The dream of having a computer you could carry around like a notebook (or even as a piece of paper) is nothing new - and it certainly predates the iPad for a decade at least. But before the iPad popped up, tablet PCs were bulky, heavy, with severely limited hardware and a lousy battery life. And worst of all, they were too expensive for most people to even consider it.
But since then, we've seen usable tablets show up at $500, and then $400... and $300, and mini tablets dropping to $200, and some can even be found at $100. When you look at it... one can't stop but wonder: just how cheap can tablets really get? Is is possible for tablets to get any chepaer, to $50 and even less? And surprisingly... they can.
Datawind is a Canadian company that developed the Aakash 2 tablet for just $38, and now they're about to bring their own Datawind UbiSlate 7ci stateside for just $38! The hardware has been revised and improved, with the slow 700Mhz CPU now giving way to a much faster dual-core at 1.2GHz, allowing this ultra low cost tablet to perform much better.
What's even more amazing is that its CEO plans to have an even cheaper tablet on the market a couple years from now: a tablet that will be available for just $20!
Just imagine all you could with if had $20 tablets readily available: that's cheaper than most smartphone touchscreens should you break one!
The iPad might be known as the tablet that ignited the tablet revolution but I dare say that the one that pops up on the market, with non-frustrating usable hardware, will be the one that will truly change the world (kind of the same BIC did with pens). After all, it's not until you can afford to throw something into the trash without thinking about it that we can consider something to really be a truly "common" item, right?
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