its own pretty well against the laptop - even beating it in 3DMark and SSD writes, while being beaten by the desktop PCs in everything except write speeds against the mechanical HDD in my old PC. But for general desktop app type use and even some basic gaming this is a surprisingly capable little machine. You have to also bear in mind that it's using very little power to do all this - it's only rated to 5V at 2.5A.
A few further notes - there's now an English manual available to download. Neither of my 1TB external HDDs were able to spin up when powered by the USB ports on this unit. In fact, if I rebooted while one of those drives was connected, it would go into some odd confused non-booting state. There's no paperclip-reset hole but fortunately holding down the power button for about ten seconds seems to wake it up again. Normal USB thumb drives worked fine.
The Windows license is, I'm assured, fully legit. It came pre-activated and, although there's no Windows logo on the unit itself or the box, there is one on the back of the manual. But there's no hologram license sticker or license key info other than that available inside Windows itself. "Windows 8.1 with Bing" seems to be a cheap OEM version with some restrictions, but nothing that should get in the way of normal desktop use. Most notably however it is NOT eligible for the free upgrade to Windows 10 that a normal Windows 8.1 install would be, according to Ainol and GearBest. UPDATE: According to Microsoft, "Windows 8.1 with Bing" IS eligible for the free Windows 10 upgrade, and I can now report that the Ainol has prompted me to reserve my copy of Windows 10, just like my Windows 7 laptop did a few weeks ago. Also, despite my having changed all the locality and language settings I can find, some bits of Chinese language still appear, such as the Windows Update screen during reboot. But otherwise it's fine and although my Windows 8.1 experience is limited, this seems like a normal Windows install to me.
So. Some of you reading this review will already have an idea in mind for how this unit can fit into a niche in your life. Maybe you find the portability and power bank features more useful than I do. Maybe you're thinking of a very easy "modded PC" by hiding it inside a model car or a toaster or something. In my household, this gadget neatly solves the problem of setting up a second "kids PC" for my second kid. It's plenty fast enough for her Reading Eggs and Mathletics type web-based educational games (and, let's be honest, Netflix). It's cheap, it takes up very little space on the "kids PC" table in the livingroom and it quite handily eliminates the need for me to find or buy a Windows license. So from our perspective, we're going to pretty much ignore the portability side of it and the slightly oddball power bank feature. As far as anyone will know, it'll just be a Windows PC used for basic desktop tasks, with some light gaming and media viewing. But I'll know that it's all powered by a little black box smaller than a paperback book. That's still pretty amazing.
Thanks to GearBest for the opportunity to review this item. Be aware that shipping times can sometimes be quite long from direct-from-China sites like GearBest. Feel free to discuss this review in this thread.
All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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