Hands-on with the elusive Ubislate 7+ and 7C

Datawind has travelled down a long and controversial path to officially launching the commercial version of the Aakash tablet, the Ubislate. And they did seem highly excited about it, repeatedly claiming: “This is not a product launch, this is a revolution.” But are such hyperbole justified for a product that is so late to the game that it has left many who pre-ordered with a bad taste in their mouth? Will it really trigger a digital revolution among the masses, or will it fizzle out into the dark annals of public memory? We go hands-on to find some answers.

Encased tablets side by side

Let’s start with the specs, both the Ubislates, 7+ and 7C are pretty much identical, save for the resistive screen on the 7+ and the capacitive screen on the 7C:

• 7.0-inch display with an 840x480 pixel resolution
• 800 MHz ARM Cortex A8 processor, with a graphics accelerator and HD video processor.
• Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS
• Memory:  7+: 256mb RAM with 2 GB internal flash storage  /  7c: 256mb RAM with 4 GB internal flash storage

• Memory expandable up to 32GB with a microSD card
• One full USB 2.0 port
• GPRS with Wi-Fi a/b/g
• Rated with 3 hours of battery life with a 3200 mAh battery

As far as hardware goes, both Ubislates feel sufficiently sturdy, with a matte plastic finish that feels pretty good in the hand, and does not betray its price. There were a few visible compromises though, such as the microSD card slot, which has been fashioned in such a way that the card juts out of the main body of the tablet and goes only about halfway in. We can easily imagine a fall breaking the microSD card, or even the internals of the slot itself. Coming back to the physical body of the device, it lives in that middle ground of thin and fat that is quite ergonomic to hold and we were quite pleased with it, considering the price.

The tablet , powered on running the Android 2.3 OS

On the software front, they ran a stock version of Android 2.3, modified a bit to run with on-screen touch buttons, which are one of our major gripes with the tablet. The touch buttons basically live on the notification bar, and thus, one can imagine how small and finicky they were. More than half the time during our hands-on we would not be able to make them work and they didn’t exactly spell intuitive. There was also a physical Home button, which was sufficiently springy, but a bit oblong and hard to notice.