Desi brands take feisty Indian tablet PC market by storm
By Kukil Bora, SiliconIndia   |   Friday, 08 April 2011, 13:53 IST
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Desi brands take feisty Indian tablet PC market by storm
Bangalore: There is no doubt that India is warming up to tablet PCs. It may not be the most pulsating of the markets like that of the U.S., Europe or China, but it is picking up slowly. India's tablet PC market is estimated at 25,000 units a quarter, but holds the promise of growing quickly as 3G penetration gathers momentum. Tablets from international companies like Apple and Samsung apart, India has seen some decent tablets from some of the 'desi' players. It all started with Olivepad. And adding to the list, there's the home grown Notion Ink Adam, the $35 government sponsored prototype, and the recently announced $150 tablet from India's largest private service provider Reliance. According to industry experts, this should set the alarm bells ringing for global biggies vying for a piece of the Indian tablet PC market. A time when the iPad reintroduced tablets to the world, India got its first tablet, the OlivePad, launched by Olive Telecom in August 2010. Priced at 25,000, Olivepad became available at the end of October with the update of Android 2.2 Froyo. Olivepad packs in a lot of hardware. It is ideally suited for mobile internet and browsing with 3.5G HSUPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It comes with a 3 megapixel in-built camera, a front camera and a 7-inch capacitive touch screen. Notion Ink Adam entered the scene with the features of the Galaxy Tab in a price point better than the Olivepad. Like the iPad, the Adam also sports a 10-inch screen with a resolution support of 1024x600. Its other features include a 178 degree rotating swivel camera, a touchpad at the back, pixelQI screen to facilitate sunlight reading and a radio to go with it. It has got a dual core ARM processor based on the NVIDIA Tegra chip and ULP GPU. There is also 1GB DDR2 and 8GB onboard storage. Notion Ink Adam tablet PC is priced between $375 and $425 ( 17,000- 19,000). However, it does not have a local distribution network and is sold mainly through the company's website. In the first half of 2010, Infibeam.com, one of India's largest e-commerce site launched Infibeam Phi tablet which is similer to Amazon Kindle device. Priced at 14999, Infibeam Phi is an 7 inch touch screen media device comes with 8GB inbuilt memory with expandable memory up to 32 GB via micro SD card. Phi runs ARM9's 600 MHz processor. Phi has Wi-Fi but doesn't have Bluetooth or microphones on-board. In this list of 'desi' tablets, the next one to come is the $35 government sponsored prototype called Sakshat that hardly looks posh. The tablet is said to have 2GB memory, run Linux, be able to connect to the internet over WiFi, open PDFs, and even play YouTube videos. Recently, India based IT Service Company HCL has come up with three tablet PCs with prices starting from 14, 990 for the base model to 32, 990 for the highest speced model. The HCL ME range tablets are all based on Android 2.2 OS instead of the newer Honeycomb OS. The last time HCL associated with tablet PCs was during the Indian government's effort to launch a $35 tablet Sakshat, though the deal with HCL fell through. Adding to all these, two Indian mobile phone manufacturers Lava International and Micromax Informatics are also planning to launch their own tablet PCs in the Indian market by July-August. Both Lava and Micromax expect demand for tablet PCs to touch a lakh unit by the end of 2011. The demand for tablet PC devices has boomed globally much beyond the initial estimates of market research firms like Gartner. Till December 31, 2010, Apple sold 15 million iPads worldwide. Driven by this, Gartner estimates worldwide media tablet sales of around 54.8 million units in 2011, up 181 percent from 2010, and surpass 208 million units in 2014. Sniffing the possible profits in the growing tablet PC market, a lot of domestic players are showing interest in rolling out their own devices. The competition has heated up, and all the players will try the hardest to take the center stage, which is an important concern for the global players as well.

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