Along with its range of Laptops and Desktops, HCL has come with the Z-15 gaming console, another product from the HCL ME (Mobile Excitement) Zone. We have a look into it and see whether it is worth your money! 

 The device looks as if one of the laptops from HCL passed under a Shrink Ray! But once you open the flap of the console, it shows a slight resemblance to the Nintendo DS. It has a 2.8 inch TFT display, and on the base there are four direction keys on the left, a round speaker with two buttons for power and play/pause in the middle, and two A and B keys with the OK and X keys on the right

On the right side of the console there are two ports for TV IN/OUT and also for the Audio IN. In between the two, there is a set of three buttons for play/pause, rewind, and forward. Moving on to the left there is a slot for a mini SD card with a capacity of 4 GB. And next to this slot, there is a small switch to lock the device from switching on randomly. Moving onto the back of the case, there are two USB ports, and the best part of this gaming console is the small little lens in between these two ports! Yeah, you got it right it’s a camera and no small one at that. It’s a 5.0 megapixel digital camera! 

Apart from the glitch that the device is a smudge-lover, the buttons have a bulky feeling, but the buttons and slots seem to be well placed.

The interface of the Z-15 is pretty smooth and the main menu has doesn’t seem to be cluttered with icons, rather you can say that the icons are spaced out. Now what grabs your attention (apart from the 5 MP camera) is the list of features that this little gaming console can provide you with. In addition to playing games, you can also listen to music, watch videos, read e-books, take and view pictures, record sound, and also watch and record TV! How do you come to an apt conclusion of such a dynamite? Let’s dissect it one by one.

Starting from music, the playback quality of the in-built speaker is pretty average, but with the provided earphones the experience is a lot different, in the sense that the music is nice and loud. It supports almost all popular audio formats such as MP3, WMA, WAV and AAC. So from a music player perspective, it’s quite nice. 

Moving on to the video playback, you can see that there is slight framing in the playback quality but if you convert the videos to a lower resolution, you won’t face that problem anymore. Otherwise, you can definitely say that the quality of playback is quite satisfying. To add to that, it supports RM, RMVB, AVI, ASF, FLV and 3GP formats, which makes the deal sweeter!