UK company Datawind has been offering dirt cheap Android tablets for a few years, particularly in India where the company has partnered with the government to provide Aakash tablets for students. Now Datawind is bringing its cheap Android tablets to the US.

You can buy an UbiSlate 7Ci from the company for just $37.99.

datawind ubislate 7ci

As you might have guessed, you won’t get a very good tablet for that price. The Datawind UbiSlate 7Ci features a 7 inch, 800 x 480 pixel display, 4GB of stroage, 412MB of RAM, and a 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 single-core processor. It runs Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich.

But the UbSlate 7Ci does at least look a bit better than low-cost tablets from a few years ago. It has a capacitive touchscreen, for instance. Unfortunately it’s still missing one of the most important features of an Android tablet: support for the Google Play Store. Instead it uses a third party app store with a smaller selectino of apps.

The tablet also has a microSd card slot for expansion, a 0.3MP front-facing camera, WiFi, and a G Sensor.

Datawind also offers higher-priced models with slightly higher-resolution displays and 3G capabilities. Select models also come with a year of free internet access.

While tablets like the UbiSlate 7Ci were originally designed to make tablets affordable for students in India, I can think of a few situations where a ridiculously cheap tablet could come in handy in the US. You could use it as a digital photo frame, a remote control for a Google Chromecast, or a tablet you won’t mind if your kids break.

via CNET

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6 replies on “Now you can buy a (lousy) Android tablet for just $38”

  1. Has anyone tried to use cheapie tablets like this as a display for an Arduino, BeagleBone or something similar? If so, how hard/easy is it usually to connect to and control the display?

  2. If one knows how and where to shop one can find dual core tablets for close to that price.
    I recently made a mistake on a 40-dollar cheapie and the 512mb of ram that was barely adequate under older versions of Android is now sub-nominal and causes problems running nearly anything at all.
    Those are the kinds of problems I would expect from these tablets running last year’s bargain basement tech with this year’s OS.

  3. Depending on the placement of the power port and the headphone jack (does it have one?) it could make a decent web radio. Just install Slaker, Pandora, TuneIn, etc. and leave it plugged into power and some powered speakers.

  4. Infant mortality can be high on these though. I’ve had Chinese cheapos that worked great until 3 months later when they wouldn’t even take a charge anymore, let alone work. Hopefully this will become less common as the low-end market matures.

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