Sunday 11th November 2012 marked a great day on the technology front as the much awaited low-cost Aakash 2 Tablet got launched in New Delhi by the President of India Pranab Mukherjee.
‘Aakash 2’ comes at a subsidized price tag of only Rs. 1,130 for students. Initially the first 1 lakh ‘Aakash 2’ devices will be made available to the students of engineering colleges and universities and later on will be distributed to others.
Aakash 2 Tablet is the result of the development effort led by IIT Bombay which has been actively supported by C-DAC. The device is rolled out by Datawind. Earlier the first version of Aakash known as ‘Aakash 1’ was launched by the government in October 2011.
Aakash 2 is the advanced version of Aakash Tablet. It has been provided with many powerful features. It has a big 7 inch capacitive touch screen. Aakash 2 has a powerful 1 GHz processor and a RAM of 512 MB. It gives a pretty good screen resolution of 800 x 480 pixels and runs on Android 4.0 Ice-Cream Sandwich (ICS).
And this is not all as the low-cost ‘Aakash 2’ Tablet has a 4GB of internal memory which is further expandable up-to 32 GB with the help of a micro-SD Card. It has a Wi-Fi support and has a front facing VGA Camera too. Plus it has a battery life of 3 hours on Wi-Fi.
It has been estimated that in the next five to six years the ‘Aakash 2’ Tablet would be available to nearly 22 crore of students across the country. Further Aakash 2 is slated to be used as a classroom teaching aid. For this over 15000 teachers from 250 colleges have been trained to use Aakash 2 for education purposes.
Also, Aakash 2 commercial version will be available too. Branded as UbiSlate 7Ci, it will be available for purchase at Rs. 4499 only.
On the whole, the launch of low-cost ‘Aakash 2’ Tablet has ushered a big revolution for the students and the public in general. Aakash 2 low cost, rich and powerful features, easy usability has all the potential to make it widely popular with the Indian masses.