A new brand in India, Smartron forayed into the crowded Indian market, where the term crowded doesn’t mean only for the consumers but also for the brands. In the past couple of years, we’ve seen several brands entering the Indian market and competing with the pricing in focus. Smartron, in that way, is a little different. It is a company founded by Indians, who have worked at Silicon Valley and again, have come back to India to see Indians using their products.
Very recently, LeTV, a Chinese company had rebranded to LeEco so as to have a branding for the entire ecosystem it is building. Xiaomi announced MIJIA, a brand that will work around the Smart home ecosystem, and Smartron is into something similar, as the company intends to have a complete ecosystem of products in different categories, including smartphones, tablets, and laptops.
The first product that Smartron introduced yesterday, was the tBook. A sleek Windows 10 convertible tablet with a screen size of 12.2-inch, the t-Book might just look like a perfect competitor to the likes of Surface Pro series, though we are talking about a competition against the makers of Windows OS itself.
Let’s begin with the specs. The t-book has a 12.2-inch IPs display with a good 2560×1600 pixels resolution and a multi-touch, alongside the oleophobic coating to keep the fingerprints away. Internally, it comes powered by the Intel Core M 64-bit chipset with a turbo frequency of 2GHz, and along with that is 4GB of RAM, 128GB SSD storage, and dual-channel Wi-Fi, USB Type C connectivity and a good 10000 mAh battery that is supposed to give about 10 hours of battery life.
A little odd with the colors, but that’s what the company has chosen for both of its devices, the upcoming smartphone too, with a touch of the color of its logo – orange. It does look like a Microsoft Surface or something similar that of any convertible laptop that has an external keyboard. It has a sturdy exterior, thanks to the Aluminum + Magnesium alloy, but the keyboard with the magnetic pin is similar to the soft-touch keyboard from Microsoft, except that this has proper physical keys.
What’s included with the connectivity? It’s the USB Type-C port for charging and for USB 3.0 transfer, two Full-size USB 3.0 ports, a Micro HDMI port, MicroSD card slot allowing for extra storage of about 128GB, Wi-Fi dual channel, and MIMO.
The unit we tried for some time, had Windows 10 Home running, but there are Windows 10 Pro variants also available, and all of these with Office 360 subscription for a limited time, i.e. one month. Physically, some other inclusions were the dual speaker grill located just above the display on the either side of the front camera, and the t-book also has a rear camera with 5MP resolution.
Windows 10 isn’t any different from any other ones, but the inclusion of Hubtron could be a useful one for someone who would like the company to help them in a few ways. t-cloud is for unlimited cloud storage, t-care for remote help from the company customer care persons to solve any problems that the users might be facing, and there are other services, tstore, a forum shortcut and a complete app for the users to handle their account and services offered by Smartron under the Hubtron / Tron X platform.
The kickstand on the back is again, similar to how the Surface RT had one, but here, the entire half doesn’t raise itself but it is a U-shaped stand that can be pulled out, and it gives a firm support for the t-Book to stand still while one can easily tap hard on the screen at times and see it still standing strong.
For the early views, the Smartron tBook does look good, and heavy on specs (we say this because of inclusions like SSD storage, Intel Core M processor, USB Type-C port, full USB 3.0 ports, and a heavy battery) and a sure shot competitor against the similar limited options available in the market, and this one is priced quite well at Rs. 39,999, with not just the standard Windows but the company’s attempt at a platform that makes the user feel at home with the additional services.
