India Launches $35 Tablet

[nsane.forums]

India is closer to its much-touted target of a US$35 tablet, with DataWind, a wireless Web access products maker in Montreal, designing and making a device that it will sell to the government for $50.

The country's Minister of Human Resource Development, Kapil Sibal, launched the tablet, called Aakash, on Wednesday. The tablet will likely be distributed at a subsidy to students in higher education in the country.

DataWind has been able to get to a price of $38 for the tablet which has a 7-inch display with 800-by-480 pixel resolution, 256MB of RAM, 2GB flash storage, and a 366MHz processor from Connexant. The tablet runs the Android 2.2 operating system.

Local sales taxes, performance guarantees, and an exacting replacement warranty have taken the price to the government up to $50, said Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO of DataWind in an interview.

The target is to get to $35 per unit, inclusive of warranty, once volumes pick up.

The Indian government is expected to buy 8 million to 10 million units of the device by March 31, 2012, the end of the Indian fiscal year, Tuli said. The first order of 100,000 units will be executed from a factory in Hyderabad over the next six weeks, he added.

Tuli said that Sibal's vision and the commitment of business from the government had driven the company to accept the challenge to come up with a device at about $35.

The Aakash tablet has been designed, developed and manufactured by DataWind, in partnership with an educational institution, IIT Rajasthan, DataWind said in a statement.

The design of the product was done by DataWind between its centers in Montreal and India, Tuli said. IIT Rajasthan is coordinating the project, including firming up the specifications, and doing the field testing.

DataWind plans to market the product in a number of emerging markets, and also commercially in India in November where the price will be about $60 with added GPRS (general packet radio service) capability, which will allow it to double as a phone. Higher-end versions of the product will also be launched in less price-sensitive markets like the U.K. and the U.S.

India's low-cost computer had a number of false starts and experimentation with the government at one point talking about a $10 laptop. Officials in the Department of Higher Education, however, clarified that the device would not be a laptop.

In July last year, the country's Ministry of Human Resource Development announced a $35 computing and access device for students of colleges and universities. The price of the device, which was to be designed by Indian academic research and education institutions, was eventually dropped to $10, according to a statement from the ministry.

India did not sign up for the One Laptop Per Child program after officials in the education ministry decided that giving a computer to every child is "pedagogically suspect" and may actually be detrimental to the growth of the creative and analytical abilities of the child.

The configuration of the DataWind tablet is adequate for most applications including HD quality video, reading books, and basic office applications, according to Tuli. The company makes up for the lower speed of the processor by using compression acceleration technologies that shift a part of the processing during Web browsing from the device to the cloud, Tuli said.

DataWind was able to achieve a low price for the device by its vertical integration model which includes designing its boards, integrating some components in-house, developing the middleware, and making the touch panels, he added.

View: Original Article

[DKT27]

India launches "world's cheapest tablet"

It was an ambitious plan that began with an announcement in February 2009. The Indian Government declared that it was funding development of a $10 laptop, as part of a wider strategy to boost the use of IT in Indian education. It was intended to be a showcase of Indian ingenuity, one which would demonstrate that such a device did not need the complexity of One Laptop Per Child’s ‘XO’ device.

But just as OLPC’s XO – which saw its intended price soar from $100 to $188 per unit – had to succumb to real world practicalities, so too did India’s ambitions, and the $10 laptop ultimately failed to materialise. Undeterred, in July 2010, the Indian government showed off a prototype for its new $35 device, this time a tablet, and promised to deliver the first examples to Indian students by the year’s end.

Human Resource Development Minister, Kapil Sibal, unveiling $35 tablet prototype in July 2010.

It appeared, briefly, that that plan too might turn to dust when it emerged, just two months later, that the prototype appeared to be an off-the-shelf reference design from a Chinese ODM, the ‘HiVision Speedpad’, which proved to be something of an embarrassment for the Indian Government which had repeatedly touted the device as being of Indian origin.

Today, after many more delays, too numerous to mention, the Indian Government has formally announced the availability of its tablet, but as one might expect from this saga, there are still a couple of twists in this tale.

First of all, the tablet wasn’t fully designed in India; it was designed by a small London-based firm called DataWind, working in conjunction with Indian institutions, and officially, the Indian Government is buying the first batch of units from DataWind, which will be assembled in India. DataWind’s CEO, Suneet Singh Tuli, is sticking to claims that this is an Indian product though. According to EE Times, he stated: “This is a ‘made-in-India’ product, with the screen coming from a South Korean company, and the chip from a US company. This [product] will revolutionise the world.”

Students in New Delhi showing off the first Aakash tablets.

That $35 price tag is also a little bit misleading. India is buying the devices from DataWind for $50 per unit, and the first 100,000 units will be given away to students free of charge. Subsequent devices will then be sold to students at a subsidised price of $35 per unit, while ordinary members of the public (i.e. not students) will be able to purchase a commercial version called "UbiSlate" later this year for $60.

The student version is called “Aakash” (meaning “sky”), and has a 7” resistive touch screen with WVGA (800x480) resolution, along with on-board Wi-Fi connectivity and two USB ports. Bloomberg Businessweek also reports that Aakash has a 366MHz processor, 256MB of RAM and 2GB of storage. The commercial UbiSlate version also includes a SIM card slot for cellular connectivity. The operating system for both is Android 2.2 (Froyo).

Reuters reported that the first 500 devices were handed out to students at the product launch today, but received something of a mixed response. One student was quoted as saying: “If you see it from the price only, it’s okay, but we have laptops and have used iPads, so we know the difference.”

While Aakash and its UbiSlate sibling won’t be scaring the iPad, their arrival marks an interesting chapter in the fight towards the entry-level of the tablet market. Amazon’s Kindle Fire has demonstrated that you don’t always have to compete at the top end to make an impact, and with a population of 1.2 billion people, just 8% of whom have internet access, India represents a vast opportunity for companies to create more affordable means of engaging with technology.

View: Original Article

[toyo]

I want one of those, if it's free :D

[karachidude]

yeh i read about this in our papers today,nice,would love to get a hand on one of these :D

[Atasas]

I'd have one for a bit of "rigid" treatment in back pocket B)