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iBall Excelance review

7.5/10
6.5/10
6.5/10



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Today, many of us use our smartphones more than our laptops. One of the reasons is that current smartphones are equally powerful and can do most of things a laptop can do. As a result of this trend, many people vouch for high-end expensive smartphones and resort to getting basic but affordable laptops, for simple tasks like typing and web browsing. This is exceptionally true in the case of people who travel a lot. We’ve seen many budget laptops that offer basic features but still capture the spirit of a being a full-fledged laptop. The iBall Excelance is one of them and at an astonishing price under Rs. 10,000*, it pretty much sets a benchmark for affordable laptops. This budget-friendly laptop comes with an 11.6-inch screen and a full-fledged keyboard to make typing easy on the move. Let’s find out if it’s really a viable option at that price.

Design and build

At Rs. 9,999* the Excelance is not only one of the cheapest laptops, but also one of the lightest you can find. It weighs around 1.1kg, with a thickness of just 2.4 cm, with the lid shut. This makes it an exceptionally good laptop to travel with. You won’t have any problems fitting it in a small bag or even a purse. The compact design also makes it easy to work with, in congested and cluttered situations, especially when travelling.

iBall Excelance_thickness

The entire build is plastic. The battery isn’t detachable and there is no vent for the heat to drift away. The chassis is held together with the help of seven screws, at the bottom. For a low budget laptop, the Excelance looks better than what we expectated. The matte finish on the inside and the slightly textured lid give it a rugged and stylish look. It goes very well with the Blue (Royal Blue) colour seen all around. Sadly, the Excelance is not available in any other colour.

 iBall Excelance_build

In contrary to the overall design, there are quite a few things about the build that come across as cheap and flimsy, when taken a closer look. One of them is the lid. The moment you put a little pressure on the lid, you’d notice some flickering on the screen. The bezel around it is fragile and bends the moment you put a little stress on it.

iBall Excelance_lid

The hinge also feels flimsy and loose. It’s not safe to pick up the laptop by the screen. The hinge doesn’t let the screen go too far back, so using it on a lap can be difficult. The USB ports also have a problem. Cables don’t plug in easily. You always need to apply a little pressure. All of this makes us think it’s not such a great laptop to be travelling a lot with.

iBall Excelance_keyboard

iBall has managed to use the space pretty well on the inside. There is surprisingly decent amount of space on the deck to place your wrists while typing. The keys are big and have good spacing between them. As a custom, iBall has highlighted the ‘i’ key in red, as they do with all of their keyboards. The keys don’t have a very good feedback and that creates a big problem while typing. Very often, we noticed that some of the keys failed to register, or in some instances mistook one key press for two. This hampers the typing experience. Another problem was with the trackpad. Though it has a decent size, it’s too sensitive. It gets in the way while typing and for that reason has to be disabled. Based on experience, it will take a little time to get used to both the keyboard and the trackpad.


5.5/10

Features

The iBall Excelance comes with basic hardware. It comes with an Intel Atom Processor (Z3735F), clocked, at 1.8GHz. It’s the most basic laptop processors manufactured by Intel, designed to undertake simple tasks, while being power-efficient. You can use it for surfing the web, typing documents and watching videos. Beyond that, most tasks would be overwhelming for the processor. Media is limited to watching videos, but it’s not adequate for playing even simple games. There is only 2GB of RAM to play with, so it’s not very big on multi-tasking either. Running your daily apps together though shouldn’t be a big problem. There is no hard drive. It’s replaced by 32GB of eMMC storage. It’s the core reason behind the Excelance being so slim and light.  Not just that, excluding a hard drive also lets you reduce temperature. The built-in storage may be just 32GB, but it proves to be much faster in reading and writing files (We’ll test that out a little later in the review). You can choose to expand the storage to a 64GB with the help of a microSD card or use an external hard drive if you need the extra storage.

iBall Excelance_USB port

The 11.6-inch screen features a standard resolution of 1366 x 768, which is very good. It’s the same resolution most laptops costing under Rs. 50,000 have. It looks good for surfing the web and the watching full videos on YouTube. iBall has also provided a mini HDMI port on the laptop, so you can even connect it to a TV, so you can play movies or presentations. The platform supports WiDi (Wireless Display), which lets your mirror your laptop screen on a smart TV wirelessly. Besides that it comes with two USB 2.0 ports placed on each side. A 3.5mm headphone jack is also present.

iBall Excelance_front

The Excelance comes with Windows 10 out-of-box. What we really like about it is that iBall has refrained from adding any sort of bloatware in order to make it cleaner and much more streamlined. Excelance lets you take full advantage of Windows 10. The Excelance packs in a 10,000 mAh battery. iBall claims it to last for eight and a half hours of video  playback and 31 hours on standby, in a single charge. Taking that into consideration, on average use, you might not have to charge the Excelance very often. iBall has provided a 5V 2.5A adaptor, which is a good thing. It charges the laptop much faster than a micro USB port that many convertible 2-in-1 laptops do. Windows 10 also supports a Battery Saver mode, which stops apps running in the background and adjusts screen brightness to increase battery life. You can choose to configure the apps you want and even the time you want the laptop to switch on the Battery saver mode automatically.


7.5/10

Performance

We were off to a good start with the iBall Excelance. Thanks to the eMMC, the laptop booted up in just about half a minute. It only took us about 45 seconds to switch on the laptop, open Word and Chrome, and start working on it. This is pretty impressive as most laptops don’t let you do that under a minute. In reality, the eMMC card is one of the main reason for Excelance’s smooth experience with basic software.

iBall Excelance_multi-tasking

The slower processor means there is still some amount of waiting you have to do, even for basic software such as Word, Facebook, Twitter and Flipboard, etc. Occasionally, even the start menu appears after a short delays after pressing the Windows button. The same goes for opening heavy webpages on Chrome. The performance with web browsing is a little sluggish in the start. In all the apps, it’s the images that take plenty of time to render. The SunSpider web browsing benchmark didn’t fetch very good scores, but they are close to our expectations.  

iBall Excelance_Sunspider

At any given time we had multiple desktops running on the laptop. We had Facebook, Twitter and Flipboard running on one, Microsoft Word running on second, YouTube streaming music on third, and a Full HD video streaming from a USB drive on the fourth. We even had it connected to a Bluetooth speaker for better audio. Surprisingly, the Excelance managed to handle all this really well. We didn’t notice any stuttering or glitches with these software. Even the full HD movie playback was fine. The only lag took place when switching between apps or switching screens within applications. When moving to  heavy apps like Facebook, the laptop slows down momentarily. With simple web browsing and other applications, the Excelance manages to keep its cool, but the moment you try to push the limits, it heats up instantly. We could notice it even when we started opening multiple tabs on Chrome. After some time, it becomes a little difficult to work on it, while keeping it on the lap. Chrome even stopped responding on some occasions and hence had to be restarted. Data transfer speeds from our 1TB drive were decent. While reading and writing files, the Excelance managed to maintain a good speed of 35MB/s. We also played a Full HD movie from the hard drive, and the performance was smooth overall, with just a few minor glitches from time-to-time. We ran the CrystalDiskMark test on Excelance and got the following scores.

iBall Excelance_CrystalDiskMark

The 11.6-inch screen is pretty good. It’s reasonably bright and manages to produce subtle yet vibrant colours. It’s decent for watching movies and videos on YouTube. The only problem we have with it is the reflective panel. Under bright lighting, it becomes very difficult to avoid glare. Regardless, we still think it’s pretty good for watching movies and YouTube videos on the move. There are two speakers placed at the bottom. While not the best and the loudest, they can still be used to watch YouTube videos occasionally. For a better experience we would recommend getting a Bluetooth speaker or using the headphones.


6.5/10

Verdict

iBall’s Excelance does not have a very appealing performance, but under Rs. 10,000, it’s as good as it can get. As a basic laptop, it can do two out of three things really well. Although not seamless, the Excelance proves good for browsing the internet, watching movies, playing music and running some other basic applications and even games. It even managed to handle all of them, together. What we had a hard time getting over is the typing. Its clumsy keyboard is difficult to work with. The trackpad is also a problem, but you can always use a USB mouse if you don’t mind sparing one of the USB ports. When it comes to performance though, we’re more or less satisfied. The Excelance is surely not on the top of our list when it comes to affordable laptops, but if you are really on a tight budget, then it’s certainly not a bad buy. There will be some problems and setbacks down the road, but not big enough to bother you at Rs. 10,000*.


6.5/10