Acer's Low-Cost 7" Tablet + India's $99 Tablet a Pie in the Sky

choi

(1) Latest first.
(a)Press release: Acer Tablet Family Welcomes New Arrival For New Users. Acer, Jan 7, 2013
http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/press/2013/53589
(Iconia B1-A71: "a starting price less than $150;"  Android Jelly Bean [4.1] operating system; Mediatek dual-core 1.2GHz processor (MTK 8317T); 8GB of internal storage)

Quote: "to launch a tablet priced to jostle with Chinese white-box tablet makers for consumers in developing countries. * * * 'Chinese white-box tablet makers are expected to sell some 60 million tablets next year, so it is a really big market,' she [Daiwa Securities analyst Christine Wang] said. 'None of the major PC brands sells a tablet right now priced to compete with them right now.'


Note: Announced at Consumer Electronics Show held annually at Las Vegas.



(b) Eva Dou, Acer Plans to Launch $99 Tablet. Digits (a WSJ blog), Dec 24, 2012.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012 ... o-launch-99-tablet/
(Iconia B1; "It’s aimed at emerging markets. While the device has been submitted to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission for clearance, it’s uncertain whether it will actually be sold stateside")


(2) Pamposh Raina, Ian Austen and Heather Timmons, 50美元的平板电脑，印度学生何日梦圆？  
http://cn.nytimes.com/article/business/2013/01/09/c09tablet/

, which is translated from

Pamposh Raina, Ian Austen and Heather Timmons, An Idea Promised the Sky, but India Is Still Waiting. New York Times, Dec 30, 2012.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/3 ... -few-computers.html
(Brothers Suneet Singh Tuli and Raja Singh Tuli's London-based DataWind want to build in Indai a $50 tablet, called Aakash, the Hindi word for sky)

Quote:

(a) "Others had tried to bring cheap computing to developing countries like India — most notably the One Laptop Per Child project. Founded by Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and backed by a host of Western technology companies, that effort aimed to bring $100 laptops to children around the world but faltered amid a host of technical, manufacturing and competitive challenges.

“'This is our answer to MIT’s $100 computer,' said Kapil Sibal, the minister of communications and information technology, when he announced the Aakash project in 2010.

(b) "In a fateful decision, Mr [Suneet] Tuli also promised to build the tablet in India, even though the country’s manufacturers had no real experience in building such hardware. While not required by the government, the pledge added to the patriotic fervor surrounding the project and generated publicity for DataWind