Saturday, October 22, 2011

Indian Aakash Tablet PC vs OLPC


Early this month India launched touch-screen tablet PC, which is known as “Aakash”. That is priced at just $35 compared to its counterpart OLPC which was originally priced at $100 and then increased to $180 - $200 later. The Aakash has been developed by UK-based company DataWind and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT - Rajasthan).
Mr. Kapil Sibal, the minister of the Indian Human Resource Development Ministry hopes Aakash will give digital access to students in small towns and villages and end the digital divide in India.


But it is too early to say how the Aakash will be received as most cheap tablets in the past have turned out to be either poor performers or expensive eventually (what happened to OLPC). Any laptop should meet the demand of its target audience. Following table shows the comparison of Aakash and OLPC;



Consideration
Aakash Tablet PC
OLPC
Technical
Display
7” colour LCD/TFT
7.5” Dual-mode TFT
RAM
2GB
1 GB DDR2 SDRAM
Hard Drive
32GB
Internal 4GB microSD card
Connectivity
Wi-Fi,
USB 2.0 (2),
Ethernet port
Wireless networking interface
Operating System
Android
OS build on modified Fedora Linux kernel
Processor
Unknown
1 GHz
Other
Target Audience
Students of 504 Universities and 25,000 Colleges in India
Primary level kids (5 - 15 years) around the world
Unite Price
$35
$180


One which has balanced the price and the features to fulfill the needs and wants of its target audience would be the most successful and sustainable laptop in the world.

-Sameera