iBall Compbook Excelance OHD Review: Is it worth it for just ₹10,000?

Back in 2016, With the launch of the iBall Compbook Excelance, iBall put its staple in the ultra-budget laptop segment in India.

The Compbook Excelance was actually pretty good bang for buck (albeit a small bang). For sure, it used cheap low power Intel Atom Processor, but that was at an extremely budget price of just ₹ 10K.

Now, read on to find out, whether the newer- OHD variant is any good.

 [Beware: Some, sellers might still actually dupe ignorant buyers by selling them the previous gen model (i.e, non-OHD 2016 variant.) ]

Specifications

Design & Build:

iBall is targeting first time laptop users and students in India with this laptop and has hence decided to go the ultra-Budget route.

At around ₹ 10,000, this is one of the cheapest laptop available in the Indian market.
Now, with such cheap price, this obviously had to lose out on build quality and performance.

The body is made of polycarbonate shells. Though not flimsy, there is some flex around the keyboard area due to the lack of support/rigidity from a motherboard. (The motherboard of the Intel Atom X5-78350 Processor is very tiny and is the reason why iBall was able to put a massive 10,000 mAh battery in such a small chassis.

Although, looks are subjective, I preferred if iBall would have kept the Blue color from the previous gen Model. The brown color looks a bit unattractive to me.
Anybody buying this should probably invest in some laptop skins too.

There is textured pattern at the back of the display lid, which personally I don't like.

Where, the laptop does shine is its compactness and weight.
With only an low power Intel Atom chip and 11.6" Display to accomodate, the chassis is pretty small.
The compact dimensions and the light weight (1.1 Kg) makes it very portable.

Display:

The iBall Compbook Excelance OHD sports an 11.6" HD Ready (1,366 X 768 Px) Display.

It is quite impressive that iBall offers a LED Panel instead of a TN panel which has been the norm of ultra-budget laptops.

However, the panel does shows its cheap price, as the colours are somewhat washed out and the contrast is also not punchy.

Viewing Angle and brightness is just okay-ish for the price.

Keyboard & Trackpad:

The keyboard runs edge to edge due to the smaller dimensions of the laptop.
The keys are chiclet style and non-backlit with average key-travel for the price.

The keys provide lesser tactile feedback than regular sized (15") laptops and takes a bit to get used to the smaller layout.

As mentioned before, due to the tiny size of the motherboard, there is no structural support underneath the keyboard.
So, heavy typers would have to control their key strokes to prevent flexing.

The power on/off key is just above the backspace key. So, one would have to be careful to not accidentally switch of the device while typing.

The trackpad is usable but the tracking is somewhat inferior to those of bigger laptops.
It takes some time to get used to, owing to its smaller size.

The trackpad does support multiple gesture support.

Audio:

The speakers of this device are bottom firing and are moderately loud. One cannot expect much more quality, for this money.
However, for better Audio Consumption, its better to stick with headphones and external portable speakers.

Ports & Connectivity:

Wi-fi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth 4.0
Mini HDMI (1.4a)
USB 2.0  X 1
USB 3.0  X 1
Micro-SD card slot for up to 128 GB expansion
3.5mm Single (Mic + Headphone) jack

Webcam:

The 0.3 MP webcam is just sorta there. Its barely usable with well-lit condition and its 640 X 480 resolution.

Storage:

Source: TechStore 

It comes with the inbuilt flash memory of 32 GB, out of which around 20 GB is usable.
Luckily, it comes with a micro-SD card slot which supports up to 128 GB.
It also comes with an empty 2.5" HDD/SSD drive bay which supports up to 1TB and is quiet easy to upgrade with just a few screws to open in the back panel.

Performance:

Now, the most interesting and important part of this review.
Does a ₹ 10,000 laptop performs well enough to be considered buying?

The laptop is powered by a Quad-core Intel Atom X5-78350 processor, which has a base clock speed of 1.44 GHz and can turbo upto 1.92 GHz.

The Compbook Excelance OHD is equipped with 2GB of soldered DDR3-L RAM (1600 MHz).

Now, this laptop is obviously meant for light tasks, such as light media consumption, documents editing and light browsing. So, it performs fairly well for these tasks, but heavier tasks do tend to lag a bit.

It can handle HD photo editing and small HD (720p) video editing well enough, although nobody will buy this for video editing purposes, obviously.

Browsing experience is quite good with the default Windows 10 Edge Browser, but the RAM hungry Google Chrome can choke up system performance on opening a few tabs and can easily lag.
The laptop obviously struggles with multiple heavy web tabs loaded.
Although 6-7 light websites can work  quiet smoothly.

YouTube playback for 1080p can cause a few jitters and frame drops here and there but lower quality playback works fine.

Document editing works fine in Word, Excel,etc.

The best option for users would be to forgo the Windows 10 OS completely and opt to install any lightweight Linux distro, as the performance would be significantly better.

Here's a list of lightweight Operating Systems which can make your low-end/older computer faster.

Caution:  Attempt this at your own risk. I am not responsible if you cannot use Linux.

Thermals :

Although, the temperature stays within moderate bounderies, I would have liked it more if they added a small fan or a better designed heatsink.

Battery:

With a massive 10,000 mAh li-po battery, the iBall Compbook Excelance OHD easily acheives 6.5+ Hours battery-life through moderate usage.
It can last 4 to 5 hours on heavy use like movie consumption.

Verdict:

Superb laptop for the money. For someone (most likely students) just looking to buy a laptop for light usage and are constrained by budget, this is a great choice.
Though, if your workload is even a bit more intensive than typical browsing, media consumption and Documents editing, then obviously look at other more expensive options.

Buy it from here.
About Author.