Mukesh Ambani's company Reliance Infotel, which is the only company with pan India spectrum to launch BWA services, has plans of selling tablets at less than Rs 8,000.
Just to have an idea how cheap Infotel's proposed tablet will be, consider that it will be about one fourth the price of a high end device such as Samsung's Galaxy Tab, which costs Rs 35,000; or a third of the price of a medium range device like the Olivepad from Olive Communications, which sells at Rs 27,000. Of course, prices in general might go down by the time Infotel's tablet is available.
Our sources tell us that the company is currently testing tablets from almost 15 Taiwanese vendors. It has already decided that it will use LTE technology for its network.
Infotel is likely to announce its plans in the first quarter of 2011 and will start network roll-out soon after.
While the specs of the tablet are not known, our sources are certain that it will use LTE, or Long Term Evolution high speed broadband technology.
Apart from that some of Infotel's tablets are expected to run on Android OS and the cheapest ones might use custom Java based operating systems.
It is said that tablets will be key to the mass market adoption of broadband and Infotel is expected to ensure that access devices are cheap, the same as Reliance Communications did when it entered the market with CDMA almost a decade ago.
India has been a laggard as far as broadband adoption goes, and analysts have pointed fingers at two main aspects, device cost and lack of content.
Infotel hopes that it is solving at least one of these problems. The company said in a presentation to its investors that it will also concentrate on creating an eco system to ensure quality content, and we expect them to already be working on it.
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