Since, it first mentions by Kapil Sibal this tablet device has been mentioned a lot of times. Personally, I had given up hope and was left to believe that this may be yet another vaporware, however the Indian government proved me wrong as they have finally announced the highly awaited ‘$35 India Tablet’.
Even though the tablet is now official it seems to be extremely different than what we saw about a year ago. They have made some design changes, mainly due to the manufacturing problems which government had to battle. However the $35 tablet is now being manufactured by Datawind, which is a Canadian company and has a plant in Hyderabad.
The device will be known as ‘Aakash’ (Hindi/Sanskrit for Sky), which would be a Low Cost Access Device (LACD) and will be available for students for 1750 INR ($35 USD) after subsidies. Apparently the government will be planning to bring it down to as low as 490 INR ($10 USD). This sounds really interesting, but it may take quite some time and may never happen, probably they can prove me wrong once again and I would be glad.
Now, don’t expect much on the specifications part, while there are no confirmation it is rumored to be running Android 2.2 FroYo, 7-inch resistive touchscreen, Connexant processor with Graphics accelerator, 2GB flash memory, WiFi connectivity, 256 MB RAM, microSD card slot and USB port.
There will be a commercial version of the tablet called the Datawind Ubislate. No word about the battery life of the device and don’t expect it o perform well while playing games.