Android is a great software — to run mobile phones. Not so great if you want that PC look and feel. This poses a problem for tablets which overwhelmingly run on Android, yet are expected by many buyers to do double duty as a notebook PC.
Three ex-Google engineers — Jeremy Chau, David Ko and Ben Luk -- founded Jide Technologies to create Remix OS, which aims to provide a PC desktop experience on an Android machine — a fusion of mobile and PC. They brought back PC features like a taskbar, a file manager to access, transfer and save files, a screen capture tool, the ability to do multi-tasking, keep multiple windows open — and easy controls to add mouse and keypad. In short the best of both worlds.
Indian tablet maker iBall is the first to bring Remix OS on a device to India — the Slide Brace-X1 4G — a 10.1-inch tablet PC with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage expandable to 64GB. The underlying OS is Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS and the screen has a resolution of 1280 x 800, not quite full HD. The 8 MP rear and 5MP front cameras are less than what one gets on phones these days, but adequate for video calls. The 7800mAh battery is good for a full day's work.
I like it that iBall has gone for a 'brace' or retractable stand so that when connected to a keyboard and mouse, it can be used on a desk. Also very useful is the 4G VoLTE support. With a compatible SIM like Jio, you can be on Internet all day and still make voice calls. At 17,499, it is not the cheapest tablet going — but the large screen size and the PC cloning software make it worth the price.
—IndiaTechOnline
