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.
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.
