India Launches $35 Tablet 203
Many readers have submitted stories about a new $35 tablet computer released today in India. The Aakash (meaning sky) has been handed out to 500 students for an initial trial run, if successful a $60 commercial version will hit the shelves later this year. The Aakash computer runs Android 2.2 (Froyo), has a 7-inch touch screen, 256MB of RAM, 32GB expandable memory slot, two USB ports, and weighs in at only 350 grams.
The real purpose (Score:5, Interesting)
Hi,
I would like to provide a background for this. The tablets are an endevaour by the Indian Government to reach out to the farmers as a means of communication to advise them about crops and similar kind of work. It is NOT meant to compete on the market with other tablets for normal functionality. I guess, the most important function would be video streaming to show tutorial videos on how to handle crop and inject them with pesticides and such and may be stream other lectuers. To get a background on what kind of exercise is this and wonders its necessity, you might like to visit NPTEL where free lectures are made available by IIT faculty on various college courses (both undergraduate and postgraduate). Due to the population, it is very difficult to reach students and farmers individually so this is the type of "distance education".
For example, in this age also audio lectures are transmitted over radio for anyone to listen by the Indira Gandhi Open University for people who want to study on their own but cannot attend a college as there is probably none in the region they can try to reach.
As it may or may not be common knowledge, software patents per se, are not valid in India. You can patent your code, not your idea (which is pretty pointless). There are certain workarounds the legal system as usual is the case. But ideas and software algos are not patentable per se. So patent encumbered thing might not be a really big issue here. I don't know about resistive or capacitive touch screens though.
How successful it is we all are sceptical (due to corruption and all the issues). But this is the main idea behind it. If it succeeds we would be very happy.