Jumper EZbook X3 Air laptop review: An affordable alternative with a premium finish

Jumper isn't a particularly large brand, but the firm is starting to pop up more and more in my DMs from people curious about their devices. The firm generally seems to make tech that at least looks premium, with the budget-conscious in mind. The EZbook X3 Air is no exception, with a design that looks like it could've come off Dell or Apple's assembly line, with a far, far more affordable price tag.

The compromise, of course, is performance, but if you're a student or looking to buy an entry-level experience for your kid's homework assignments, the Jumper EZbook X3 Air might be a great buy for you.

Design and features

Source: Windows Central

The best thing about the Jumper EZbook X3 Air is the surprisingly high-quality construction and finish, especially when you take into account that svelte price point. Chamfered edges with a metallic finish really give it a hint of premium flair, with chiclet keys with decent key travel and a precision touchpad that makes browsing and word processing quite pleasant.

The EZbook X3 Air sports a 1080p HD IPS display, which gets decent color reproduction and sharpness, but lacks brightness to the point where it might be unusable outdoors. For the most part, though, you'll probably be using this in an office or a school scenario, which renders the brightness a bit of a moot point. For indoor use, it's totally adequate, with decent viewing angles. Just keep it away from a window, though, because this panel is not really designed to ward off glare.

The bezels around the display are more the sort I'd expect to see on higher-end brands, thin enough to give it a dash of modernity, while still remaining affordable. The top bezel is angled a little wider to house a webcam, which is a preferable solution to putting the webcam down low as we've seen on some laptops that become a little too over-obsessed with thin bezels. The webcam quality will be decent enough for taking those work or school Zoom calls, but don't expect to be doing any content creation with it.

Source: Windows Central

I have to give Jumper another shoutout for its impressive array of ports. Jumper managed to squeeze a USB 3.0 and a USB 2.0 port on both sides, despite being an incredible 0.4 inches thick, using a mechanical interface that expands to accommodate larger ports while in use. Alongside the power interface, we also have a USB-C port, a mini-HD port, an SD card reader, and a 3.5mm audio jack. If you're the type who needs something that interface with practically anything on a budget, the EZbook X3 Air has you covered.

Speaking of audio, the EZbook X3 Air has downward-firing speakers that pull surprisingly impressive sound, oftentimes better than what I've heard on far more expensive laptops, complete with DTS certification.

What about performance?

The Jumper EZbook X3 Air is a laptop that is designed with a very specific consumer in mind, with components that were designed for very specific consumers. The EZbook X3 Air utilizes Intel's Gemini Lake Celeron processor, which has both advantages and disadvantages.

I was actually fairly impressed with the performance of the EZbook X3 Air. It handles media apps like Netflix with ease, and most websites run well on Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome. Office tools like Word, Powerpoint, and the like don't struggle.

However, if you try to move up to things like Adobe Photoshop, or even higher, like Premiere Pro, you may find that you've hit the limits of what this laptop can do.

This isn't being marketed as a gaming machine by any means either, but when services like Project xCloud on Xbox Game Pass proliferate on PC, this could actually become a decent gaming option for in between those intense study sessions. The Intel Graphics HD 600 combined with 8GB of RAM and the quad-core Celeron processor can actually make short work of many older, less-intensive gaming titles on Steam as well. Just don't expect to be running Cyberpunk 2077 or any modern game on this thing. Even Minecraft and World of Warcraft don't run particularly well.

The battery performance fell largely in-line with listed expectations, hitting about 4-5 hours on a single charge with average day-to-day blogging use. This might not be enough to get a full workday out of for most people, but using Windows 10's battery-saving features can push that juice up to around 6-7 hours.

Update January 15, 2021: After a few months of light use, the EZBook X3 Air HDD died, and the system has a strange BIOS that makes repairing it difficult.

Should you buy the Jumper EZbook X3 Air?

For the vast majority of people, the Jumper EZbook X3 Air is actually a surprisingly capable machine, for things like web browsing, Office, webmail, and beyond. The experience offers a few compromises when it comes to more intensive tasks, but for college students looking to save money, or someone looking to buy their kid an entry-level laptop experience, this is a truly great option.

The Jumper EZbook X3 Air might not win any best Windows laptop awards, and you won't be editing 4K video footage on the Jumper EZbook X3 Air or playing next-gen AAA games with ray tracing. I suspect you knew that already, though. This is more akin to a netbook experience, and in that, the EZbook X3 Air excels. However, the HDD failed after just a few months of use, which is a grim reminder of what can happen if you buy cheap hardware. This is probably best avoided.