Datawind becomes India's leading tablet maker for Q1 2013

[my2cents]

Datawind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli (extreme right)
at a launch of the Aakash 2 tablet at the United Nations.
(Credit: DataWind)


Despite all the setbacks and media frenzy surrounding the Aakash series tablets, it turns out that Datawind is in fact India's leading tablet maker. According to The Times of India, Datawind was the leader within the Indian market for the first quarter of 2013, supplemented with data by market research firm CyberMedia Research.

Between the January and March 2013 time period, Datawind had a strong 15 percent of the Indian market, and this does not include the Aakash series of tablets. It even beat out homegrown rival Micromax, which tied Apple with close to a 12 percent market each.

Furthermore, nearly 10,000 tablets were shipped daily, from different vendors, for the January and March 2013 time period, resulting in an increase of 150 percent growth compared to the same time period last year. This translated to about 905,000 tablets sold for the period compared to 1,097,902 in the prevoius quarter.

As far as Datawind is concerned, they appear to be in the good books of the Indian government once again, as plans are being finalized for the fourth iteration in the Aakash series, known as the Aakash 4.

Datawind becomes India's leading tablet maker for Q1 2013 | ZDNet


I just received my Aakash tablet, now it is called Ubislate 7c+ for my son and he thinks it is quite good. Only drawback is the Camera which is quite low resolution. I did get a chance to play some video on youtube and had no problem in buffering or the resolution.

I hope they will increase the processor speed and screen resolution on Aakash 4 and also better camera.

 

[GR!FF!N]

how much did it cost??Ubislate 7c+??

 

[my2cents]

Including shipping and handling it cost me Rs 5199.

Rs4999 + rs 200(s/h) = Rs 5199

 

[JohnyD]

I had booked one long long ago, neither they contact me for the delivery nor I followed up with them. But, IMP Datawind appears to be more of a big mouth company than actual leader....so far I have not seen any of my friends, relatives or colleques using Datawind tablet....guess, they are dealing with universities under the contract from govnt and thereby coming up with huge number and this kind of status. But surely, they are not the leader at least not in Tier-1 cities like Mumbai.

 

[my2cents]

I had booked one long long ago, neither they contact me for the delivery nor I followed up with them. But, IMP Datawind appears to be more of a big mouth company than actual leader....so far I have not seen any of my friends, relatives or colleques using Datawind tablet....guess, they are dealing with universities under the contract from govnt and thereby coming up with huge number and this kind of status. But surely, they are not the leader at least not in Tier-1 cities like Mumbai.

I also booked it more than a year ago and got a call only last week. I don't think they have the capacity to ramp up the production to meet the basic demand from the govt. orders leave alone outside public. They are riding on the publicity that was generated and are only now making available to general public in small quantities. Even at the price point I purchased I think it is a decent purchase. They have come a long way from unresponsive tablets to something which people desire.

 

[my2cents]

Design and build

The Ubislate 7C+ looks like any regular 7-inch android tablet. The entire shell is black in colour and with a very rugged and firm build. The front panel features absolutely no buttons apart from the earpiece and the front-facing camera. The rear panel sports a rubberized texture, which helps in gripping the tablet when in use. It sports a single speaker grille and a reset button. The rear panel withholds large brand names and stickers, which looks very cluttered and spoils the overall aesthetics. The entire right side is features the necessary interfaces and buttons. This includes a micro USB PC interface, a charging jack, the volume rocker, the earphone jack and an opening for the microphone. Also included here are the microSD card and GSM SIM slots housed underneath a rubber flap. The tablet has a decent look from the front, but loses out on the rear panel. The 7C+ measures 190 x 150 x 13 mm and weighs about 350 grams.

Features
The Ubislate 7C+ is built using a Cortex A8 processor running at 1GHz supported by a MALI-400 GPU. The processor seems to be overclocked by 200MHz (AnTuTu reported a 1.2GHz processor) by Datawind. The reason could be to have the performance bumped up by a small sum. The tablet has been provided with 512MB of RAM and an internal storage of 4GB, which can be expanded up to 32GB via the microSD card slot. The total storage of 4GB is shared by the system and user data, and only 1.4 GB is available to the user. The display featured here is a 7-inches multi-touch capacitive panel with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. The 7C+ is a single SIM GSM tablet that features calling connectivity and internet via GPRS and EDGE. Other connectivity options are Wi-Fi and a microUSB PC interface. There is no camera on the rear panel and the one on the front is a simple VGA camera for video chats. Lastly, the tablet is fueled by a 3200 mAh battery. The tablet runs on the Android ICS operating system.

http://tech2.in.com/reviews/tablets/datawind-ubislate-7c-review/897274#show

According to this tech2.in.com website their user rating is 7.5/10 and their own rating is 5/10.