“Last month, Kalra’s team — led by two I.I.T. Rajasthan electrical engineering professors, one of whom comes from a village that still has no electricity — unveiled the Aakash tablet. Aakash is Hindi for sky. It’s based on the Android 2.2 operating system, with a 7-inch touch screen, three hours of battery life and the ability to download YouTube videos, PDFs and educational software like Virtual Labs. The government will subsidize the wireless connections for students.
If Indians could only purchase tablets made in the West, the price points would be so high they’d never spread here, said Kalra, so “we had to break the price point” in a big way. They did it by taking full advantage of today’s hyperconnected world: pulling commodity parts mainly from China and South Korea, using open-source software and collaboration tools and employing the design/manufacturing/assembly abilities of two companies in the West — DataWind and Conexant Systems — and Quad in India.
The Aakash is a ray of hope that India can leverage technology to get more of its 220 million students enough tools to escape poverty and poor teaching, but it’s also a challenge to the West.”
- The Last Person - NYTimes.com
If Indians could only purchase tablets made in the West, the price points would be so high they’d never spread here, said Kalra, so “we had to break the price point” in a big way. They did it by taking full advantage of today’s hyperconnected world: pulling commodity parts mainly from China and South Korea, using open-source software and collaboration tools and employing the design/manufacturing/assembly abilities of two companies in the West — DataWind and Conexant Systems — and Quad in India.
The Aakash is a ray of hope that India can leverage technology to get more of its 220 million students enough tools to escape poverty and poor teaching, but it’s also a challenge to the West.”
- The Last Person - NYTimes.com