Thomson 12.5" NEOZ3 Silver Review

The Thomson NEOZ3 is a $200 ultraportable with epic battery life and 4G, but painfully slow performance and tiny storage. It's only for someone who needs all-day browsing on the go and nothing else. Not worth it for most people.

The Thomson NEOZ3 is a cheap Windows laptop built around a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. It's thin, light, and promises crazy battery life with built-in 4G LTE. That's the pitch. The reality is you're getting a device with specs that were low-end a decade ago, wrapped in a modern shell.

Let's be real: performance is not this laptop's thing. The Snapdragon 850 is an old mobile chip, and our data puts its CPU power in the 3rd percentile. That means it's slower than 97% of laptops we track. The 4GB of RAM is in the 2nd percentile, and the 64GB SSD is in the 6th. It'll boot fast and open a few browser tabs, but try to do more than one thing at a time and it'll choke. The integrated Adreno 618 graphics land in the 37th percentile, which sounds okay until you realize that's still far too weak for any real gaming.

At around $200, it's undeniably cheap. But 'cheap' and 'good value' are different things. You're paying for a ultra-portable form factor and long battery life, but you're sacrificing every other aspect of performance. For the same money, a used or refurbished Intel/AMD laptop from a few years ago will run circles around this thing in every task except maybe battery life.

This isn't competing with the MacBooks or high-end Windows laptops listed. Its real competition is other budget ultraportables and Chromebooks. Compared to a $200 Chromebook, the NEOZ3 runs full Windows, which is a plus for some specific apps. But that Chromebook will likely feel smoother with its lighter OS. Compared to a used business laptop like an older ThinkPad, you'll get a much better keyboard, more ports, and way more power, but you'll lose the slim design and all-day battery. It's a series of tough trade-offs.

Skip this if you need to run more than 5 browser tabs, use desktop software like Office regularly, store more than a handful of files locally, or have any expectation of speed. Students, business users, and anyone who values their time should look at used machines instead.

Only consider this if your entire computing life happens in a web browser, you absolutely need 20 hours of battery and 4G LTE away from an outlet, and you have zero budget for anything better. It's a hyper-specialized device for a very specific, low-demand user.