TopJoy Falcon Review – A Windows 10 Mini Laptop (Prototype)

The Topjoy Falcon is a mini laptop reminiscent of netbooks and similar to the recent GPD Pocket 2 or One Mix Yoga devices.

Marketed as an 8 inch (203mm) pocket-sized computer with the following specification:

• Intel Pentium SilverN5000CPU
• 8GRAM
• 256GSSDdisk
• 1920*1200FHDIPStouchscreen
• 6000 mAh battery for up to 8 hours working time
• 1 x USB A 3.0, 1 x USB Type-C
• 1 x 3.5mm headphone jack
• 1 x Mini HDMI port
• Activecooling
• 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0
• Backlit keyboard
• Windows 10 Home
• Weight 550g (1lb 3oz)
• Fits easily in your pocket

Although you would need a large pocket as whilst It is physically small consisting of an approximately 8″ by 5.2” and about 0.7” thick (203mm x 132mm x 18mm) when closed it is in reality too big for the average pocket.

It will soon be available on Kickstarter with an early bird price of $399 and an expected retail price of $699.

I’ve received an early prototype which I’ll review below. The first point to note is that being a prototype there are some outstanding issues already identified and will be addressed:

• Type-C port: The prototype’s Type-C port locates a little “deeper” than normal requiring a power adapter with a “longer head”. Other Type-C cables or hubs can’t work on Falcon now. We will fix this.
• G-Sensor doesn’t work well.
• When close the laptop, the screen won’t turn off.
• When use it as a tablet, the keyboard won’t lock.
• The screen is a little bit heavy so that the laptop may fall backward when open. We will adjust the screen weight.
• Mouse right click button doesn’t work.
• A button on the keyboard can turn on/off the cooling fan. It doesn’t work now.
• The battery indicator doesn’t work well.
• The cooling fan of the sample doesn’t work well. This will affect its performance.

The specifications of the prototype differ in that the SSD is only 128GB, it weighs 703g (1lb 9oz) and Windows 10 is not activated otherwise everything else is as stated.

The device came fully installed complete with a random user set up and various movie clips loaded. I mistakenly reset Windows selecting ‘remove everything’ and immediately found that the drivers could not be found to re-enable touch screen or the included touch pen.

Fortunately I had “played’ with the device before resetting it and found the screen was responsive to touch although the calibration was slightly out when using the touch pen.

So now with a clean Windows installation I started with a quick look at the hardware information:

I partitioned the main drive so I could install Ubuntu later:

As usual I ran my standard set of benchmarking tools to look at performance under Windows:

So bearing in mind the cooling fan issue and its impact on performance let’s look at the results compared to other Intel mini PCs:

Overall the results are very good with the fan’s impact only being seen on the 2D graphics performance which is lower than expected.

I was also able to run Ubuntu on the device by respining the Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS ISO and updating with the latest mainline kernel and I installed Ubuntu as dual boot Ubuntu.

Interestingly everything works: WiFi, Bluetooth, audio and touch screen. Initially there is an issue with the screen rotation but this can be fixed by the ‘xrandr’ command.

I first ran some basic commands to look at the hardware in more detail:

I then ran my usual suite of Phoronix tests to look at performance in Ubuntu:

The results show as expected performance with the N5000 CPU performing between the J4005 and J5005 processors.

Ubuntu’s Octane result was also tested and it was marginally better than in Windows:

I also looked at real-world usage by playing videos under Windows using both Edge and Chrome browsers. Under both browsers 4K@30fps and 4K@60fps videos played fine:

Although on Chrome the 4K@60fps video had some occasional dropped frames but were unnoticeable while watching.

In contrast playing videos in Chrome on Ubuntu was a similar story to on other Intel processor-based mini PCs with 4K@30fps dropping too many frames and pausing making it really not watchable:

but fine when played at 1440p:

The 4K@60fps video resulted in the frames being dropped and was unwatchable:

However 1080p@60fps was fine with only the occasional unnoticeable dropped frame:

Finally I tried playing some games. First I installed Minecraft and performance was reasonable but loading was slow:

Next I tried streaming a game on Steam which worked fine:

And then to finish I installed a game on Steam playing it locally:

The gaming experience was reasonable and played as expected for this CPU/GPU combo.

Cooling is impacted by the known issue with the fan so I didn’t perform any specific cooling tests. However the body of the device whilst made from aluminum was only slightly warm to touch when the processor was put under load.

As mentioned audio works on Windows and and also on Ubuntu without issues. Network connectivity throughput was measured using ‘iperf’ on Ubuntu:

The network results were comparable with other Intel devices tested.

Finally I measured the battery capacity by fully charging the device and then left it playing and repeating a two hour music video. The battery lasted for 4 hours 50 minutes which is much less than the slated eight hours.

The BIOS appears to be fully locked at this stage:

Overall despite the known limitations being a prototype the device performed well. It is an intriguing little device with ‘little’ being the operative word. I often found myself squinting at the screen to make out text and resorting to one finger typing in order to type more accurately. One major improvement would be the inclusion of a full-sized HDMI port rather than the current mini-HDMI. That would allow easier ‘docking’ to use a monitor and keyboard when needed.

I’d like to thank Topjoy for providing the unit for review and keep an eye on their Facebook page for when it will be available on Kickstarter with an early bird price of $399 and an expected retail price of $699. [Update October 24, 2018: The kickstarter campaign is now live]

Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium)

Ian is interested in mini PCs and helps with reviews of mini PCs running Windows, Ubuntu and other Linux operating systems. You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter.

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