Submit your Article

The versatility of a laptop has helped it stand out from all other kinds of computers. A few years ago, business houses and offices had bulky desktop computers. They have all been replaced by thinner, smaller laptops. Corporate houses are getting populated more and more with portable computers which has further influenced the growth of professional laptops. Among the glitz and glamor of powerful gaming laptops, there thrives a market of computers built around productivity. We look at two powerful professional laptops that would see you through all kinds of work.  

 Lenovo ThinkPad T470  

 Price

Rs 132,000  

 ThinkPads are known to be professional busi­ness-grade laptops, and from the outside, the T470 looks sleek and classy. It features the ThinkPad style, no nonsense aesthetic, and smooth black rectangular shape with a nice luxurious feeling soft-touch mate­rial on to the outside. Unfortunately, the material does not cover the insides of the laptop where the soft-touch material would have done wonders for my palm. Staying true to the professional aspect of the laptop, it comes with powerful specifications: a Core i5-7200U paired with an ample 8GB of RAM.

It also comes with an unimpressive dedicated GPU from AMD, the Radeon M330. While the graphics chip has enough horse power to run a few moderate games, don’t expect it to run the latest triple A titles. What does work in the laptop’s favor is the hybrid battery system with an inbuilt 3-Cell battery, but also a removable battery caddy with additional 6-cell bat­tery. With a total of 9-cell worth of power, the laptop can run off the battery for over 17 hours. That’s much higher than the MacBook Pro’s 16 hours. The laptop also comes with an exceptional keyboard, probably one of the best out there. The keys have decent travel and are responsive enough to help improve your typing speed. But the audio and the display are two aspects that works against this laptop’s favor.  

Dell XPS 15

Price

Rs 155,000  

 Dell’s new XPS line is truly impressive with a stunningly bright and vibrant ‘Infinity Display’ that minimizes the bezels around the screen on the laptop. Truly, the XPS 15’s screen is brilliant with almost a 100 percent coverage of sRGB and Adobe RGB color tones, a feature that enable creatives to work on the laptop with astounding color accuracy. The laptop is also very powerful on the inside, pow­ered by a Core i5-7300 HQ processor, 8GB of RAM and 256 GB of SSD Storage. And it comes with an impressive and powerful GTX series graphic card, the GTX 1050. With such a powerful graphic processor, the laptop has plenty of power even if you wanted to game on it.

Gaming performance aside, the XPS 15 is a pow­erhouse when it comes to productivity. While the earlier laptop might have been suitable for more resource efficient work, the XPS is tailored for power hungry tasks such as video editing, photo editing and 3D modeling. The laptop also feels exception­ally premium with a nice carbon-fiber finish and a decent keyboard. The trackpad has excellent tracking and gesture support through Windows Pre­cision drivers. If you want a laptop with the power to handle all of your resource heavy programs, the XPS 15 is a great choice.  

Small cars are compara­tively affordable and for­giving of rookie drivers, making them the best choice when choosing one’s very first four-wheeler. Suzuki have dominated this segment for long. Right from the Maruti 800, to the Alto, A-Star, Ritz, and now the Celerio, their prowess in the small car seg­ment is unprecedented. Fur­ther, Suzuki has always insisted that an overlapping product range is better than losing a sale to a competitor; and this mentality has made life diffi­cult for other brands. Celerio has been a popular offering from Suzuki in Nepal since 2014. Now, the Celerio also comes as Celerio X—a crossover that will lock horns with the likes of the Mahindra KUV100 and the Renault Kwid. Read on to find out how it fares in our test drive.

Exterior

The dimensions remain pretty much the same, with a slight increment in height and length. The tried and tested formula of adding cosmetic changes to make a simple hatchback look more utilitar­ian has been implemented in the Celerio X as well. The new all-black grille with honeycomb maze pattern and a black hous­ing for the fog lamps make a sort of ‘X’ in the front. Other crossover elements come in the form of black cladding around the wheel arches and across the doors. Although built to look like a crossover, the ground clearance remains the same at 165mm.

Overall, in terms of the aesthetics, it is a significant upgrade. The dual tone exte­riors, new bumpers, six spoke alloys, and the claddings do a great job of giving the Celerio X character. But it has to be said, we definitely dig the paprika orange color over the caffeine brown that we test drove.

Interiors

It’s an all black affair inside the cabin with white accents and patterned seats with orange highlights. There is adequate storage space for your bottles and knick-knacks and the instrument console is pretty straightforward. You get Bluetooth connectivity and the speakers do a pretty decent job for a vehicle in this segment.

The seats are super comfort­able, and cabin space for rear seat passengers are surpris­ingly good. We were able to get three large, well-fed adults in the back seat without much of a fuss.

Performance

The 998 cc petrol three-cyl­inder engine generates 67 bhp at 6,000 rpm and 90 Nm of torque at 3,500 rpm. Regard­less, you will be pleasantly surprised at how the Celerio X performs on flat tarmac. Give it some gas and it happily surges forward. It might not make for a blistering starts and it won’t be winning many drag races; but with its light weight, peppy engine and easy maneuverabil­ity, it has the daily city runs in the bag. It does begin to strug­gle when you point it up a mod­erately steep incline and load it to full capacity, but there is only so much that you can ask from a 998cc engine. Even on the highways, the Celerio X performs to satisfaction as long as you push the rev happy engine. A warning: this is not its strongest suit.

City driving, though, is a joy with the Celerio X. It makes easy work of heavy traffic thanks to its nimble handling and radius of 4.7 meters. Mak­ing U-turns and parking is also hassle free. The Celerio X draws very little criticism when it comes to traversing in the urban jungles of Kathmandu.

The verdict

Keep in mind the segment that the Celerio X caters to and you’ll find that it scores high in almost every aspect. The aesthetic upgrades have enhanced the simple Celerio, and it should do a good job of attracting younger drivers. Cabin space and comfort are surprisingly good for the seg­ment, and the same goes for the features and styling.

When it comes to perfor­mance, it does what it’s sup­posed to. The rev-happy engine will get you around town eas­ily. If need be, it will soldier through the highways as well. For city dwellers, the Celerio X is a very desirable package.

However, the AMT version would have been the cherry on top, had CG Moto Corp decided to bring it into Nepal. Taking away the hassle of changing gears would make this car pretty close to perfect, whether it’s lazily trudging in bumper-to-bumper traffic or scurrying through the city roads.

In April last year, Samsung released its flagship phones, the Galaxy S8 and S8+. Revolutionizing its design language, the South Korean company now had phones that, along with their almost bezel-less sides, had managed to significantly reduce the bezels at the top and the bot­tom as well. Marketed as ‘Unbox your phone’, both the S8 and the S8+ had wowed customers while heavily influencing the smart­phone design in 2017. Now in 2018, Samsung has announced the suc­cessor to the much-loved S8 with Galaxy S9 and S9+. The S9 and the S9+ are both excel­lent phones with top of the line specifications that many upcoming flagships will mimic. The phones are either powered by Samsung’s inhouse SOC the Exynos 9810 or the Snapdragon 845, both octa-core pro­cessors. The S9 comes with 4GB of RAM to support the processor while the S9+ comes with 6GB.

The internals are powerful and a significant improvement for the S8 lines. But the external design of the phone leaves a lot to be desired. It essentially looks exactly the same as its predecessors with a little more shaved off the top and bottom bezels. The screen-to-body ratio is the same (84.2 percent, with a 5.8 inch screen on the S9 while the S9+ has a 6.2 inch screen, both incredi­bly vibrant and crisp displays with 1440 x 2960 resolution). We have seen companies like Apple and Mic­rosoft stick to a well-adopted prod­uct design, so what Samsung has done does not come as a surprise. The S8 was a well-designed phone (aesthetically, at least); the S9 line looks just as sleek and modern. The rear glass panel does tend to attract a fair amount of fingerprints but a phone cover should easily solve the issue.

The phone is also consumer friendly with features like the head­phone jack and an external micoSD slot adding to its appeal. The awk­wardly positioned fingerprint reader on the back has also been moved to a more convenient location right under the camera module which makes it easier to hit. The S9 line, moreover, has a feature never before seen on a Samsung device: stereo speakers. The S9 fires music from a dedicated speaker at the bottom and the earpiece, which makes media consumption on this device signifi­cantly better. The speakers also have a better sound.

The most important change, how­ever, comes in the form of a vastly improved variable aperture camera. Smartphones of 2017 and early 2018 have all competed on camera per­formance, which has led to phones like the iPhone X and Google Pixel 2 producing remarkable pictures. As a response, Samsung has invested heavily on the cameras and it does not disappoint. The 12 MP rear cam­era works two apertures, f/1.5 and f/2.4; the camera will perform much better in low light with the aperture wide-open. The S9+ comes with an additional 12 MP telephoto lens for a closer zoom. With such impressive specifications, the S9 phones pro­duce great photos but still fall short against pictures from the iPhone X or the Google Pixel 2. Which is not to say the camera is bad, it’s a remark­ably good camera, it just falls short against its competitors.

While the S9 and S9+ have some really great updates, there are some aspects where Samsung failed to improve. The battery life on the phones are still sub-par and the phones are jam-packed with Sam­sung software. Software like Bigsby, Samsung’s voice assistant that’s still far inferior to Google Assistant, and AR Emoji, a response to Apple’s Ani­moji, all feel gimmicky and useless.

With the S9 and S9+, Samsung seems to be improving rather inno­vating. Instead to making dras­tic changes to the S8 line, it has managed to uniformly improve many aspects of the phone. The new flagships from Samsung are great devices and highly recom­mended if you’re in the market for a flagship phone.  

Following the success of the SR150 in the Nepali market, D-Lifestyles Pvt. Ltd, the sole authorized dealers for Piaggio Group in Nepal, has introduced the SR125. Priced at Rs 235,900 the new vehicle will ex­tend Aprilia's scooter portfolio after the SR150. Aprilia says the SR 125 evokes the world of competitive sport where April­ia is a protagonist, with large 14 inch wheel rims typical of racing vehicles, giving the two-wheeler a strong sporty feel.

The all-new Aprilia SR 125 is powered by a 124cc, 3-valve, single cylinder engine that produces 9.46bhp @ 7,250rpm and 9.9Nm of torque @ 6,250 rpm. The engine is mated to a CVT gearbox. The new April­ia SR 125 gets a 6.5-liter fuel tank and its seat is 775mm above the ground. The scooter gets telescopic hydraulic forks up front and a monoshock at the rear. Up front, there is a 220mm disc brake and at the rear, a 140mm drum.