Saturday 23 March 2013

New Aakash tablet may not be available at discounted price


Most of the versions of Aakash tablets were slammed for poor quality as well as for unavailability.

The Union government, which is providing subsidized Aakash tablets as of now, may dump the whole project all together if a report of Indian Express is to be believed.

The newspaper has quoted the Human Resource Minister, Pallam Raju as saying that instead of "an obsession with hardware", the focus should be on enabling students with educational content - also allowing them to choose the device they want.

The minister further added, "Aakash is only a tablet... there are other such devices as well. While work will continue to develop it and increase its productivity, manufacturing is obviously a problem."

This clearly indicates that the government is looking forward to clearly withdraw itself from involving itself in making of a tablet for students.

The first Aakash tablet was announced in the late 2011 but it got embroiled in controversies like poor quality and lack of availability ever since. Datawind, which was in charge of manufacturing the tablet, had later introduced the second generation of Aakash tablet, called Aakash 2, which too failed to create a mark for itself in the market.

Though the government wanted to distribute the various version of Aakash tablet to students for a subsidized price of around Rs 1200, it had failed to do so for lack of supply.
Today, there are a number of manufacturers in the market who are also supplying tablets for as low as Rs 3,000, which has further diminished the value of the Aakash tablet.

Datawind is now even thinking to bring the third version of the tablet, called Aakash 3.

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