Alldocube Kbook
Mancs for thee bargain
Budget laptop is a smooth operator
LAPTOP ❘ Around £350 from ebay www.snipca.com/33697
The closer you go too whewhereere computers are made, mostly in eastst Asiasia,ia, the cheaper you can buy one. It’s’s stillstilll not worth the cost of going over therehere tot shop, of course, particularlyy consconsideringsidering you’d have to pay VAT at custocustomsms on the way back. Dealers basedd in Hhong Kong will deliver items to o you, but there are hazards: you could receive an unexpected ted VAT bill on arrival, and iif goods arrive incorrectect or r faulty, your consumer rightshts araren’tren’t as robust.
Sometimes, though,gh, a productd is so well suited to the UKK market that it starts to turn up everywhere.ere. The Kbook is a great example. Whenen we tested it before Christmas, it was availablevailable from an official UK Amazon vendor at £474. That offer has since disappeared, but we found it being sold by a highly rated ebay seller from Manchester for just £347. Delivery is free and you’ll get the benefit of ebay’s buyer protections.
You can also order it direct from the manufacturer ( www.snipca.com/33700) – based in Shenzhen, China – for US$460 plus $30 delivery, about £375 before any currency-conversion fees. Again, just bear in mind that it’s hard to enforce your rights against a supplier abroad.
The Kbook has a solid aluminium chassis with a slim, tapered design. There’s no fancy detailing, the keyboard – with a US layout and no backlight – is basic, and there are no speaker grilles because there are barely any speakers, but it feels sturdy, and the hinge lets you tilt the screen right back. It’s a decent screen, too, the same shape as Microsoft’s
Surface Laptop (see our review, Issue 570, page 24) with even sharper resolution. Brightness and contrast are also above average, but colour accuracy isn’t, covering just 76 per cent of SRGB.
That rules out photo or video editing, as does the low-power Intel Y-series processor. It’s too old and slow to play 4K video smoothly, and if you attach a monitor – using an adapter with the single USB-C port – you’ll need to stick to conventional resolutions or put up with a flickery 30Hz refresh rate at 4K. But we found Windows 10 smooth for basic tasks, helped by a standard 8GB of memory and a practical 512GB SSD. The latter is on a SATA interface, limiting its speed but making future drive swaps easier. In our video-playback test, the battery lasted 4 hours 30 minutes.
For the price, it’s a decent laptop that runs smoothly, if slow