The low cost Indian tablet also known as Aakash which has been into news until the last year has finally started shipping in India. After the company started its online booking for the first 30,000 batch of tablets in late December, it brought so much traffic that an Indian cyber regulation agency called to inform them they were possibly under attack. In the last two weeks, they’ve racked up over 1.4 million pre-orders — iPad-scale numbers.
It’s being sold for ₹2500, which makes it to just under $50. The government then subsidizes sales to students, bringing the cost down to $35. India does not have enough manufacturing capacity to supply the orders that are rolling in. New factories are being built by Datawind in Cochin, Noida, and Hyderabad which will solve that problem, but in the meantime the Aakash will be available by the Datawind’s present manufacturing units.
Datawind on the other hand launched Aakash 2 aka Ubislate 7+ a slightly expensive device with better specs. The firm give an option to change their order for Aakash to Aakash 2 by the people who ordered Aakash. Its a strategy just to minimize the pressure of manufacturing a million devices and people opt for it too in order to get a better device for just ₹500 extra.
In between all this success, there have been reports that the few who received their orders are facing issues on their tablets, and the support team at Datawind is unresponsive. People have reported that their support phone numbers are not working, and nobody bothers to reply to emails. This is a big disappointment, as support logistics should have been in place much before such large scale orders are taken in. We do hope Datawind doesn’t disappoint, as 1.4 million angry customers won’t be a pleasant site !
