$35 Android Tablet

[trelawrence]

On the wire today: $35 tablet computer, dubbed the Aakash, unveiled in India - CSMonitor.com

Earlier this year, Amazon unveiled the $199 Kindle Fire tablet, which undercuts even the cheapest Apple iPad by a cool three-hundred bucks. Today, the government of India unveiled $35 tablet computer, the Aakash, which undercuts the Kindle Fire by $165, and the cheapest Apple iPad by $365.

Take that, Apple!

At a press event in New Delhi, Kapil Sibal, India’s minister for human resources development, dished out 500 Aakash tablets to a group of students, and invited them to test out the device. Considering the price tag, the Aakash is a pretty full-featured machine: According to the New York Times, it ships with a 7-inch touch screen, Android 2.2 OS, a pair of USB ports, and 256 megabytes of RAM.

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The Indian government will make a pilot run of 100,000 Aakash tablets available to students, Reuters reports.

Speaking to the BBC, Suneet Singh Tuli, the CEO of Data Wind, which manufactures the tablet, said he hoped the Aakash would provide an alternative to luxury devices such as the iPad.

"Our goal was to break the price barrier for computing and internet access," Tuli said. "We've created a product that will finally bring affordable computing and internet access to the masses." (Data Wind will also make a $60 commercial tablet called the UbiSlate.)

Of course, as the Atlantic's Adam Clark-Estes notes, "the Aakash is just the latest attempt to speed the process of development through internet access. The One Laptop Per Child program has been turning donations from the first-world into computers for the third-world since 2005."

In May of last year, that program, which was responsible for the XO laptop, announced plans to manufacture a line of tablet computers, not unlike the Aakash.

[Paladinleeds]

hope it hits the UK soon

[trelawrence]

I suspect it will find a way out of India soon.

[taajir]

would be nice if they make a solid 99 bucks tablet

[Xopher]

I was thinking this device had a resistive touchscreen, so it doesn't respond as well as a capacitive screen, and there wouldn't be any multi-touch, so no pinch-to-zoom functions and such.

With only 256MB RAM, it will be interesting to see how it would keep up with tablets with 512MB and the new devices having 1GB RAM. Performance can easily be affected by RAM.