14 DAY TRIAL // If you thought the flurry of supermarket tablets unleashed on the consumer market as of late, represented the lowest slate prices could go, think again.
Canadian company, Datawind has announced it will be bringing its super affordable tablets, the UbiSlate line to UK shores. And if you think you might have heard the name somewhere, you are right.
Datawind is the same company that produced the Aakash 2 tablet, which turned to be extremely popular in the educational sector in India, due to its wallet-friendly price tag of only £25 / $40 / €29.
Datawind claimed various times it was aiming to make available entry-level tablets to every household and launching the line in the UK will certainly help the company gain more territory.
Now the manufacturer has updated its UK dedicated website and added three new tablets, the UbiSlate 7Ci, 7C+ and 7Cz.
The cheapest of the line, is the UbiSlate 7Ci which features a 7-inch TFT capacitive display and is powered by a 1GHz Cortex A8 processor coupled with 512MB of RAM.
The budget offering also has 4GB of storage, a frontal VGA camera, but runs the outdated Android 4.0 operating system. All for the price of £29.99 / $49 / €36.
Add an EDGE 2G connection on top and you get the UbiSlate 7C+, which is priced a little higher for £69.99 / $114 / €83 a pop.
The most advanced of the three, the UbiSlate 3G7 has the extra 3G GSM connectivity, an additional rear camera of 2MP and runs the slightly improved Android 4.1 for £129 / $210 / €153. Note that if you have a SIM card, you’ll be able to place video calls on the tablets.
Granted, the last two models are priced a little too high if you ask us, compared to other budget offerings on the market today, like the Tesco Hudl.
UbiSlate CEO, Suneet Singh Tuli explained why ridiculously cheap slates were needed in the UK, as well.
“With recent figures showing that in the UK, 29 per cent of the poorest households have no computer and 36 per cent no internet, we’re working to bring affordable technology to the many hundreds of thousands of households excluded from benefiting from the digital revolution.”
Datawind hit the jackpot in India, managing to sell 10,000 tablets daily between the months of January and March 2013, thus dethroning even the king of all tablets, Apple. Will the company be able to achieve the same success in the UK? The tablets will be available in the UK in time for Christmas.
