The Indian government is pushing ahead with plans for a new and improved low-cost Aakash tablet for students which it hopes will reinvigorate a project hit by countless delays.
The technical specs of the proposed Android-based Aakash IV have been posted to the web sites of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) to allow stakeholders to comment.
The seven incher should be no more
than 500g in weight and 0.75in thick, with a minimum of 1 GB DDR3
SDRAM, alongside at least 4GB internal storage which can be expanded by
up to 32GB with an SD card, according to the proposals.
Battery capacity should be enough for at least three hours of 720p video playback and five hours of web browsing.
The government wants to stick with “the latest Android stable version” but said the tablet needs to be dual bootable through an external SD card to also offer the latest version of Ubuntu.
Browser-wise it needs HTML5 support and the default language of the device will be set to English, although support for multiple Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil and Punjabi is a must.
As a learning tool for students, there is also a strict requirement for USB, mouse, keyboard, and “all popular” 2G, 3G and 4G data dongles to be supported.
In a blow to UK firm Datawind, which produced the first two iterations of the Aakash, the government said it hadn’t decided who would be awarded the lucrative contract this time around.
The firm may well be fearing the worst, given that the project has been plagued by problems up to this point.
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