Aakash Tablet Updates

The Aakash tablet is the world's cheapest computing device. It is ideal for use by students at whom the machine is actually targeted. The design of the tablet has been maintained simple and basic; but is a little bulkier when compared to the other similar devices.

The high point of the Aakash Tablet is its competitive price which is within means of the masses. The tablet was developed keeping in mind the general public in India, especially the student community spread out in far flung places. The tablet was developed under the aegis of Shri.Kapil Sibal.

The tablet that made headlines across the world as being an innovative computing device is developed with big goals towards improving the education standard even in rural townships. The (NME-ICT) National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology has plans of linking Universities and Colleges across the country so the students can benefit from a higher standard of education. It is proposed that a total of 416 Universities and 20,000 colleges in the country will be initially linked through this system. NME-ICT proposes at least 18 separate line items for the benefit of content creation.

The specifics of the line content which are required to fit the bill have already been decided upon by the NME-ICT. The required criteria that has been made public is as under –

• The content must be linked with education and aim at delivering a high standard of education.
• Faculty from various institutions across the country must be involved so that a quality program can be prepared.
• All projects that are developed in this scheme under the funding of the NME-ICT, will be the Intellectual Property of the Ministry of Human Resources and Development.
• The content developed would need to use open source software.
• The content developed under the NME-ICT can be accessed free of cost; the Mission or any other source will not put a fee for accessing the data.

The Salient Features of the Tablet

• The tablet is the cheapest in the world
• The tablet can also be used as a mobile phone as it has facility for inserting SIM card and headphones
• The device is Wi-Fi and GPRS enabled
• It can also function as a 3G if dongle is enabled
• The formats supported by the image viewer are –JPG, PNG, GIF and BMP
• The audio formats the device supports are – WMA, AAC,MP3, WAV and AC3
• The tablet supports the following video formats – MPEG2, MPE4, FLV and AVI
• Document formats supported by the system are – DOCX, DOC, PPTX,PPT,XLSX,XLS,ODP and ODT
• The web browser is of standard compliance, JavaScript 1.8 complaint, xHTML 1.1 compliant
• It also has a Text editor and a PDF viewer

Though the Aakash Tablet may not have a high speed processor or all the features required by the technical savvy, it is still a good device and an upgrade is expected soon.