Further intensifying the price war in the fast-growing tablet PC market, HCL Infosystems on Monday introduced U1 tablet, priced at Rs.7,999, that comes loaded with 17 applications covering jobs, games, social networking and music besides goodies worth Rs.3,000.
The company also launched ‘MyEdu Tab' focussing on the education sector. The ‘MyEdu Tab K12' (kindergarten to class XII) version, priced at Rs.11,499, is an innovative educational tablet packaged with curriculum-mapped digital content and educational applications, while ‘MyEdu Tab — Higher Education' version comes with a price tag of Rs.9,999 and is an edutainment platform that brings together world-class rich multimedia content on technical and professional skills, assessments and applications.
“Our feature-rich tablets are designed keeping in mind the specific needs of Indian consumers. It has capacitive screen and 1Ghz processor with high performance and low power CPU. The tablet comes with a front camera and 512 MB RAM, with an internal memory of 4GB expandable to 32GB and a long-lasting battery. It also has a full USB, mini USB and a micro SD card slot,” HCL Infosystems Executive Vice-President and Head (Mobility) Gautam Advani told journalists here.
The tablet market in India is expected to grow to over 20-lakh units by 2013 from 3.5-lakh units in 2011. HCL now enjoys 15 per cent market share in the tablet PC business. The company also plans to export its tablet PCs to Africa, Gulf nations and other developing nations.
Talking about ‘MyEdu Tab', HCL Infosystems Senior Vice-President and Head HCL Learning Anand Ekambaram said: “It will change the way we learn, definitely make learning an interesting proposition and will make the student more engaged even as the cloud ecosystem will enable a learner to imbibe knowledge at his/her own pace. Our tablet will rope in parents by enabling them to take a more active interest in their wards learning process.”
Referring to the government's focus on providing tablet PCs to students, Mr. Advani said HCL Infosystems was also keen on providing tablets to students but would not compromise on its quality to match any price point. Pointing out that the Centre's Aakash has helped in pushing sales of tablets, Mr. Advani said: “We would love to participate in the government tender…if it comes to prices which are not feasible, we will exit graciously.”
