The low cost Akash tabletwas unveiled in India some days back by Union Communications and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal. It is said to be the cheapest tablet in the world and has been specially engineered for the student community of the country.
The Akash tablet has been developed by Britain based company Data Wind in collaboration with IIT Rajasthan, under the Human Resources & Development Ministry’s National Mission on Education through Information & Communication Technology (NME-ICT). The Indian government will be buying 100,000 tablets from DataWind at an all-inclusive price of Rs. 2, 250 per unit.
It equips a 7-inch touchscreen featuring a pixel resolution of 800 x 480 and runs on Android 2.2. Delivering multimedia content in HD, it offers access to more than 1, 50,000 apps through the Android market. Incorporating 256MB RAM it includes 2GB internal memory which can be expanded up to 32GB via the microSD slot.
The device embeds standard USB port and provides support for various audio and video formats such as MP3, AAC, AC3, WAV, WMA, MPEG2, MPEG4, AVI and FLV. The developers say that an affordable tablet such as Akash will help Indian students in academics and can make a huge difference in their education.
While the tablet will be available to post-secondary students through the NME-ICT for a price of Rs. 1750, DataWind is scheduled to offer its commercial version, called the UbiSlate from late November. The difference between the two versions is that the UbiSlate comes with an in-built modem and can also serve as a mobile phone.
Users can access unlimited internet with only Rs. 98 per month on the Akash tablet priced at an affordable Rs. 2,250. The UbiSlate comes for a price of Rs. 2, 999 and both of them are accompanied by a 12 month replacement warranty.
