It supports web browsing and video conferencing, has a three-hour battery life and two USB ports, but questions remain over how it will perform. Officials hope the computer will give digital access to students in small towns and villages across India, which lags behind its rivals in connectivity.
He said the government was buying 100,000 of
the tablets and plans to distribute 10 million of
them to students over the next few years. "The
rich have access to the digital world, the poor and ordinary have been excluded. Aakash will end that digital divide," Mr Sibal said.
The Aakash has been developed by UK-based
company DataWind and Indian Institute of Technology (Rajasthan). It is due to be assembled in India, at DataWind's new production centre in the southern city of Hyderabad.
"Our goal was to break the price barrier for
computing and internet access," DataWind CEO
Suneet Singh Tuli said. "We've created a product
that will finally bring affordable computing and
internet access to the masses."
But critics say it is too early to say how the
Aakash will be received as most cheap tablets in
the past have turned out to be painfully slow.
"The thing with cheap tablets is most of them
turn out to be unusable," Rajat Agrawal of
technology reviewers BGR India told Reuters news agency. "They don't have a very good touch screen, and they are usually very slow."
Critics also point out that an earlier cheap laptop
plan by the same ministry came to nothing. In
2009, it announced plans for a laptop priced as
low as $10, raising eyebrows and triggering
worldwide media interest. But there was
disappointment after the "Sakshat" turned out to be a prototype of a hand-held device, with an
unspecified price tag, that never materialised.
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