Asia Bizz: The much awaited Indian tablet PC Aakash, which has been termed as the world’s cheapest tablet, has been launched by the government of India on 5th October 2011. Kapil Sibal, the Union Minister of Human resources Development in India had spoken about launching a low-cost tablet especially for students.
The device is manufactured by a British firm DataWind at a facility in Hyderabad. The new Aakash tablet has a 7-inch resistive touchscreen and is powered by a 366 Mhz, a graphics accelerator along with HD video processor, 2GB flash internal storage, 256 MB RAM, one USB port, supports Wi-Fi and up to 180 minutes of battery life.
The software of the tablet includes an Android 2.2 Froyo OS and can support document formats like DOC, PPT, XLS, XLSX, ODT, ODP and DOCx. It can also support several audio and video formats and also has a PDF viewer and text editor.
During the launch of the Aakash tablet, 500 students were handed the tablet out of the 1,00,000 tablets that the government has said would give away free to students. The government is also planning to provide seamless connectivity on the devices and for institutes. Indian service provider BSNL will be providing the connectivity to more than 416 universities and 20,000 colleges.
Aakash tablet PC has been priced at a mere $49.
