This is the JOI Book SK3000. This is the laptop with the Snapdragon 850 chipset, which I uploaded a picture of its task manager to our Facebook Page – and a lot of you were curious and surprised that there’s a laptop running on the Snapdragon 850 chipset.
And I was surprised too. This is our first time reviewing a laptop that runs Windows 10 and powered by the Snapdragon 850 chipset. But for today, we’re only going to focus more on the laptop itself because, at the end of the day, we’re still using this device like a laptop despite its hardware differences.
Firstly, the price. It’s at RM2,199. We’ll come back to this later.
What you get is rather funky. This is a very tiny and portable laptop. It has a 12.5-inch IPS LCD screen with 1080p resolution at 16:9 aspect ratio, and the screen looks decent.
It even has rather thin bezels too – and if you realized, this laptop is using a glossy screen instead of those typical matte finishes.
The JOI Book SK3000 also has a pretty nice keyboard that is very tactile and very springy. I also like the standard 13-inch laptop keyboard layout so it’s easy to just pick up and use.
The trackpad is also surprisingly good. My fingers glide really nicely and overall, it tracks well. Palm rejection is important here since the laptop uses an ultrawide-ish form factor for its trackpad – and surprisingly, it’s on par with many other Windows laptops out there.
And this entire laptop is compact yet durable at the same time since both the top and bottom panels of the JOI Book SK3000 are made mostly out of metal.
That black piece is made out of plastic because that’s where all of the antennas are housed. There’s a small little cutout at the bottom here where you can unwind a screw and open it up, revealing a microSD card slot and also a nano SIM card slot. Yes, you can plug in a SIM card Windows will immediately detect it and connect to the internet.
And in terms of performance – we need to go through the specs first. This JOI Book SK3000 is equipped with a Snapdragon 850 chipset with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of UFS 2.1 NAND flash storage. But is it actually good for work use? Actually, yes.
I used Microsoft Edge as my browser, Foxit PDF Reader as my PDF reader/signage app, and Spotify to stream my music.
Now, the reason why I use Microsoft Edge instead of my usual preferred Chrome is that when I installed Google Chrome and synced up all of my extensions into the JOI Book SK3000 – Chrome performed really badly when I opened up Gmail to read my emails. And that’s why I moved to Microsoft Edge by importing all of those extensions from Google Chrome to Microsoft Edge, and that works way better. I can open Facebook, Twitter, a few more tabs for browsing and online shopping, and it runs fine.
And of course, Microsoft Office 365 works as well. I also typed this entire script of the review on this JOI Book SK3000 using Microsoft Word.
And if you realize, this laptop is completely fanless. There are no openings for air intake or exhaust, and everything is passively cooled. I thought the metal bottom plate is going to be a massive heatsink but it didn’t even get hot. The whole thing is still cool to the touch after using it for all my tasks.
Then, the battery life. I can say this for sure. I got a really long battery life on this relatively tiny 31.92Wh battery. While using it for purely online web browsing only at 50% brightness while on WiFi – it drained 10% for an hour. That’s impressive.
I did another test whereby I watched Netflix for half an hour and then browsed the web for half an hour, it drained only 15% in total.
And as for ports – the JOI Book SK3000 comes with one USB-C port on the left, and another combo audio jack on the right. That’s it. You’ll need a hub if you want USB-A and charge at the same time.
Speaking of chargers, the JOI BOOK SK3000 comes with a tiny 30W charger! It supports both USB-PD and USB-PD PPS charging standards – and you can charge your phones too since phones won’t come with a charger sooner or later anyway.
I also charged the JOI Book SK3000 using the Ugreen 65W GaN charger – and that worked too.
But for the price of RM2,199, who is this laptop for? Well, the most obvious is for students. It’s inexpensive, built to be really durable, has 4G connectivity, and also has fantastically long battery life. Performance is decent enough for schoolwork and for online classes too.
Another use case that I can think of – is actually thanks to one of our Facebook commenters. See, he asked about remote control apps like TeamViewer. And yes, it works on the JOI Book SK3000. That means this JOI Book SK3000 can be used as a thin client. A thin client is basically a dedicated machine made to access remote servers to handle all the apps and whatnot. And since this laptop has 4G connectivity and great battery life, it’s a great fit as a thin client.
And at the end of the day, this JOI Book SK3000 is built very well to serve those target audience perfectly. It’s also very well-built too. I’m looking forward to testing and reviewing other higher-end Snapdragon-powered laptops from JOI in the future.
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