Microsoft Surface Book 2 (13.5-inch) Sourced by The Telegraph
JBL Endurance Dive
Price: Rs 6,999
Listening to music during a swim is still a rarity, and the JBL Endurance Dive arrives to fulfil a need we didn’t know we had.
Power it on and pair it with your phone and you can start piping tunes to the earphones. The touch controls are on the right earbud, but I’ll have to say that they are a bit fidgety and take some getting used to. The magnetic on-off mechanism is convenient. Because of its neckband shape and unique ear-lock design, the Endurance Dive sits tight behind your neck and in your ears, making sure that it doesn’t slip off during a swim. When you’re in the water and Bluetooth stops working, you can switch to MP3 mode, which will play songs from the 1GB built-in storage. Audio quality is great on the low end, with the high end a little too loud for my comfort. Battery life is good at six-seven hours, and it only takes about 10 minutes of charging to yield one hour of playback.
Can handle being submerged in 1m water only for 30 minutes. So no scuba diving with these. It is pricey and has a niche audience.
Xiaomi Mi Band 3 Sourced by The Telegraph
Amazfit Cor Sourced by The Telegraph
Nokia 5.1 Plus Sourced by The Telegraph
Xiaomi Mi TV 4A Pro 49 Sourced by The Telegraph
Amazfit Cor
Price: Rs 3,999
Xiaomi sub-brand Huami impressed with the Amazfit Bip and Stratos smartwatches in the recent past, and the Cor is its entry into the budget fitness tracker segment. It’s priced well but faces stiff competition from the Mi Band 3.
The Cor ticks off a number of boxes — a vibrant 1.23-inch colour IPS LCD, 5ATM/50m water resistance with tracking for swim workouts, heart rate, sleep and activity. Navigation via the touchscreen is responsive and battery life is about seven to 10 days, depending on how much activity you track, your notification frequency, and whether you activate continuous heart rate tracking. It’s accurate for counting steps and monitoring sleep, but heart rate tracking is irregular.
The rather generic tall design of Cor, save for the dash of elegance that the stainless steel gives it, doesn’t really work. It’s not the most comfortable of trackers to wear. It feels bulky and just doesn’t sit well on the wrist. Your mileage may vary, but that means you must try it on for size before buying. Syncs with the Mi Fit app, which is sparse compared to the competition. Lacks multiple exercise modes for different activities.
Nokia 5.1 Plus
Price: Rs 10,999
HMD is slowly but surely getting Nokia its mojo back with a solid formula of design and software, the latter courtesy the Android One program. The 5.1 Plus hits the super-competitive Rs 10,000 segment with the right amount of flair but camera issues hold it back.
The 5.1 Plus proves that you need not pay big bucks to land yourself a premium-looking phone. The high-gloss body and curved glass on the rear make it a tad slippery, but the effect looks really good. Plus, you get a whole lot of screen in a very easy-to-use, compact form, albeit with a pretty significant notch. Colours and outdoor legibility are good on the punchy 5.86-inch display, so much so that you tend to forget this is a 720p display. The capable MediaTek Helio P60 chip is a good alternative to Qualcomm chips at this price point and offers a smooth experience, thanks in large part to the bloat-free optimised Android One (8.1) platform. The 3,060mAh battery easily lasts a full day.
The camera is a let-down, despite packing in AI chops for edge/scene detection. Shutter lag is very evident and image quality and detail are mediocre at best, even with decent light… and it gets worse in low light.
Xiaomi Mi TV 4A Pro 49
Price: Rs 29,999
Xiaomi’s line-up of smart TVs just got a shot in the arm with the new Pro variants, now available in 32-, 49- and 55-inch avatars, which ship with Android TV 8.1 alongside the company’s custom PatchWall OS. For buyers looking for a large TV with a strong set of smart TV features without breaking the bank, the Mi TV 4A Pro 49 fits the bill.
While Xiaomi’s PatchWall platform did well to integrate streaming and linear TV content, it was hobbled by the lack of app support for many major streaming services. So the addition of Android TV makes a big difference this time around. With the TV running Android TV 8.1 out of the box, you finally get direct access to the Google Play Store and its thousands of made-for-TV Android TV apps, without having to mess around with sideloading app installers via the USB drive. The Bluetooth remote now supports Google Voice Search powered by Google Assistant, which lets even seniors and kids navigate the interface, change channels and search for content on PatchWall or YouTube simply by speaking to it. Way more convenient than typing for sure! The ability to control other Xiaomi smart home devices directly from the TV is a bonus. As a TV, this one checks the right boxes — the design is pleasing, ports are a plenty, audio from the two 10W speakers is decent and the panel by itself is good for watching 1,080p movies or playing games — but playing back HDR content is average at best.
While voice search works really well, you can’t search for content within all streaming services yet, so you can “open Hotstar” but not “find me the latest episode of Game of Thrones on Hotstar”. The installation process suggests apps from your Google Play Store purchase history. So it was useful to see that apps like Plex, VLC and those for network storage devices are available, but native apps for Netflix or Prime Video are missing (the latter is expected soon). Built-in Chromecast functionality is useful, but you still can’t cast Netflix from your phone. That means you will need a Fire TV Stick or something similar. No support for 5GHz Wi-Fi.
Microsoft Surface Book 2 (13.5-inch)
Price: Rs 1.38 lakh onwards
Microsoft’s Surface line-up has, over the years, been based on a simple premise — if you have the budget to afford one, you will arguably not find a better portable computing experience at the Windows end of the world. The no-compromises, “we’ll show you how it’s done right” approach holds with the Surface Book 2, Microsoft’s latest iteration of its shape-shifting tablet-by-day-laptop-by-night convertible. But its premium pricing means that it realistically appeals to a very small niche in India.
The all-metal body is super premium and feels great to hold and use, even if the design may come across as a little plain on the eyes. The magic lies in that hinge, which allows you to pop the tablet out and use independently, or dock it back, either straight in regular laptop mode or the other way around in presentation mode, with the screen facing away from you. Docked in, the Book 2 can take full advantage of the discrete GeForce GTX1050 graphics and additional battery in the keyboard base, the latter giving you up to 15 hours of peace of mind. The 13.5-inch variant I tested packed in an 8th-generation Core i7 chip, 512GB storage with 32GB of memory and blazed through heavy workloads and can even manage to hold its own while gaming, as long as you’re willing to dial down the visual quality settings. The display is colour accurate, scores high on details and compares well with the fancier near-zero-bezel 4K display I’ve seen on the competition, though I’m not a fan of the squarer 3:2 aspect ratio — it’s good for everyday work and browsing but not for watching videos. Great keyboard too — well spaced out and with good key travel.
It’s compact for a laptop with a 13.5-inch screen, but the hinge leaves a small gap between the keyboard and the display, which exposes the Book 2 to dust and makes fitting into tight laptop sleeves a bit of a squeeze.
Xiaomi Mi Band 3
Price: Rs 1,999
Much like the Mi Band 2 that propelled Xiaomi to the top of the Indian wearables market, the Mi Band 3 packs in a heck of a lot for the money — a bigger touchscreen display, improved fitness and heart rate tracking and 50m water resistance — features that would put you back by a lot more with the competition.
A big reason why Mi Bands have traditionally fared well is the excellent pricing for its feature set, and the Mi Band 3 scores again in that regard. The larger 0.78-inch display shows notifications better (alongside the usual steps, weather, and so on) without adding to the bulk, which means you can wear the Mi Band all day and night and feel no discomfort. You can do on-demand heart rate monitoring or enable all-day tracking to check your heart rate at frequent intervals (not live) at the expense of battery life. Setting it up to check every 10 minutes would about halve the battery life to about 10 days. Water resistance is a big plus.
The Mi Fit app allows you to see additional data on sleep and calories, but it isn’t quite as full-featured and insightful about your data as some of the competition. Readings are just a bit off in terms of accuracy, but the tracker does a decent job tracking/logging workouts and providing you with a trend of your fitness. Display could have been brighter for outdoor use.
Tushar Kanwar is a tech columnist and commentator.
