Aakash 2 Tablet Launched. Price Rs. 1,132 Only (Students Only)!

Finally, Aakash 2 tablet has been launched in India at an incredibly cheap price of Rs. 1132 only. It's Diwali season in India and a perfect time for the electronics companies to launch new electronic gadgets. Government of India obviously did not want to miss out on this chance to attract students. The commercial (regular) price of this tablet will be Rs. 4499. The price is subsidised for students and will be offered for only Rs. 1132 (~ $20.72). This ultra low cost Android tablet is based on DataWind's UbiSlate 7Ci. There's not much to expect inside the hood apart from a nice ARM Cortex A8 architecture based 1 GHz processor (original Aakash tablet had only 366MHz processor),  a 7" capacitive display (original model had resistive display) that offers 800×480 px resolution. Aakash 2 also comes equipped with 512MB or RAM and approximately 4 GB of internal storage; you will be able to extend the storage capacity with the micro SD card.



On the software part, we see a major improvement. The original Aakash tablet relied on Android 2.2 (Froyo) but the Aakash 2 tablet adopts the latest (well, not so latest) Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. There's a VGA front facing camera along with Wi-Fi connectivity. We're trying to hunt down the exact specs but at present DataWind's website is down.  We'll of course keep you updated as soon as we get the details.

Aakash has been through lots of ups and downs in the recent times. The tablet remained in the tech news over the quality issues and the fairly public disagreement between IIT Rajasthan and DataWind over the quality specifications of the tablet. Lenovo had recently said that for the price Government Of India wanted to offer the tablet; it was almost impossible to offer the tablet without letting the user experience suffer. The latest Aakash tablet seems to have addressed major pain points by upgrading the display and the firmware. We won't pass on our official judgement and opinion on this tablet without getting our hands on the device.

Aakash 2 was launched today by India's newly appointed President, Mr. Pranab Mukherjee at Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi. The tablet ships with Amrita University’s e-Learning platform A-VIEW – Amrita Virtual Interactive E-Learning World software preloaded. If you're looking to order the tablet online, wait for DataWind's website to go live again. Looks like they're experience a major downtime at the moment.

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