Datawind Ltd has introduced the commercial version of its Android based tablet computer, Aakash for US $ 50. British company which is run and owned by Indians eying billions of data users across the world who want to buy their first mobile device for using internet on them. Earlier in October last year, Datawind had introduced Aakash for $ 35 but company says, updated commercial version has more features to offer.
Datawind has already provided 100,000 tablets to Indian students which were designed at its Montreal facility.
The response of tablet is immense and demand is huge. CEO of Datawind, Suneet Singh Tuli has told AFP in a telephonic interview that company is receiving 30,000 orders on average every day. We have received some 3 million pre-bookings from individuals and the graph is continuously rising, Suneet added.
While talking about global statistics, Suneet said, there were 750 million users connected to internet in the late 1990s and many other using mobile phones. The figure has swelled to almost 6 billion users making use of mobile phones worldwide and some 2 billion using internet.
Suneet hoped that Aakash would reach to billions of internet users worldwide because of its affordable price and better quality.
Tablet PCs are being introduced by major global handset manufacturers including Apple’s Ipad, Samsung, HTC and Research in Motion but due to their high prices, the penetration of these devices is limited to a certain class.
India with 1.2 billion of population has only 8 percent internet users at the moment. According to Google’s statistics, the number will get tripled in the next 3 years only if people start getting cheap internet based devices.
Combined with global demand, Aakash can turn out to be a gap filler in the global mobile internet based devices. The company is in talks with World Bank in order to declare Aaskash as an educational tool on the steps of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a project that was aimed to provide cheap laptops to the poor students worldwide. OLPC failed eventually due to higher cost for producing affordable laptops.
Critics say that Aaskash is slow in processing and the display is dim with very few applications installed. These are shortcomings which can disturb its growth worldwide.
