Wipro's worthy workhorse. Review on Wipro 7B1611

The iValue 7B 1611 is a Wipro product. But, you will not find a mention of it on the Wipro.in site. And that is just one area where Wipro seems to have cut corners with the 1611.

Appearance

The 1611 is a good looking laptop. The matte black finish is excellent, compared to the glossy black or mulitcoloured stuff that other laptop makers have been releasing. The rough exterior and the rounded edges all are pleasing. Once opened the spartan interiors are also impressive. No plethora of shortcut buttons, just the Power button makes the interiors look uncluttered.

Specs

The specs of the laptop are par for the price tag:

Celeron 2.2GHz, SiS Chipset(Mirage onboard graphics), 1 GB DDR2 RAM, 160 GB Hard disk, DVD Writer, 14.1 widescreen LCD(1280 X 800), Wireless, LAN, Card reader, 4 USB ports, VGA out, Audio ports(Line and Mic)

Pros

1. The keypad is definitely one of the few plusses on this laptop. The keys are large, probably the largest in the 14.1 category, and they give good feedback while typing. The Keys are arranged well, with the Home- Pg UP, Pg Dn, End combination on the left side(unlike Lenovo which makes a mess of this arrangement). The Arrow keys are a bit narrower than the rest, and are placed without any clearance from the other keys increasing the chances of accidental depression while pressing the Shift or Enter keys.

   
   




2. One commendable act by Wipro has been the inclusion of the driver CDs(containing drivers for both XP and Vista and original CDs for PowerDVD and NTI Burning softwares. This is an act that is unseen in laptops in this price range. And strangely, all the Windows bias seems to be occuring in a laptop that is factory loaded with Linux!

   
   




3. The leather bag is one of the best available for laptops in this price range.

   
   

Cons

The list of disappointments with this laptop is huge.

1. The buttons on the touchpad are too hard

   
   




2. The ports placement is very strange and RETRO. This is infact amusing in many ways, except when using the laptop! It is usual for laptop makers to use all available real estate on the sides to spread their ports, but Wipro's designers have gone one step ahead with the spartan design. The front and right sides of the laptop have no ports. YES, you read it right. There are not ports on the front and right hand side. This is indeed unprecedented in laptop design. For all the idle real estate in the front and right, the ports have been squeezed on to the left side - along with the DVD writer. And, most annoyingly, 3 USB ports and the LAN port are on the back. Why did the designers not spread the ports evenly on the right and left sides is indeed a mystery worthy of MONK! The Power socket also could have been placed on the sides and not behind. The excess of ports on the back reminds one of laptops made atleast 10 years ago when the ports were located mostly away from sight(and easy reach).

   
   




3. Battery life is poor, with a full charge barely lasting 90 mins even with minimal activity and LCD brightness turned down to zero.

   
   




4. For those intending to use Win OS on this laptop, the bundled drivers are great, but for a laptop that comes out of the factory loaded with Fedora Core(Linux), it is disappointing that a full distro DVD was not included.

   
   




5. Performancewise, there is nothing to complain or cheer. The onboard Mirage(SiS) graphics will not be at par with the nVidia or ATI or Intel counterparts especially in the gaming arena, but there was no problem in movie playing or other more serious activities.

   
   

Conclusion

The funds spent on the org software and the bag could have been spent on bringing together a better design team to look into more important aspects of the laptop.

The said price is for a 4 month old device acquired from the used laptop market, the actual price for a new one is about 24000.