India’s low-budget electronics market is seeing a massive push, be it smartphones, tablets, laptops, notebooks or any other gadget you can think of. And while people are more eager to buy a sub₹15K Xiaomi smartphone rather than a tablet or notebook, that didn’t stop Google from introducing two new, sub₹13K Chromebooks into the market.
The two new Chromebooks are manufactured by Xolo and and a rather unknown brand called Nexian. The Chromebooks are a part of Google’s larger global bet, to put its Chrome OS and Chromium platform as an affordable alternative to Micrsofot’s Windows OS. Google is more keen to try on in emerging markets like India, where it thinks its affordability tag might in over India’s tech janta. That however, seems to have failed till now.
The new Chromebooks, which were comprehensively reviewed by India Today, is a “rather run of the mill product”. There’s nothing distinct about it. It has a 11.6-inch 1366×768 pixels display, a Rockchip Cortex A17 quad-core CPU, 2GB RAM and a 16GB of internal storage.
The Chromebook however has a decent keyboard and more than decent tactile feedback, something which would be sufficient enough if the Chromebook is employed solely for work related daily chores.
Talking about the build, Sahil Mohan Gupta at India Today says,
Build quality wise, it looked pretty solid with minimal flex in the frame, but it had a glossy plastic design, which caught fingerprints easily and looked gaudy.
Apart from a more decent keyboard, there is literally no differentiation on the performance front. Both are powered by a lesser known Rockchip-SoC.
That’s not quite all… Google said also that machine’s from ASUS, Samsung and other Indian companies will hit the market soon to provide even greater choice.
