Hands On: India’s $35 Aakash Android tablet lands in America

So, 3 years ago you'd have called it revolutionary.

Technology moves so fast these days that if you don't place the bar for your product sufficiently high you won't be able to get happy customers even if you give it away.

This device is not meant for someone like you to even evaluate. It is not meant to be used by people who hang out on hacker news or for people who grew up in Delhi and who travel in a/c Delhi metro. It is for poor kids in UP/Bihar who will never have any access to such technology otherwise. You have to see the bigger picture here.

I agree with kloc - you are not the target audience for this market. The reality is that the digital divide is still so real in India. The idea is to not give [underprivileged] children a toy product for watching YouTube videos, but to give them access to a device, a technology and a revolution that they otherwise would never even have dreamed to have access to. I for one applaud the Indian Govt's efforts to "democratize" access to technology. Also remember this is just a v1 - I'm sure as things get cheaper, better, faster etc. so will this device.

> It also comes with 100 mb free data per month plan.

If that's true then it is actually the real revolution here in my mind. For non-entertainment purposes a tablet is just a window onto the internet. It doesn't really matter how you get to the internet, but the minute you can your world expands a thousand fold. Suddenly giving millions (or tens or even hundreds of millions) of underprivileged people constant, always available internet access is a huge disruption.

let those little ones play with the system, some of them will soon realize how much there is in the world outside and some of them will attempt to change the world!

its not about how fast it is or what all things are wrong in that. its about whatever is right in that - which indeed will be amazing for them.

The largest percentage of cell phone users in the world will never have used a landline and never will.

It's a big mistake thinking that every new emerging economy has to go through the same industrialization steps in the same way as the last one.

Its meant for distribution among poor kids in India's Rural areas.

And those kids don't generally have access to a computer or laptop or any other computing devices in general.

Seeing as 4.68 million new PCs for a population of largely previously off-line 1.2b people is a very small drop in the bucket, I expect it will continue to go up rapidly very quickly for many years to come as India gets richer and PCs get cheaper.

This could change your life if you can't get to a library and you can't afford a normal computer. Just being able to look up how to fix a car could restore mobility to someone who couldn't afford labor, or afford a tow to a mechanic.

That's one tiny example in a sea of little conveniences a computer affords us that we don't usually think about. And I'm not even talking about India. There are people in this situation in the US.

My first computer cost me just under a months wages (on special offer) as a recent graduate. Now we're looking at offering a computer with a similar performance to people on the official poverty line for just over a months wages ... seems like good progress.

Aside, I wonder how good these are at being repaired.

The parts are pretty standard and the government can potentially buy them by million plus they can easily line up cheap manufacturing. The OLPC was a unique and novel design with no real momentum behind it.

The main barrier to the success of this device is that since it's a government project at least 50% of the budget will be siphoned off into pork barrelling, ministerial pet projects and 'consultancy fees' to close friends and relatives of the politicians involved. Unless of course Indian politics is unlike any other variety.

OLPC beat the mass popularization of mobile by a few years. The had to start with a non-stock (and more expensive) device because there weren't many parts that did what they wanted to do.

This tablet is probably what OLPC would look like if it started today.

I would guess this won't be easy in rural India.

It would be awesome if they load it up with lots of free ebooks and a decent offline copy of wikipedia (wikidroyd) from the start.

The subsidized cost is $35, which makes it affordable to pretty much everyone who can afford a mobile phone. Obviously, this is not going to fix India's education problems. I'll go a step further and say that nothing anybody can do will fix all the educational problems in my country within, say, the next 15 years. Having said that, this seems a step in a right direction.

Students will get this device for $35.

It is not just about courses in youtube. Quite a few courses are already available in the educational network in India. At present, only a small section of the students have access to these; that too, only at school. The main objective of the government is to provide means to access these courses.

Defintely the tablet by itself means nothing. it needs content. And it can be said that even 20 years ago the indian government could have put a tv + VCR + great recorded content in every classroom for what is relatively a small sum. Just doing this would have improved the current Indian system by leaps and bounds.

But maybe the thing about the tablet is that once people have the tablet, the government isn't the only one who can improve education. Private entrepreneurs, non-profits and juts plain teachers could build great content, market it, etc.

Considering the awfull state of indian education and(my guess) that indian educators are much less entrenched than westren ones(i.e. powerfull unions), affordable private education could really hit big in india, and a tablet at every hand could really be the needed channel for it.

This is nitpicking, but no middle-class family can afford to spend 2k on a night out in India. Hell, I was earning a boatload (relatively of course) of money, and I wasn't comfortable spending more than 1k or so on a night out.

wait!! you are saying a family night out in India would cost more than 1700 INR? Unless you are going to a five star restaurant, I am pretty sure this is not the case.

This would be awesome if they don't allow the cost to increase, down the road.