The Times of India reports the Indian government is buying a first 100,000 batch of ultra-cheap tablet computers. It’s named Aakash, and if that pilot is successful, it would be offered to students at $38. This is currently the cheapest tablet in the world, in a market where analysts still view Apple’s iPad having an aggressive price of $150. Specs from the article:
The tablet runs on Android 2.2 (Froyo) and comes with a 7-inch resistive touchscreen with 800×480 resolution and weighs 350 grams. The tablet has a 256MB of RAM, a 32GB expandable memory slot and two USB ports.
It is can run HD videos for 2 hours, and like Amazon’s Fire table, web content is rendered in the cloud and then served to the tablet to increase perceived performance. Other reports from educated users describe the tablet as slow, because of a slow processor and also the resistive touchscreen.
What’s interesting is that the Aakash was designed in Montréal, from the engineering & design company Datawind, which specializes in mobile devices. Datawind was born in Montréal, and it still has a staff of +60 engineers in its René-Lesvêque offices, but its top management has relocated to London.
From a pure design point of view, the Aakash is similar to Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child initiative, which aimed to build laptops for children in developing countries for lower than $100. The initiative didn’t have a wild success, both because of the long development process, and a price which increased much higher than the announced goal. Users were also not satisfied with the device, especially when you’ve played once with a “real” laptop.
Nevertheless, the OLPC movement created the netbooks market, much to the delight of Asus and other Taiwaneese makers which used the opportunity to build their first laptops. The $38 price (or the announced price $60 for the retail market) might also do the same for the tablet market. Plus with the developer-friendly Android apps market, we can imagine Indian developers building software that matches exactly users’ neeed (as opposed to Negroponte’s top-down initiative), and perhaps making it finally interesting for Indian students, farmers.
