Upgraded Aakash to be launched in April

An upgraded version of the Aakash tablet will be launched in the next month. The feel-good facter is that there would be no price hike at all. This information was given by the HRD minister Mr. Kapil Sibal. This should pull in more customers towards the Aakash tablet.

The upgrade includes a higher performing battery with extra life. The tablet can have three hours of backup along with an improved screen. Aakash is tagged as the world’s cheapest tablet priced at slightly more than INR 2000. There will be the 700 MHz Cortex A8 processor along with a 3200mAH battery. The display will certainly be enchanting with a smooth touch screen.

It was decided that there would be a first batch of 100,000 tablets which would target the students who are pursuing higher technical education. The aim of having these students use this tablet first was to gain the technical knowledge about the performance of the tablet.

Datawind is short of the manufacturing capacities as of now. That is why ITI Rajasthan and BHEL will be looking into the production as well.

A $35 Android tablet as means of education: Indian Govt

In one of its firsts, the government of India will on Wednesday launch a gadget – a $35 Google Android tablet dedicated to the education sector. The tablet will have a 7-inch touchscreen. It will run on Android 2.2 mobile OS, says the report. The report also adds that, the tablet will have Wi-Fi and multimedia apart from videoconferencing capacities.

Some of the features of the Android tablet are as follows:

The gadget will have an accurate battery power of 3 hours (180 minutes). It will come in 2 USB ports. The device is blessed with 32GB expandable memory. However, the downline in the otherwise excellent device is the 256MB RAM (Random Access Memory). The lower RAM might play down the performance of the mobile phone.

The tablet has been christened as Akash, which means the sky. As this experiment is for the educational purposes, the tablets will not be sold over the counter as done in the market. However, universities and colleges will sell the tablets to their students. The tablet will see a first batch of 500 devices. In the course of time, the production of the gadget is likely to pick up.

It is not only in India, but there are other countries too, that are making efforts to make such touchscreen devices available to their students at lower costs. In the near future, we might even see a solar-powered tablet targeted for rural villages as Nanyang Technological University, Singapore is busy with the work currently.