Xiaomi Redmi 4A review: One of the best entry-level smartphones, but only if you can get your hands on it

• 
  Other smartphone players have also caught on to Xiaomi’s strategy, and there has definitely been stiff competition in the last one year, but Xiaomi still has a star product in most of the under Rs 30,000 price segments. The only annoying aspect is actually buying a Xiaomi handset. Its flash sales or open sales are notorious for making you wait weeks before you finally get one handset. After these many years, it is high time Xiaomi got this aspect right. It is a pain for mobile phone buyers to wait for weeks before they get lucky in purchasing one handset off the sales.
  
  
  Recently, Xiaomi released its entry level Redmi device — the Xiaomi Redmi 4A, which is priced at Rs 5,999. Will this be the phone to go for someone thinking of making the switch from a feature phone? Let us find out

Build and Design: 7/10

Xiaomi’s mid-range devices have started to sport metallic builds. The Xiaomi Redmi 4A being an entry level device, comes with a polycarbonate finish. It weighs in at 131 grams and feels quite light, but sturdy to hold.

The volume rocker and power/standby button on the right hand side give good feedback. The SIM card tray is located on the left hand edge. The phone measures around 8.5 mm thick.

Xiaomi Redmi 4A ensures that there are no sharp edges on the phone, thanks to bevelled edges. This also helps in giving a good grip to the phone. On the rear of the phone there are fine grooves at the top and bottom, but it’s just a design element and it is not meant for antenna bands. The 13 MP rear camera is housed inside a metallic ring and is located on the top left hand corner with an LED flash unit beside it. The Mi branding is prominent on the lower half of the rear side. Towards the base there is a speaker grille section, with a minor chin just below it.

The phone comes with an infrared blaster on the top edge, which also houses the 3.5 mm audio jack. At the base, you have a microUSB port for charging and data transfer. On the front there is a 5-inch HD display with thick bezels on the top and bottom.

Overall, the build quality at this price point isn’t bad at all. The design is nothing out of the ordinary. The one-hand fit element will certainly attract a lot of buyers.

Features: 7/10
Xiaomi Redmi 4A comes with a 5-inch HD display and houses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 SoC with a quad-core Cortex A53 processor clocked at 1.4 GHz. The graphics portion is taken care of by an Adreno 308 GPU. The chipset is paired with 2 GB RAM. It comes in 16 GB and 32 GB storage variants. We got the 16 GB model to test, which gives around 10.3 GB of usable space. You can expand the storage using a microSD card by up to 256 GB.

The Xiaomi Redmi 4A comes in a hybrid dual SIM configuration (micro SIM + nano SIM), supports Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS with A-GPS, GLONASS and BDS. It comes with a micro USB port for charging and data transfer, and there is no support for fast charging.

Thankfully it bundles in an FM radio as well. On the camera front, you get a 13 MP rear camera, along with a 5 MP selfie camera. All this is powered by a non-removable 3,120 mAh Li-ion battery.

Publish date: April 25, 2017 12:48 pm| Modified date: April 25, 2017 12:48 pm

Single Page

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Acer Aspire S13 review: This might just be the best Windows-based Ultrabook in its price range

• 
  

By Anirudh Regidi /  23 Aug 2016 , 11:45

The MacBook Air has been the gold standard for ultrabooks almost since its unveiling. At the time it launched, it was the only thin, light and solidly built ultrabook around with decent specifications. Today however, there is a plethora of powerful, gorgeous devices to choose from.

Acer’s Aspire S13 is one such device. It’s slim, light, well-built and more powerful than the Air; it’s also more expensive. It does seem like a great device, but is it worth it?

Build and design: 8/10

First things first. This laptop is thin, very light and looks rather nice. It’s meant to be a business laptop and the muted black finish does help with that image. The entire device seems to be made of metal, though the lid does have a coating of some sort of plastic.

There’s metal under that plastic though, an aspect that we discovered in a rather unfortunate fashion, as you can see below:

Sorry, Acer!

The device is built very well, with one exception. Everything feels solid and unbendable, but the hinges, they feel like cheap plastic. The hinge mechanism itself is made of metal, but the caps are silvery plastic and very flimsy plastic at that.

The plastic pieces around the hinge keep popping open

Another complaint we have with the design of the device is concerning the charger. It’s very compact, smaller even than the MacBook Air’s charger, but the contact point is very flimsy. It doesn’t sit snug in the charging port when plugged in and would have felt at home on a cheaper device.

These are minor niggles in an otherwise great device though. Don’t let those oversights throw you off.

Keyboard and Trackpad: 8.5/10

The keyboard and trackpad are a pleasure to use. They’re comfortable and responsive and the trackpad has just the right amount of friction for my taste.

The keyboard is a compact one and lacks a numpad. There are no shared media keys either, but all other functions such as Wi-Fi toggles, brightness and volume controls, etc. can be adjusted in combination with the Fn key.

The keyboard is backlit

The keys are also very firm in that there’s no wobble when typing. Even if you press a corner, the entire key depresses, which makes for a pleasant typing experience.

The touchpad responds fluidly to gesture inputs and the left-click and right-click buttons are also smooth and responsive. The lack of a touch-screen was a bit of a downer, but overall, I’m very happy with what Acer has done with the keyboard and mouse.

Features: 6/10

The hardware choice for the Acer Aspire is very sensible. You get a 15W Intel Core i7 6500U processor clocked at 2.5GHz (dual-core with HT), 8GB LPDDR3 RAM and a 512GB SSD. The screen resolution is a bit low at 1920×1080, but it’s enough for a 13.3-inch screen and we aren’t complaining.

You get two USB 3.0 ports, one on each side, a USB Type-C 3.1 port and HDMI output. You also get an SD card reader and 802.11ac Wi-Fi with MU-MIMO support, which is to be expected in this day and age.

The fact that all of this is packed into a device that’s as slim and light as the MacBook Air is saying a lot.

The laptop does lose out for its lack of accessories and relatively low-resolution screen – considering we are seeing higher resolution displays from competition.

Display: 7/10

The display on the device is an FHD, 13.3-inch IPS panel. It has a matte finish (Thank you, Acer!) and good brightness levels.

Colours are a bit of an issue, they seem a little muted, and black levels are also not up to the mark. We also found banding to be slight problem. Sharpness was on point however, and so were the refresh rates.

The resolution is a bit odd for a 13.3-inch screen. Without scaling, everything feels a tad too small and to make things feel right, you need to scale to 125 or 150 percent. The problem there is that Windows doesn’t handle scaling very well and sharpness is ruined.

Performance: 6.5/10

In terms of performance, this laptop is right up there alongside the best in its class. Bearing in mind that this device doesn’t come with a graphics card, its CPU performance is actually better than most devices, a step higher up the performance chain.

For comparison, the Acer Aspire S13 scored 44431 in 3DMark Ice Storm Extreme with an i7 6500U, whereas the likes of the Asus G551VW and Dell Inspiron 15 7559, both with the more powerful Intel i7 6700HQ, scored a measly 38,374 and 30,851 respectively. 3DMark Ice Storm Extreme is a CPU intensive test that doesn’t stress the GPU much.

Even without a dedicated GPU, the Aspire S13 managed 48fps in Grid: Autosport at 720p at the medium preset, which is eminently playable. Obviously, light gaming is possible, but that’s not what the laptop is for.

The video conversion time — using Handbrake — was also quite fast at 11 minutes.

Another area where the device shines is in the storage benchmarks. Acer very generously equipped the S13 with a 512GB SSD, which leads to stellar read and write rates of 525 MB/s and 414 MB/s respectively.

This laptop is overkill for the average user, but as long as you’re not gaming, you’ll never be left wanting for performance. In fact, the PCMark score of 2912 is among the highest we’ve seen in this category.

There is one problem in this otherwise perfect performance score and that is overheating. Under heavy load, the CPU temperatures cross the 70 degree Celsius mark and the base heats up to 48 degrees Celsius. This is under heavy load though.

Under normal use, the base gets a little warm, but not uncomfortably so.

Battery Life: 5/10

Battery life was a tolerable 3 hours in our benchmarks, which translated to about 4-6 hours of use. This is not bad for daily use, though we wish there was more on offer.

Verdict and Price in India

I enjoyed every moment I spent with the Aspire S13. It’s lightweight and high-performance made it my go-to option whenever I needed something done quickly (it boots up in seconds). If I bought this laptop for myself, I don’t think I’ll be disappointed.

The price of Rs 84,000 is also not that bad. You’ll only get Intel i5 powered devices in this price range and few will offer a 512GB SSD.

The Acer Aspire S13 is among the best laptops I’ve ever tested and if you’re in the market for a workhorse Ultrabook, it might just be the one for you.

Nvidia's Tesla P4 And P40 GPUs Boost Deep Learning Inference Performance With INT8, TensorRT Support

Nvidia Tesl P40Nvidia continues to double down on deep learning GPUs with the release of two new “inference” GPUs, the Tesla P4 and the Tesla P40. The pair are the 16nm FinFET direct successors to Tesla M4 and M40, with much improved performance and support for 8-bit (INT8) operations.

Deep learning consists of two steps: training and inference. For training, it can take billions of TeraFLOPS to achieve an expected result over a matter of days (while using GPUs). For inference, which is the running of the trained models against new data, it can take billions of FLOPS, and it can be done in real-time.

The two steps in the deep learning process require different levels of performance, but also different features. This is why Nvidia is now releasing the Tesla P4 and P40, which are optimized specifically for running inference engines, such as Nvidia’s recently launched TensorRT inference engine.

Advertisement

Unlike the Pascal-based Tesla P100, which comes with support for the already quite low 16-bit (FP16) precision, the two new GPUs bring support for the even lower 8-bit INT8 precision. This is because the researchers have discovered that you don’t need especially high precision for deep learning training.

The expected results will appear significantly faster if you use twice as much data with half the precision. Because inference operates on already-trained data, even less precision is needed than for training, which is why Nvidia’s new cards now have support for INT8 operations.

Tesla P4

The Tesla P4 is the lower-end GPU from the two that were announced, and it’s targeted at scale-out servers that want highly-efficient GPUs. Each Tesla P4 GPU uses between 50W and 75W of power, for a peak performance of 5.5 (FP32) TeraFLOP/s and 21.8 INT8 TOP/s (Tera-Operations per second).

Nvidia compared its Tesla P4 GPU to an Intel Xeon E5 general purpose CPU and alleged that the P4 is up to 40x more efficient on the AlexNet image processing test. The company also claimed that the Tesla P4 is 8x more efficient than an Arria 10-115 FPGA (made by Altera, which Intel acquired).

Tesla P40

The Tesla P40 was designed for scale-up servers, where performance matters most. Thanks to improvements in the Pascal architecture as well as the jump from the 28nm planar process to a 16nm FinFET process, Nvidia claimed that the P40 is up to 4x faster than its predecessor, the Tesla M40.

The P40 GPU has a peak performance of 12 (FP32) TeraFLOP/s and 47 TOP/s, so it’s about twice as fast as its little brother, the Tesla P4. Tesla P40 has a maximum power consumption of 250W.

TensorRT

Nvidia also announced the TensorRT GPU inference engine that doubles the performance compared to previous cuDNN-based software tools for Nvidia GPUs. The new engine also has support for INT8 operations, so Nvidia’s new Tesla P4 and P40 will be able to work at maximum efficiency from day one.

In the graph below, Nvidia compared the performance of the Tesla P4 and P40 GPUs while using the TensorRT inference engine to a 14-core Intel E5-2690v4 running Intel’s optimized version of the Caffe neural networking framework. According to Nvidia’s results, the Tesla P40 seems to be up to 45x faster than Intel’s CPU here.

So far Nvidia has been comparing its GPUs to Intel’s general purpose CPUs alone, but Intel’s main product for deep learning is now the Xeon Phi line of chips with its “many-core” (Atom-based) accelerators.

Nvidia’s GPUs likely still beat those chips by a healthy margin due to the inherent advantage GPUs have even over many-core CPUs for such low-precision operations. However, at this point, comparing Xeon Phi with Nvidia’s GPUs would be a more realistic scenario in terms of what their customers are looking to buy for deep learning applications