This is an Ubislate 7CZ tablet computer, by designer and manufacturer Datawind Ltd. This is the commercially released version of the Aakash 4, a tablet device procured since 2011 by the Government of India to provide to students across the country, with a 7” touch screen running on an Android operating system. It was developed to be manufactured at a price point low enough to enable access to the Internet to ‘the next 3 billion people in the world’1.

The Ubislate 7CZ tablet is an example of social impact design in action. It complements, and represents a step beyond another object already in the Furniture, Textiles and Fashion Department’s collections, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) laptop from 2005 (W.9-2011).

In 2009, the Indian government announced an initiative, the National Mission on Education through ICT (NMEICT), with a budget of $1bn. $600 million was to be spent on ensuring bandwidth in the country’s universities and colleges with the rest on the development of a low cost computing device. Datawind, a British-Canadian company founded by Suneet and Raja Tuli, won the tender in which no major companies showed interest due to the low profit margins and high risks involved.

Over the course of the Aakash’s development Datawind has focused on producing hardware at extremely low cost and generating money from partnerships and advertising on the devices’ apps. For elements that proved expensive to source for the earlier Aakash devices, such as the touch screen and LCD, these are now produced by Datawind themselves.

This latest version of the Aakash / Ubislate is the first to be fitted with inbuilt cellular connectivity. This change in specification is indicative of the growing market for inexpensive tablet computers. It is intended for users beyond the state education sector without networked internet access. Priced at under £20, the device is the cheapest mobile internet ready device currently on the market.

Datawind designed the Aakash’s operating architecture: a processing environment where web pages are pre-processed and pre- rendered to reduce bandwidth consumption by 30 times. Using this method pages load faster and the cost of data is significantly reduced. Datawind is also seeking to offset the cost of data through other value-added services including location-based advertising. The eventual ambition is to provide completely free internet access to the user.

Suneet Singh Tuli gives the following statistics: of 1.2 billion people in India, 900 million use mobile phones, while only 100 million use the Internet. These mobile users have access to power and signal for their phones, meaning that the infrastructure is in place to support power and connectivity. The Aakash also has solar power charging capabilities to further facilitate its use among very low-income individuals who may not have regular access to electricity.

In January 2014 Datawind launched a new solar-powered tablet computer in partnership with OLPC at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It is hoped that this device will meet many of the unrealised expectations of the Fuseproject-designed OLPC of 2005.

Notes
1 Mims, Christopher. "$25 tablets, $2 mobile data plans, and zero margins–how the insers". Quartz. 2012. Web. January 10, 2014