There’s a new Android tablet in India and it’s selling like hotcakes. The tablet is called Aakash and it costs only $ 41 or about P1,800. Since reservations opened early December, the tablet has reportedly gathered 1.4 million bookings.
The Aakash is supported by the government of India, which contracted British company Datawind to manufacture the tablet. The response of the public was too overwhelming the manufacturer will be opening new factories to keep up with orders. And there’s also a planned update called Ubislate 7 that’s scheduled to be released in March.
As to specs, the Aakash is of course not impressive but it’s not bad either. For the price of $41 you get a 7-inch touchscreen, an ARM 11 processor, Wi-Fi connectivity, a multimedia player with HD video playback, 180 minutes of battery power, Android 2.2 operating system, an external 2GB storage card and two USB ports. The RAM is only at 256-megabyte though and there’s no Android Market access. The apps will come from Getjar, an independent apps market. What’s surprising is that the manufacturer Datawind said the price can drop to $35 or even to $10.
I hope the Philippine government does a project like this. Clearly, this is just wishful thinking.
Here’s a video I found on YouTube featuring the Aakash.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He_lwac7NLg