The cheapest fully-functioning tablet PC on the planet

Suneet Tuli, the 44-year-old CEO of UK/Canadian/Indian startup Datawind, is sitting on a potential (and very nearly realized!) gold mine. On Sunday 11th November 2012, the president of India, Pranab Mukherjee, unveiled the seven-inch Aakash 2 tablet computer that Tuli’s company is selling to the government for distribution to 100,000 university students and professors. If things go well, the government plans to order as many as 5.86 million. Already, he’s facing a backlog of four million unfulfilled pre-orders.

And what is the reason for all the hype and buzz about this particular tablet? The answer is simple. The price! The Aakash 2 is being priced at only $20. In India, that’s a fourth of the cost of competing tablets with identical specifications. Similar tablets in China, the world champion in low-cost components and manufacturing, go for $45 and up, wholesale. Which means the Aakash 2 isn’t just the cheapest fully functional tablet PC on the planet because the Indian government has decided it should be—it’s the cheapest, period.

In the developing world, and especially in India, a country where one billion people have a monthly income of less than $200, every rupee matters. Aakash means “blue sky” in Hindi, and that’s a fair description of Datawind’s goals for the tablet. Ultimately, says Tuli, the government would like to distribute one to each of India’s 220 million students. India has 900 million cell phone subscriptions, but in a country where smartphones are rare, 95% of Indians have no computing device. Which means the Aakash 2, or something like it, could become the sole computer for hundreds of millions of people in India, not to mention elsewhere in the developing world.

Educating the 'ignored billion'

“Our effort in all of this,” says Tuli, “Was to use technology to fight poverty. What happens when you try to make it affordable at this level?”

Every year, the Indian government spends $13 per student just to ship them textbooks. In primary schools, all texts are based on a standardised, public domain curriculum that is easily transformed into free eBooks. The government is considering paying the full cost of the tablet when handing them out to primary-school-age children. In that case, the $40 the government pays Datawind for each tablet could be recouped over the projected three-year life of one of these tablets, says Tuli.

600 universities, 1,200 colleges and 250,000 villages

But the Aakash 2 isn’t just about replacing textbooks: It’s about bringing the full-fledged Internet to users who have never touched it before. In India, competition for wireless connectivity is so cut-throat that it’s possible to get an unlimited prepaid mobile data plan for $2 a month. The basic Aakash 2 has WIFI, but an upgraded model, available commercially for 3,500 rupees, or about $70, includes SIM cards and the radio required to communicate with a cellphone network. As costs fall the company will incorporate these features into the base model.

The Indian government is already connecting 600 universities and 1,200 colleges with broadband and WIFI, in addition to an effort to connect 250,000 villages with fiber-optic Internet in the next two years, at a cost of $4.5 billion. Even so, says Tuli, almost all connectivity to individual devices—the so called “last mile” connection of the internet—will be achieved through cellphone networks.

The world’s isolated, rural and impoverished places are just the sort of locations where Tuli sees tablets acting as an educational supplement. In a recent experiment in Ethiopia, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the original “One Laptop Per Child” project, gave Android-powered tablets to children in an isolated village. Despite having never had any previous contact with high technology, within months children had used the tablets to teach themselves the English alphabet. Negroponte’s ultimate goal is to see whether or not the children, who have no teachers, can use the tablets to learn to read.