UK-based company Datawind have released the UbiSlate 7Ci Android tablet which costs just a mere £30.

They certainly work and in reality they are quite good office devices. So if you want to stay in touch, keep up with social media or look at your favourite web site they are a nice pocket sized device.

These budget priced devices started life as a low cost access unit for India and demand just grew and grew. Earlier this year they appeared on mainland Europe and more recently something very similar was on offer in TESCO Europe for €34, around £30.

So here is our first top tip to using one – get the extra memory. You can add up to 32G and it is worth doing it.

Secondly download the Android cleaner App. This one stop App helps move Apps to the extended memory, cleans up the on-board cache and just makes it work better. This highlights a drawback of such devices as the RAM is tiny.

At this point it would be very easy to attach such a device as it’s simply not the same as a higher level spec/cost tablet. However, what can you expect from a tablet costing £30. Certainly it won’t play memory hungry games, but if you are building/testing the next Angry Birds what a great place to try it out.

Where this device shines is the everyday things. You can do email, Facebook, watch Youtube, listen to radio and your music, watch a movie (best only with extended memory card) and play Angry Birds. Installing the free office style package covers excel, word etc.

Consider you are working on a pitch document. Normally, you have to carry your laptop. I don’t know about you but carrying a laptop around always makes me a little nervous. With one of these tablets you can copy the document to the small tablet. You can even put it in your pocket for safety. What’s more, now the cost is just £30 who is going to try and steal it?

Audio is more than acceptable and the video is OK for the everyday things of life. Android has a BBC iplayer App, SkyGo App and there is even a Freeview TV Guide App so it can become a TV when everyone is watching something boring.

So overall it’s a great little device if you use it for the purpose it was designed for. Try and convince yourself it’s a Windows Surface and you will be disappointed.