As far as memory serves, the tagline mentioned above was (and
is) used when ‘The Aakash Tablet was first talked about. Not being a
gadget-goer at all, this post coming from me is rather surprising. But what
really compelled me to write about this issue was a recent article I read some
place – ‘what really went wrong with the Aakash?’
For those who would like a mention of its features - The
Aakash is a low-cost computer with a 7-inch touch screen and 256 MB RAM running
under the Android 2.2 operating system. It was in 2011, that India's IT
minister Sh. Kapil Sibal announced the launch of the Aakash tablet for Rs 2,500
with much fanfare. It is part of the ‘One Laptop per Child’ idea. That moment, I
recall my brother telling me with much excitement, ‘And I shall book this digital
leveler ASAP’. (Well, he is a computer engineer after all!). And so, he became
one of those 1.4 million users who registered for the gadget. (:O)
But I guess, that was the ONLY happy part. A series of
blunders followed. First, there was an IIT-Rajasthan versus DataWind quarrel over
specification issues, making headlines. According to a statement by Datawind's
CEO, Suneet Singh Tuli, the company supplied 10,000 tablets to IIT-Rajasthan
which were part of an initial order of 1,00,000 tablets that Datawind was
supposed to supply to the government at a price of $49.98 per unit. But after only
a few hundred tablets reached the students, IIT-Rajasthan started rejecting the
Aakash tablet, allegedly after reports that the device was failing during pilot
testing and did not meet the quality criteria set by the institute. IIT-Rajasthan
was then removed from the Aakash project, and IIT-Bombay was then chosen.
The process became murkier when DataWind entered into a
war-of-words with its ex-assembly vendor, Quad Electronics. While the ‘registered’
customers awaited the delivery of Aakash, the Hyderabad-based assembler of the
tablet, Quad Electronics, sued DataWind alleging that the British Indian firm
failed to procure its contracted inventory or pay for the tablets. DataWind
retorted saying it won't procure any more tablets from Quad and would settle
the issue legally.
And to top it all, the prototype turned out to be a
disaster. Some phones in the market worked faster than this contraption. The
battery wouldn’t last two hours if a user tried to play video files on it. The
touch screen, apparently, wasn’t ‘touchy’ enough. Similar computing devices
with superior capabilities have been brought out of Chinese factories but India
seems to have lost the plot; what could have been an incredibly compelling
story is now nothing but a stillborn.
What I’m trying to put across through this post is that almost
three years ago, when we first heard of an ultra low-cost tablet to be launched
by the Indian government, then known as ‘the $35 tablet’, India made it to the
headlines across the world. ‘Steve Jobs innovates for the rich; this is for us’,
one of my friends had remarked. So what went wrong – Is it all the quarrels? Is
it the MHRD, which claimed to come up with an effective program in too short a period?
Or is it the failure of the initial prototype? Well, it is ALL of these.
And now the news shows the launch of an upgraded version of
the tablet. The Aakash II is reported to have improved hardware with Google’s
Android 4.0 OS, 256MB of RAM and 2GB flash storage. And it shall hit the market
around December this year. So, lets just wait-n-watch on this one before
commenting any further.
No comments:
Post a Comment