Tablets are on the boom now a days. This article will tell you about some of the low cost tablets running on Android in India.
It has been quite a time since the inception of tablet device came into the market. It all started with the launch of Apple iPad and since then many manufacturers are launching their new tablet devices now and then. But at that time prices of these tablets were too high. Nowadays many companies have come forward with their own low cost tablets running on Android. Some of them are as follows:
1. Aakash Tablet/ UbiSlate:
Aakash tablet is one of the most anticipated and controversial low cost tablet and has already received 0.3 Million prebook orders. It was announced by the India Ministry of Human Resources that they are going to launch a tablet running Android for just $35. It was also said that this tablet will be manufactured by HCL technologies. Later HCL announced that it was never given any order by the government to manufacture any such tablet.
Finally, Datawind, a Canadian company, has manufactured the Aakash Tablet for the government. The Indian government will be distributing these tablet tot the student at a subsidized cost of Rs. 2,200( approximately 35$). Datawind has also announced the commercial version of the tablet known as UbiSlate. The commercial version is up for pre-book and is available for Rs. 2,999( approximately 60$).
The UbiSlate comes with a 7” resistive touchscreen display with a resolution of 800x480pixels. The device has GPRS and WiFi IEEE 802.11a/b/g. It is powered by Android 2.2 FroYo which is most probably not customised with any other UI. It has a memory of 2GB which can be expanded to 32GB. It also has 2 USB ports which support flash drives as well as USB data cards. The device also has a SIM card slot and can also be used as a mobile phone. The device supports normal features for multimedia playback and document editing. An additional feature is a web browser application which is powered by Datawind’s own Data Acceleration service. Though the UbiSlate lacks a lot of features like front camera, 3G, etc still it offers more than enough for the price it is available at. You can order the UbiSlate tablet here. A newer version of Aakash i.e. Aakash is also scheduled to launch ina couple of months
2. OlivePad V- T100
OlivePad V – T100 is a tablet from Olive,a relatively newer manufacturer of mobile devices in India. Olive pad has a 7” touchscreen with a TFT display under which lies the ARM11 600MHz processor on a Qualcomm MSM7227 chipset. It has 512MB RAM and 512MB internal storage memory which can be expanded upto 32GB using MicroSD cards. It runs on Android 2.2 FroYo. It slao has a miniUSB connectore slot for attaching USB devices. SIM card slot is also present beside the other connectivity features like Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g), Bluetooth 2.0+EDR. One advantage is that the OlivePad has 3G which can be used for high speed internet browsing as well as video chatting using the inbuilt front VGA camera. At the back, this device has an average 3.0 megapixel camera. All this is available for just Rs. 14,990/-($290)
The OlivePAd has almost all the essential features a tablet should have but still it is new in the market device so not much can be said about the reliability. Though OlivePad seems to be very competent in the low cost tablet markets, still Olive would have to go a long way to strengthen their roots in Indian markets.
3. Reliance 3G Tab
Reliance 3G Tab is a tablet is a tablet brought into the market by Reliance and will be sold bundled with customized data plans. The tablet is manufacture by a Chinese manufacturer ZTE and rebranded and sold as Reliance 3G Tab in India. It has a 7” LCD capacitive touchscreen display and is powered by an 800 MHz MSM7227 CPU and has 512MB RAM. It has 512MB internal storage memory expandable up to 32Gb using MicroSD card. It has quad band GSM support and also supports 3G(HSDPA 7.2Mbps and HSUPA 5.76Mbps). Best of all it runs on a bit newer version of Android as compared to its competitors : Android 2.3.4 GingerBread OS. It has a 2Mp back camera and a 0.3Mp front camera. GPS, Bluetooth 2.1 and other standard features are also present. The tablet has a pretty nice build quality and has an aluminium back finish.
A few of the features provided by Reliance include MobileTV services and 3G data plans for both prepaid and postpaid customers. This tablet is available for just Rs. 13,000/- (or $250). You can check the tariff and data plans here.
4. Beetel MagiQ
Beetel MagiQ is Bharti Group’s first tablet device in the market. It is manufactures by Beetel and is also sold bundled with normal data plans from Airtel. The device has a 7”TFT touchscreen and has a great advantage above all the other tablets of this price range: a 1GHz SnapDragon processor. This makes the device the most powerful in the league of low cost tablets though it runs on the outdated Andorid 2.2 FroYo. One other big advantage is the inclusion of inbuilt 8GB memory which is expandable upto 16GB . The device has a front camera of 2MP with CMOS and fixed focus lens and rear camera also of 2MP with CMOS sensor and autofocus with 4x zoom. The device has Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, GPRS, GPS, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n apart from supporting 7.2Mbps HSDPA 3G. One extra feature is the inclusion of an FM receiver.
Though any SIM card can be used with the device, Airtel provides 250MB/month 3G data or 2GB/month 2G data for the first two months on the first Airtel SIM inserted in the device. And the ebst part is that this device is available at only RS. 10,000/- (or $190)only. Another similar version of this tablet Beetel MagiQ II is also available for Rs. 9,500/-.
5. Spice mi720 11.5k
This tablet from Spice is another low cost tablet from Spice running the good ol’ Android 2.2 FroYo OS on an 800MHz Qualcomm processor, 256MB RAM( though the website says it is 2GB) and 512 MB ROM. It comes with a 7’ LCD display with a resolution of 800×480. It also comes with a GSM SIMcard slot and can be thus used as a mobile phone. The good thing about this tablet is that it comes with the Adreno 200 GPU which makes it a bit compliant for gaming. The tablet has a2MP front camera and a 0.3MP secondary camera for video calling, etc. One more plus is the 4-axis gravity sensor. The tablet has all basic communication features like Bluetooth,GPS, Wi-Fi and 3G( HSDPA 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA 5.76 Mbps). One problem that might conjure up is that the tablet already runs on an out-dated version of Android OS and is not even scheduled to receive furthers updates from Spice as of now. But what all can we expect when it just costs Rs. 11,999/-
A few other tablets have also hit the market which also fall in this price range. These include Mercury mTab for Rs. 13,000/-, MSI EnjoyPad for Rs. 15,000/-, LACS Magnum Pepper for Rs.6,250/-, HCL ME AE7-A1 fstarting from Rs. 15,000/-and Binatone HomeSurf 705 for Rs. 6,690/- only.