Tech toys to enhance your summertime self love

As things heat up – quite literally – across the country, you can do two things to keep cool. One, plan a holiday and two, indulge yourself with not just smart phones, but other innovative and useful stuff. Here are two ideas:

Fan Play

Which is the oldest appliance in your house, that hasn’t changed in years, yet works just fine? Look up. It’s the ceiling fan. It is meant to do one job and it does it well. Not really.

Indian IoT brand Ottomate has just launched a new range of smart fans, disrupting the way we have operated fans all these years. There is no regulator: you control your fan with a remote or a mobile app. And you don’t have 4 or 5-speed steps. Instead, there is a soft slider that lets you continuously adjust the speed. Additionally, there are preset options such as the breeze mode, that creates a breeze effect even when your windows are closed. The Ottomate Smart Fan has the intelligence to sense the temperature and humidity levels in your room and adjust speeds accordingly. All this flows from Ottomate’s R&D centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad, where they leveraged WiFi mesh technology and embedded a Qualcomm 1020 chip in the fan.

The Ottomate smart fan costs Rs. 4,199. If you are not convinced about having a smart fan just yet, you can opt for the Ottomate Smart-Ready fans at Rs. 3,199 and Rs. 2,999 for four and three blade variants respectively. You can smarten these fans later by adding a cassette module.

Serious gameplay

For those who take gaming seriously, ROG will be a familiar buzzword. This summer sees the launch of three new Republic Of Gamers gaming laptops from Asus for the Indian market: the Strix Scar II, ROG Strix Hero II, and Zephyrus S GX701, all powered by the latest RTX-series graphics processing chips.

The ROG Strix Scar II and ROG Strix Hero II are similar looking gaming laptops targeted at different gaming audiences. While the Scar series targets the FPS or First-Person Shooter, Hero is aimed at the MOBA or Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. Both have similar specifications, Intel Core i7-8750H processor, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 GPU and 15.6-inch 144Hz anti-glare full-HD display. The Scar series features a gunmetal finish lid with red accents, and printed camouflage pattern while the Hero series comes with a black finish with a cyber-text printed pattern. They are priced at Rs 1,64,990.

The Zephyrus GX701 is much larger --with a 17.3-inch display powered by Intel Core i7-8750H CPU, 24 GB of DDR4 RAM, 1TB PCIe SSD, USB 3.1 Type-C ports, DisplayPort video output, and power delivery support, USB 3.1 Type-A, HDMI, Bluetooth 5, and Wi-Fi 802.11ac. It is being called the most compact 17-inch gaming laptop available. The ROG Zephyrus S GX701 will go on sale at Rs 3,49,990.

With these devices, Asus has brought its new arsenal of gaming laptops to Indian gamers, who are willing to spend big money on serious gaming.

--IndiaTechOnline