Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO of Datawind Inc., a small Montreal-based company, has been travelling like a whirlwind back and forth between Canada, the United States and India lately thanks to the wave of interest generated by Aakash – the $35 tablet.
ITBusiness.ca recently managed to pin Tuli down long enough to give us a hands-on look at Aakash, an Android 2.3 powered tablet for which the Indian government has recently ordered more than 100,000 units and intends to order as many as 6 million within the year. If everything goes as planned, the Indian leadership, which is selling the tablet to students for a subsidized price of around $35, hopes to be able to deliver low-cost Internet access through the device to rural areas using GPRS (General Packet Radio Services) mobile phone networks. Datawind expects to sell 6 million units of the Aakash this year.
So how does a $35 tablet look?
Bland really - pretty much like many of the other low-cost, seven-inch Android tabletsthat came out a couple of years back after the iPad made a big splash. A strip of black plastic encircled Aakash's seven-inch display and continued into the tablet's rear casing.
The Aakash logo is actually taped on the back of the device.
“The tablet was originally named Ubislate7 and that was etched on the parts already of the earlier batch of the tablet,” Tuli explained. The Indian Government wanted the tablet named Aakash (literally “sky” in Hindi) to underscore it's made-in-India identity. Tablets now being manufactured in Datawind`s factory in Hyderbad, India will bear the Aakash name, he said.
When Tuli fired up the tablet, it took the device about more than 30 seconds to connect to the WiFi signals. The screen images appeared to be darker than on the displays of other high-end tablets we have become accustomed to testing. There was no lightening fast launching of applications either.
iPad, PlayBook and Android tablet users should not expect to experience features they have grown to take for granted such as crisp, bright images, nimble responses even when multiple apps are open and of course the swish, pinch and zoom touch interface that mainstream tablets are known for.
This is because Datawind had to take a few compromises in order to bring down the tablet's price.
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