Leading technology companies including Dell, Acer, HCL, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Intel have shown their interest in bidding for the Indian government’s low cost Aakash 4 tablet, the tender for which closes on January 28; however, all OEMs have expressed concerns over government demands of packing top notch specifications while keeping the cost as low as possible.
Datawind, Micromax, WishTel and ITI have also shown interest with some companies even planning to form consortia to jointly produce the tablet which will help in eliminating any kind of delivery delays and keep the prices down. In order to promote local manufacturing, the Indian government has also mandated that the tablet if manufactured domestically will get 30% value addition by March 2014 and 35% after that.
As per technical specifications recommended by the government, the Aakash 4 tablet will have a 7-inch scratch-resistant capacitive touch display, Wi-Fi, 2G, 3G and 4G connectivity options, 4GB internal storage, an external memory card slot with storage capacity of up to 32 GB, and a front camera. In addition it must come with a dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM.
Companies are finding it difficult to integrate tablet specifications recommended by the Indian government with a price level of Rs. 2,500 (£25) per tablet. British and Canadian tablet manufacturer Datawind, which supplied around 100,000 low-cost Aakash tablets to the government, feels that it would be a great challenge for them to supply the device at Rs. 2,500 per unit owing to rupee volatility and other factors.
Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO, Datawind said, “The government wants an open source operating system so that it does not depend on the intellectual property of others. All participants are talking to each other for their expertise and getting together to produce Aakash 4.”
“We will be able to bid for Aakash 4 at a price below Rs 2,500 a unit. However, it is a challenge to maintain it at that level. We have seen fluctuation of about 20 percent in the value of rupee and the uncertainty remains,” Tuli added.
Simmtronics on the other hand said that the bids will be highly competitive considering the number of players involved; however, the company did mention that because of the low asking price each and every company will face difficulties in maintaining the desired quality.
In our analysis of the proposed Aakash 4 specifications we pinpointed issues in the requirements, which are just not plausible at the asking price. Some of these have been echoed by vendors as well including the CPU, battery backup, display resolution, and NFC based connectivity option through SD card.
