Gemini NC14 Pro Ultra Slim aluminium Laptop, 14-inch Full HD IPS Notebook (Grey) - (Intel Dual Core Celeron N3350 Processor, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Windows 10 Pro, Bluetooth 4.0, Webcam, NC14V1008-128)

This laptop has kept popping up in online stores and even though it did fit nicely into what I was looking for I was reluctant to make the purchase, mostly because of the almost nonexistent reviews. Below I will try to summarize my impressions of the first few days, hoping other will find it useful!First ImpressionsAs you unpack the device it strikes you how well it is made - the extremely low price would not warrant such craftsmanship yet it exceeds all expectations. It is indeed a full aluminium body (albeit not single frame but hey, look at the pricetag). There is absolutely no twisting or squeaking, the the middle of the base does not bend at all as you type or lean on it, the screen is firmly in place after opening and does wobble. Magnets keep the screen closed.Speaking of which, the maximum opening angle of the display is around 120-130 degrees which i don’t see as a problem at all but there are people who get their kicks from being able to open it fully horizontal. You can kinda sorta open the screen with one hand (another popular fetish) but only if you go really slow.If it is not obvious from the dimensions, this is a fanless device, the alu body easily dissipates the heat that is generated by the 6W TDP processor. This dark shade of grey looks really great and the minimalist branding does much good to the overall looks. Chinese OEM brands tend to go for english names that usually sound pretty lame, Gemini however is a pretty decent choice.ScreenFull HD IPS screen, just as it says on the tin. Viewing angles are perfect both vertically and horizontally. The maximum brightness feels more than adequate - I’d be hard pressed to try it in direct sunlight in wintery London but I image it would fare well outdoors. There is a glossy coating on it yet you don’t have to stare at your own reflection all the time.StorageThe 32GB of storage will leave you with around 28GB after formatting - I immediately ran into problems running windows updates, the 1709 feature update was due and it simply could not squeeze onto the remaining free space. I opted for a clean install of Windows 10 Pro, that left me with around 14GB free after updates and a disk cleanup. Office 365 Pro Plus and the essential apps (chrome, adobe reader etc) made a further 5GB dent on that so at the end of the day you have to make do with around 8-9GB, including the swap and hibernation files. Fancy Outlook cache and dropbox/whateverdrive files? Hmm no.The eMMC chip is manufactured by Sandisk and there is nothing inherently wrong with it - a CrytalDiskMark benchmark produced the following results (read/write MB/s):Seq Q32T1: 200/1104KiB Q8T8: 32/144KiB Q32T1: 32/144KiB Q1T1: 6/12It is not much compared to any modern SSD but more than enough for everyday use and quite frankly you’ll run out of CPU juice well before ever hitting an IOPS bottleneck. The main problem is size, 64GB should have been the absolute minimum, this way an m.2 SSD upgrade is almost inevitable.I was pleasantly surprised to find a TPM onboard so if you decide to throw Bitlocker on it (as you probably should) you won’t be bugged by a boot password (unless you want to). In all fairness I do feel that the software encryption is taking a bit of a toll on the overall performance which I have never ever seen before but I blame that on the relative lack of performance on the CPU front.KeyboardAlthough typing experience is fine the keyboard has a distinct Fisher Price feeling to it - button travel is really short and there is hardly any feedback along the way. All in all not the greatest but completely usable. It is a shame though that it doesn't come with a backlight option. If you have big hands like me you will often find yourself resting them on the lower edge of the laptop which feels a little sharp but I am really just being nitpicky here.TouchpadA well sized pad with a semi-rough plastic surface, physical clicky buttons hidden under it on both sides at the bottom. I find that whenever I try to use the buttons they hijack my cursor position but this may be just teething troubles until I get the hang of the new kit. In any case, W10 can nicely customise multi-finger gestures so I stopped using the buttons almost completely.WifiDual-band Intel AC1365 onboard, no cheap Broadcom or Realtek substitute! It does actually pick up networks in both bands. I can’t say much about MIMO and max performance as I only have 11n at home but it all feels okay.Battery50Wh battery pack, real life usage must be around 6-7 hours. The charger is fairly small but not really slim, think ⅔ the size of a pack of cigarettes but about 20% thicker. Standard three hole power cord.Media playbackMost codecs are hardware-accelerated, x265 playback with VLC is very snappy. 4k videos from youtube do play, Edge feels smoother than Chrome in this regard.Speakers are really decent, loud and clear enough for watching videos or streaming music, do not expect much bass though. There are no grill anywhere, the sound comes from somewhere around the bottom of the screen, not muffled when in lap.CPU & RAMWell, we have arrived to the weakest part - the CPU tends to flatline almost constantly if you are doing anything, it is clearly the most limiting thing about the whole config. The burst frequency should be 2.4GHz according to Intel but I never see it going over 2.3GHz. Expect delays when you open new apps or tabs or switch to full screen in youtube. Once a site is loaded it is smooth but multitasker is clearly not the N3350’s middle name. Considering that the list price of the quad-core N3450 is the same, it is infuriating they chose to go with the N3350.The 4GB RAM holds up nicely until you don’t go beyond 4-5 tabs in the browser of your choice (steer clear of the 3GB version!). A fresh boot uses around 1.5GB so you are left with 2.5GB for all your various apps. Again, designing with anything less than 6GB should be a crime but you’ll be hit by the meagre CPU performance before you run out of memory.SummaryI may have drawn a bleak picture about the overall system performance - if you know what to expect and are only after something pretty and lightweight to surf the web while you are sipping your gluten free pumpkin mochachino as the true neo-nomad that you are, it will not disappoint you. It will serve you well to forget anything that goes beyond office’ing and browsing, but the little it does it does well.Am I happy with my purchase? I can say yes with very little cognitive dissonance! I bought it purely as a second device for running around and if I am honest, that fact that it is so sleek and pretty really makes me feel really glad to be owning one.In the off chance that anyone from the supply side is reading this: for the love of god, make another version with an N3450 or N4200 CPU, 6/8GB of RAM, 64/128GB of storage and a backlit keyboard, charge 50% more and you’ll sell them faster than Shenzhen can make it!

Been very impressed so far. It isn't the most powerful laptop - but that is obvious from the spec. However it runs Windows 10 perfectly well along with all the usual Office apps with no issues whatsoever. You must factor in an additional hard drive - the built in SSD is only just about big enough to have a functioning copy of Windows 10. Be careful with the SSD that you order - not many available, however the KingSpec 256G 2242 NGFF SATAIII SSD is great and runs perfectly. It does ship from China, so allow a few weeks for the additional SSD delivery. All in for around £300 with the additional SSD, it is a great way to get an everyday laptop. Just don't expect to be running PhotoShop or other 'heavy' apps.

I do not know why the producers of this laptop decided to add word to the bundle included with this PC, I know word certainly does not come cheap, and even was not advertised. I cannot help but feel as though I have personally swindled the manufacturer, or at least seller on amazon, as I have a computer far beyond my original expectations. If I truly do own this, and this is not just some sort of trial version sent here to allure me in and spit me out wanting more, then I honestly feel that it is my Christian duty, not only to my fellow man but to God himself, to ensure that every man, woman and child can own a laptop quite so perfect. I can say, without hesitation, that this computer is not only worth the price I had paid for it, but I would have been satisfied had I paid substantially more.You’re doing God’s work, keep it up lads.

I got the 32GB model for my sister for Xmas, but wisely also bought a 256GB M.2 SSD which was straightforward to install. You're only left with a pitiful 16GB of internal storage on the 32GB model which is not enough. Having two internal drives is nice, so I made it my mission to install Linux (a superior OS on low-end machines like these) as well.Of course, I needed to be able to boot a live Linux USB stick and unlike everyone else here, careful scrutinising of the impressively comprehensive BIOS options found the solution. I'd advise preparing a live USB stick on another machine and inserting it in one of the USB ports prior to following the instructions below.Power on the laptop and repeatedly press the Delete key to get into the BIOS at boot start. Use the arrow keys to navigate to Boot -> Fast Boot. This option is bizarrely disabled by default, so enable it (move down to the option, press Enter, choose Enable and press Enter).Once Fast Boot is enabled, new options appear below it and one of them is "USB Support", which has the crazily stupid default option of "Partial Initial" (meaning USB sticks won't be visible prior to the OS being looked for - arrgh!). Change that option to "Full Initial" and press Enter.Go back up the page a little bit to the Boot Option Priorities section - here you want to put your USB stick at the top (Boot Option #1), so you do this by selecting the first boot option (probably "Windows Boot Manager") and choosing your USB stick instead. If your stick can boot either via BIOS or UEFI (my Fedora 29 live USB stick could do both), it might be presented as two options. I just picked both of them and put them in Boot Options #1 and #2, but you can just pick one that works.Now use the arrow keys to move to the "Save & Exit" menu and select the first item which is also called "Save & Exit". Reboot the laptop and happy, happy, joy, joy, you should be booting into your live USB stick.I'm not going to explain how I copied Windows 10 from the 32GB eMMC to the 256GB SSD or moved the Windows recovery partition to the end of the 256GB SSD or how I extended the C: drive to fill around 200GB of the SSD - use the Google force, Luke!After Windows 10 worked fine on the 256GB SSD, I installed Linux Mint 19 Cinnamon on the 32GB eMMC and tweaked the Grub menu so that Windows 10 was the default, Linux Mint or the BIOS could be selected alternatively and it boots into Windows 10 after 3 seconds if no key is pressed. "Grub Customizer" is your friend :-)Of course, I made sure the Windows C: drive (an edit to /etc/fstah to mount the NTFS partition) and the microSD card were visible (Linux Mint mounted the latter automatically, but not the former). I also soft-link linked sub-folders like Documents, Videos etc. in the Linux ~username/Desktop and the C:\Users\~username/Desktop folders across to "real" folders on the microSD card, so anything read/written there would be shared between the two OS'es.My sister will probably never use the Linux setup - it was more of a fun exercise to see how it performing on a low-end laptop like this (very well, plus the 150% volume setting you can get in Linux Mint is a real bonus :-) ). Weakest thing? The CPU struggles badly with Windows Updates, which as we know kick in at uncontrollably random times on Windows 10 and beat the hell out of the low-end CPU. Yet another reason to use Linux, where *you're* in control of the updates!If you are only doing simple tasks like Word processing (note to another reviewer - it does *not* come with an activated copy of Office 2016 - you need to buy a product key...so I deleted it and put LibreOffice on instead in both Windows and Linux), Web surfing, watching videos, then it's fine. It will not play any demanding games, but you'd be a bit foolish to expect it to at this price point.I'd hate this to be my only machine, but as a second laptop for the family or to have something basic that's portable to complement your desktop, there really isn't anything to touch it at this 150 quid price point. However, you will soon be desperate for extra storage (SSD preferably, but if you skimp a bit, maybe a high capacity, fast microSD - I did both :-) ), so budget bringing the price closer to 200 quid.

Looks too good to be true, but it's not. It's slim, light, has a nice all metal body and is as promised. Decent laptop for the spec, great laptop for the price.