Jinoy Jose P In case you’ve been lazy and not noticed, the television as you have known it all these years is a done deal now. Enter Smart Screens. The advancements in streaming technologies and the boom in broadband aided by the low-cost data revolution have heralded the era of smart screens and most gadget makers are now preparing to bid adieu to the good ol’ TV and are focussing all their R&D energies on developing smart screen that can double-up as traditional TVs while giving a lot more. A pack of players are already in the space, from BenQ to Samsung to Mumbai-based CloudWalker.

Under review here is the CloudWalker Smart Screen which the company aims to make a difference in the fast-growing smart display market in India. For starters, a smart screen or smart display is pretty much like the traditional flat panel TV, but it is much more than a TV. It can be connected wirelessly to a computer or a smartphone. It can double up as a computer screen and more, taking the TV experience several notches up. That said, most smart screens today are a work in progress and a good deal of fine-tuning and innovation need to go into making these products so as to make them more in tune with today’s living room requirements.

Affordable 4K

The CloudWalker smart screen comes with a remote, a small keyboard and a mouse. The device is not very heavy and it is fairly easy to set it up. If you are a little savvy with technology and have some experience in setting up electronic gadgets, you wouldn’t need a technician to set up the CloudWalker smart screen up and running. In a way, it’s a plug-n-play affair. You can easily pair it with your home Wi-Fi connection and start loading your favourite streaming apps. The CloudWalker smartscreen runs on a Dual-Core A73 ARM Cortex Processor backed by 1 GB RAM and 8 GB ROM. It also has a Quad-Core Mali 450 graphic processor.

The smart screen supports most popular apps. There is a Netflix (unlike in, say, a Mi TV), Hotstar and Amazon Prime. You can also chromecast these content from your mobile phones to the CloudWalker screen. It even supports Apple’s Airplay sharing facility, which shows CloudWalker really wants to all kinds of users. The screen looks fragile and the body feels plasticky. But the display looks premium and can deliver a resolution ratio of 4K Ultra HD (3840x2160) with an impressive refresh rate of 60 hertz. The display is true to life and can deliver error-free, well-saturated video and image even when you’re running low-resolution content on the device. We have no complaints at the way the engine renders deep colours or fast videos. The display is HDR 10 (High Dynamic Range) and has 4K enhancer features. The IPS panel can identify 16.7 million colours (which is pretty much the industry norm nowadays) with a viewing angle of 178 degrees.

Modes of comfort

The screen comes with a bunch of modes for ease of use: entertainment, personal computer use, child safety, mobile and such. The entertainment mode helps you to use it for multimedia entertainment purposes. while the child safety mode, as you would have guessed already, have a lot of options parents can use to control the way their children use the smart screen. The other modes are also pretty easy to customise and run.

The CloudWalker smart screen has three HDMI ports for connecting the device to set-top box, bluray players and gaming consoles. There are two USB ports to connect hard/pen drives. Users can also get access to a bunch of original content, thanks to CloudWalker’s partnership with a few providers. To be fair, we couldn’t find anything really impressive there. The device sports a 20W sound output, thanks to an in-built boom box speakers. The audio is impressively detailed for the price. For news and movies, this is a steal and for music, especially for the puritans, there might be something missing, to be frank. The device has built-in Wi-Fi but no bluetooth for some models so connecting the device to an external speaker is going to be all wired.

Now, the keyboard is a disappointment. It needs a dongle to connect itself to the device and in our experience the performance has been really troubled. The booting time needs improvement. That said, overall, the CloudWalker is a value for money smart screen that can help you save time, space and good money while offering you a beyond-TV experience at an affordable price tag.

CloudWalker smart screen
  • Pros: Display, price, easy set up, supports most apps
  • Cons: Fragile body, average processor, poor original content
  • Price: Starting from ₹33,990 (₹22,990 on Amazon) for 43 inch

comment COMMENT NOW