There seems to be a new player in the tablet market, but instead of competing head to head with other major tablets on the basis of quality (e.g. the iPad) they are competing on price. 100,000 of these “Aakash” tablets have been purchased by the Indian government from the Montreal-based firm DataWind. The government will be heavily subsidizing these tablets, purchasing them for forty-eight dollars from Datawind, and then reselling them to students for twenty-five dollars. This move by the Indian government is in an effort to make mobile internet available to the masses.
http://www.thestar.com/business/companies/article/1065082--montreal-firm-launches-world-s-cheapest-android-tablet
This situation is eerily similar to Tata’s strategy to bring the lowest priced car in the world to India, which turned out to be a disaster because of the minimal quality the car possessed. I do feel however, that this deal seems to have a lot of promise. At twenty-five dollars, students would be receiving an enormously efficient machine that will allow them to stream HD video, read Ebooks and run office-suite applications. The deal also gets much sweeter for DataWind, as there are over 80 million students in grades nine to twelve in India and two to three million students entering University each year. Talk about an emerging market.