The Apple is a role model for many manufacturers. Especially this statement refers to Chinese manufacturers that are going to occupy the whole market soon. Fortunately, Time has passed when 鈥榤ade in China’printing was associated with something useless. Now those who follow what happens in the market, know Chinese products successfully compete with top brands. As for Apple, it has a lot of rivals from this region as well. Say, the MacBook Air, which is a high-end ultrabook known to everyone can be ignored by many in benefit of cheaper Chinese variants. I guess many of you will object to me saying all they are MacBook Air clones. But the truth is that those laptops are capable of providing acceptable performance; they are packed with a decent list of specs; and they cost the way less. In this sense, the CIVILTOP Air is one of the most attractive rivals to the MacBook Air. It is going to launch in coming days, so we decided to review it.

Actually, the situation the CIVILTOP Air is in now is more serious than you can imagine. This device is going to compete not only with the Apple MacBook Air and 鈥榞rab’customers from it, but it will fight against blood brothers. I mean there are other MacBook Air rivals made in China, and this model should reckon with them as well. Among them we can mention the Xiaomi Notebook Air 4G , YEPO 737S , and the Jumper EZBook Air . As you see, some of these models hint what an ultrabook they are going to compete with. Thus the CIVILTOP Air is going to face tough competition for sure. On the other hand, this brand has already launched a few models for this niche. We even have managed to take a glance at them – CIVILTOP S643 , M651FB , and G672FB . Now it’s turn of the CIVILTOP Air.

CIVILTOP Air Design

The first feature caught our eyes is the metal housing. You know most of Chinese laptops are made of plastic. So in this sense, the CIVILTOP Air has a perceivable advantage. It comes with a frosted surface, which makes the product to look more stylish. This laptop comes with a 12.5-inch display. Thus it is very comfortable in terms of portability. So you can take it with you even without a laptop bag.

Like other ultrabooks this one has a gradually thinning design. That’s why the main ports and slots are located close to the hinge. The 3.5mm audio jack is placed on the right hand side. The USB Type-C is on the opposite side. Unfortunately, no other ports are available, but I don’t think this is a problem, because only a few people use many peripherals with them. Plus, if you want to plug many peripherals you can use USB hubs. Shortly, having many ports doesn’t matter. Although I guess there will be people disagreeing with me.

This laptop comes with a regular keyboard. Keys are made of plastic. They are relatively soft but don’t have enough elasticity. Although I guess it doesn’t affect the typing speed. Thanks to acceptable distance between keys as well as height, you won’t get tired even after long-time typing.

The touchpad is located below the keyboard. It works smoothly, but there is a thing many people will complain on. It’s the location. We used to see touchpads placed on the left side, and when it is on the center, many think the palm will get tired sooner. However, there is an interesting feature placed on the touchpad ’a fingerprint scanner to unlock the laptop.

The CIVILTOP Air comes at dimensions of 29.42 x 20.00 x 1.26 cm and weighs only 1.270 kg. Thus we are dealing with one of the lightest ultrabooks available in the market. For example, the Xiaomi Notebook Air comes at 1.48mm thickness and 1.280kg. At this moment, only a champagne color option is available for pre-order. And there is no hint whether other colors will come or not.

CIVILTOP Air Hardware

I guess you are not impressed of the design of the CIVILTOP Air. Me too. But it is not the selling point of this product unlike other products from this niche. I mean many Chinese ultrabooks sport good design, but they are not attractive from the inside. Fortunately, this is not the case.

The CIVILTOP Air features a 12.5-inch Full HD TFT screen at display ratio of 16:9. Thus it provides regular ratio unlike many other products.

Other than that, it comes with an Intel Apollo lake Celeron N3450 quad-core CPU clocked at 1.44GHz. It is based on a 14nm process technology with 2MB caching and 2W power consumption. Intel Turbo Boost Technology delivers dynamic extra power when you need it. The chip is paired with an Intel HD Graphics 500 running at 200MHz – 700MHz, 4GB LPDDR3 RAM, and 128GB eMMC. The latter has no option to be expanded, but the RAM can reach up to 8GB for advanced multitasking.

One of the biggest shortcomings of this product is the 4000mAh battery providing 3-4 hours of life time. Actually, it is normal for notebooks. But we used to see larger capacity batteries on laptops under 13 inches.

The rest of features include a 0.3MP camera for video calls, WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, and Bluetooth 4.0. Finally, it comes with DOS pre-installed. So you have to install Windows yourself.

Pros

• Full HD display
• 14nm based processor
• Metal housing
• 4GB RAM
• 128GB internal storage
• Ultrathin design
• Dedicated fingerprint scanner

Cons

• Battery
• Less Ports
• Weaker camera

The Final Words

As we can see, this product is quite capable of competing with other laptops from the same niche. Some of its rivals cost less, and some of them cost more. But we are familiar with this brand, and we trust it. So I guess many of you will choose this one. The CIVILTOP Air has many attractive features such as Full HD screen, metal housing, fingerprint scanner, Intel quad-core processor and many more. So I guess many customers will ignore the shortcomings such as smaller battery, less connectivity options and so on. It is priced at $359.99, which means you can acquire a good ultrabook for a song.