Datawind, a UK-based company, is following the footsteps of Tesco, Argos and Aldi after launching the world’s cheapest tablet in the UK.
The UbiSlate 7Ci is priced at £30, which is £70 cheaper than Argos’s MyTablet and less than Tesco’s Hudl at £119 and Carphone Warehouse’s £49 Avoca 7.
The 7-inch model runs the 2011 Android Ice Cream Sandwich and has 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage, which can be expanded up to 32GB using a microSD card.
The tablet is the commercial version of the Aakash 2 tablet, which was built for universities and schools in India to improve education.
Other features include a Cortex A8 1GHz processor, games and education apps.
DataWind said it could afford to sell the device at £30 after the cost of the hardware was offset by the revenue from content and advertising.
According to Gartner, "basic" tablets are expected to account for almost 45% of the total market by 2017. Other research from IDC shows that tablet computers are set to overtake PC sales this year, growing to 229.4m units, driven by lower cost devices.
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Google’s Asus-manufactured released its updated Nexus 7 at £199 this year, which is one of the lightest tablets, weighing 290g.
Tesco followed suit after releasing the Android-based Hudl, which has already sold out just weeks before Christmas, while Amazon recently dropped the price of the Kindle Fired HD down to £119.
Argos then released MyTablet, before Aldi rivalled them all with its £79 Lifetab earlier this month, which sold out after its first weekend of going on sale.
