Smartron tBook Windows Tablet Hands-on & First Impressions

Now and then we see a company launch their first product, but it’s not every day a God of Cricket himself is endorsing that product. Not only Sachin Tendulkar is a brand ambassador for Smartron, a Hyderabad-based registered firm who have come out of stealth mode after two years of its establishment, but the Master Blaster is also an investor and mentor to the team building next generation of smart devices at global scale.

Now a Cricket fan inside me would like to talk a lot about how great talks Sachin did at the launch event hosted in New Delhi, but it was not the only highlight of the day. Revealing what might be the most affordable premium tablet PC, the tBook was quite the highlight of the event, apart from the tPhone, which we didn’t get to go hands-on with. For your information, the company hasn’t shared much detail about the tPhone, but will have Iris Sensor to unlock the phone, which is yet to be seen on a consumer-centric smartphone. I spent a couple of minutes with the device and on a brief note I can say that it might be hitting sixes in all aspects, just like Yuvraj Singh did in 2007 during World T20 encounter with England.

Note: I have used a lot of Cricket references in my hands-on and first impression for the Smartron tBook, it’s my way to honor Sachin Tendulkar’s new innings. And also, I’m crazy fan of the Master Blaster.

Coming into more technical part of this article, the tBook has a metal body construction; specifically, it uses a mixture of magnesium and aluminum. With a beautiful finish on every nook and corner, the hybrid tablet looks pretty neat and clean. The combination of Smartron Orange and Grey color on the back side, it looks beautiful. And what’s look nicer is the kickback stand. With a price point it comes with, one would think that build quality of the stand wouldn’t be sturdy, well, I’ll stop you right there. The Kickback stand is pretty stable; you feel the solid body when you pull it out from the space assigned to it. Edges have dedicated keys and ports, such as power button, 3.5mm audio jack, microSD card slot, Type-C with USB 3.0 support, 2 X full USB 3.0 ports, micro HDMI port, and a magnetic pogo pin on the bottom edge, which is used to attach the keyboard. As well as you would see dual stereo speakers and dual microphone for better noise cancellation during those conference calls. With a dimension of 308.5 x 9.5 x 206.5 mm, the tablet feels to hold and offer an excellent grip. Company hasn’t specified the weight, but it felt light enough to carry around in your backpack.

Talking about the keyboard, it comes with an attachable accessory that you can use when you want to browse comfortably and type because let’s face with typing on that large real estate might be a headache. It’s always good to get an attachable keyboard to use when typing is all you need. And before you ask, it’s a full-size keyboard, which we thought needs some work, since it didn’t felt quite good. But I can judge more about it once we use it as our daily driver machine, which we are hoping to in near future.

Moving to the display, it has 12.2-inch WQXGA display with IPS technology and a resolution of 2560 x 1600, which is as better as it gets on a size that large. We didn’t get to play videos on it, but the system colors felt pretty good on it, just a couple of minutes of browsing will tell you that how clear the display is, as well it has good viewing angles too. With a 16:10 ratio, the content on this display is as wide as it gets, the multi-touch certainly felt responsive with couple try, as well as the company is claiming that it as a fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating.

The device is powered by Intel Core M processor, which is said to be next generation chipset bringing the best efficiency in terms of power usage and performance. That’s why the company is claiming a battery life of up to 10 hours in web browsing while a 28 days standby time, which is something of an amazing feat. But then again, we would only know it better once we get started on using tBook as our daily driver machine. The processor offers turbo frequency if up to 2GHz, it is supported by a 128Gb SSD drive, which said to be numerous times faster than HDD. Moreover, there is a 4GB of LPDDR3 RAM inside the system, which ensures swift multitasking. It would be coming with Windows 10 Home, which can be upgraded to Windows 10 Pro as well as would come pre-installed with 30 days trial version of Office 2016 Edition.

The camera setup includes 5-megapixel image sensor on the rear, which is an autofocus module while on the front packs the 2-megapixel HD camera useful for conference calls. Apart from all this, the company has created a Tron X, which is all set to deliver software experience with t-cloud, t-store, and t-care. This all is listed under the Hubtron, company’s native artificial engine integrated on every smartron device. With this users would be able to access their data, profiles, content, services, and community. We can’t explain how useful these features are yet as we haven’t tested them yet. That said we are certainly looking forward to it. It’s all a lot to take in at the time, but one can make sense of these services once they use this service.

The idea of owning a portable, powerful hybrid machine would be accessible to more consumers as Smartron tBook priced at Rs 39,999 is something that many consumers would be interested in to get their hands-on with. The specifications on this tablet are very promising; from design to display, enough number of ports to an array of hubtron services and performance to battery life. This was our first impression of the Smartron tBook hybrid tablet. Watch out for the video of our first impressions on the YouTube Channel where you can see the tablet in action. Would you be willing to buy this handset when it comes out for sale next week? Or you would like us to review it first for you? Let us know in the comments section below about your feedback.