Datawind Ubislate 7C+ (Aakash 3): World’s Cheapest Phablet

By adding a few enhancements like the capability to make phone calls in Aakash 2 (or the Ubislate 7Ci), Datawind is back in the Indian market with Aakash 3, or the Ubislate 7C+. It looks very similar to its predecessor, and there aren't too many differences in features either. The big difference is in the addition of calling functionality and a slightly more powerful battery that provides longer backup.

Ubislate 7C+ vs 7Ci: The body of Ubislate 7C+ is made of black plastics, which give it a tough and sturdy feel, though its weight of 338 gms is higher as compared to 286 gms of 7Ci. The power button, volume control, DC-in, USB 2.0 and audio jack are placed at one side of the device. The display has a thick bezel around the 7 inch capacitive multi-touch screen which provides a maximum resolution of 800x480p.

Most of the functionality and features of Ubislate 7C+ are identical to that of 7Ci except the capability of making voice calls using a GSM SIM. There is one front facing camera which is good enough for you to make Skype and other video chats, as well as to use with apps.

The Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) device is powered by 1 GHz Cortex A8 processor and boasts of 512 MB of RAM & 4GB of internal memory (which is extendable up to 32 GB using micro SD slot). For connectivity, you can use either Wi-Fi or Edge, but that restricts the usage to 2G networks only. For 3G, you can use a dongle with a micro-USB converter.

The phablet is capable of playing multi-format videos and along with 3.5mm audio jack, it's a nice feature to have for this price.
Performance: Touch was smooth and responsive but colors on the display looked slightly washed out. The desktops icons also appear a tad bigger than they should.

Plus, it takes some time to get used to the lag in the display re-adjusting itself when you rotate the screen. The audio and video playback was smooth with no time lag. It can easily read out text or e-books without a hitch.

The call quality is poor, even with earphones it's not all that audible in a noisy environment. Comparing the benchmark scores of Ubislate 7C+ to Ubislate 7Ci, we cannot say that 7C+ has out-performed its predecessor, but yes, it showed some decent performance, courtesy: 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM.

We used four different benchmarks to determine the performance of Ubislate 7C+. AnTuTu benchmark that quantifies CPU, database, IO and memory computing ability, yielded a score of 3160 which is a good score in the budget tablet category. To gauge graphical and animational ability, AN3DBench & AN3DBenchXL were used which gave scores of 6161 and 18907.

These are slightly lower than those of Ubislate 7Ci. A score of 574 in Vellamo mobile web benchmark indicates that there will be no problem whatsoever in using the web browser. But that doesn't mean that you will have same performance for the websites which need Flash player or Shockwave. The device's 3200mAh battery lasted 5 hours against 4 hours of Ubislate 7Ci.