How unfair! India is getting its long-promised $35 tablet, yet we are spending $500 for an iPad.
I have to admit that I am dazzled by the media coverage of the launch of the Aakash, the world's cheapest tablet.
It will cost $50 per unit for the Indian government, $60 in retail and
possibly as little as $35 once the volume increases. When we are able to
contain our jealousy, however, it's easy to see that this tablet is
neither a discounted iPad nor a product that could succeed in the
Western hemisphere, despite its impressively low price.
More
than a year ago, when it was announced that India would be developing a
$35 tablet, many of us were quick to question the ability to take such a
device from an idea to a commercial product. In the end, we all know
what happened to the OLPC, which was supposed to sell for $100 but
finally sold for $190. The Aakash took a similar path, as the retail
price of the device is now almost twice as high as the original target
price.
The
Aakash tablet is designed by Canada-based Datawind and comes with a
7-inch 800x480 pixel display, 256 MB of RAM, 2 GB of NAND flash storage
and a 366 MHz Connexant processor. There is also an SD expansion slot
with two versions. One has Wi-Fi only, whereas the more expensive $60
version has SIM card-based GPRS cellular connectivity.Datawind said that
the total price of the base model is $38, but it is actually $50 when
additional fees such as local taxes and a replacement warranty are
included. The Indian government apparently guaranteed a purchase volume
of eight to ten million units by March 31, 2012. The first 100,000 units
will be built within the next six weeks in a factory in Hyderabad.
Higher-priced
versions of the tablet will be coming to the U.S. in the future. This
makes absolutely no sense to me. Would you buy a $35 or... Let's be
realistic. Would you buy a $60 tablet that features the specs mentioned
above? You may buy one, but I doubt that you would enjoy using it beyond
the first few minutes. I need to expand on that.
Without
having touched it, I am convinced that the Aakash is one of the
best-designed computers I have seen in a long time – at least since
Intel's bug-free computer. (That computer was offered in the early 2000s
and was designed for rural Africa with features to keep insects out of
the case. In addition, it could be connected to a car battery.) The
Aakash tablet is a computer with a strong regional and cultural focus
that caters exactly to the needs of a very specific group of people.
India
has a population of about 1.14 billion people. The latest
telecommunication data I could find from the Telecom Regulatory
Authority of India indicate that 81 million of them, or 7 percent of the
population, access the Internet today via wired or wireless devices.
Only 9.45 million, or 0.8 percent of the population, have access to a
broadband connection to the Internet. If only 7 percent of the Indian
population access the Internet today (actually, the data go back to
2009), then we can conclude that Internet access is still a rarity in
India. In comparison, 74.1 percent of people living in the United States
access the Internet today and about 37 percent browse via a broadband
connection, according to Nielsen.
It
is clear that Internet access works differently in the U.S. than it
does in India, and India will need, at least for now, different means to
provide its population access to the Internet than does the United
States. Let's go a little further by looking at wired versus wireless
telecommunications in India.
The
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India states that there were only 36.2
million wired phone connections in India in 2009. Keep in mind, there
are 1.14 billion people – and only 3 percent have a wired telephone. The
reason is the extent of rural areas in India, which has given the
country a good reason to focus on wireless communications. According to
the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, there are currently 635.5
million active cell phone subscribers in India, which translates to a
market penetration of 54 percent. People in India are used to paying way
too much for their ability to communicate wirelessly (much more than we
think we are paying for our communications). A typical smartphone in
India costs about as much as it does in the U.S. – about $600 without a
contract. However, the average income per capita in India is just $1,039
per year, which means that advanced communications via a mobile
computer that is more than just a feature phone will require people in
India to invest more than half of their annual income into such a
device. Would you be willing to do that here in the U.S., considering
that our current average income is $46,381 per capita?
There
is a real need in India for a basic, low cost Internet device that may
also serve as a cell phone – one such as the Aakash. An expenditure of
$60 is about 6 percent of the annual per capita income in India, which
is far more acceptable. It is comparable to about $2,800 here in the
U.S. It isn’t cheap, but it’s better than $25,000.
In
India, the Aakash almost certainly has a bright future. It perfectly
fills a need and provides an affordable way to communicate and access
information on the Internet.
In
the U.S., it is a different story. You can imagine the first reviews
with complaints about a terrible display, lack of storage space, slow
processor and cheap materials. We have different expectations, and while
it may be cool to own a $35 or $50 tablet initially, it has an older
version of Android where you will need a vastly more capable device to
run the applications in which you may be interested. There are no such
expectations in India. You can't miss what you don't know, and you will
be happy with it if it enables you to do more than you could before. The
Aakash will enable millions of people in India to access the Internet –
people who could not have previously afforded Internet browsing. Also,
imagine the new ways of wireless communication it may facilitate.
A $35 or $50 tablet is what India needs today. In the U.S. this tablet would definitely fail.
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