Some people on the list had expressed interest in this tablet - might be interested in the followup. I tried to buy one when I was in India last fall - but they were unavailable.
davew
----- Original message -----
Date: Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:42:29 -0500
Subject: India's Cheap Tablet Does Not Compute
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February 8, 2012 |
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India's Cheap Tablet Does Not Compute |
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by Bob Charette, an IEEE Spectrum contributing editor, writes the Risk Factor blog. As a self-described "risk ecologist," he investigates the impact of the changing concept of risk on technology and societal development. |
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Does the Aakash ultralow-cost tablet computer, India’s answer to the One Laptop Per Child project, stand up to the hype? In a word, no. The 2500-rupee (US $50) Aakash-1, a basic 7-inch tablet, is slow, cheaply made, lacks Bluetooth or cellular links, and runs for only 1 hour and 20 minutes when video or other applications are running. Its poorly attached touch-screen cover frequently becomes unattached during normal use and makes simple clicking difficult. And it’s incapable of accessing Android Market for apps and media that would make updating the Aakash’s software easier to do from remote villages. The tablet’s developers have already gone back to the drawing board, and the Indian government may be setting up a multivendor competition for the contract to produce the next version instead of giving it to DataWind, the Montreal-based firm behind the Aakash-1.
Read more.
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On 3 February, hackers sat in on a teleconference during which the two law enforcement agencies and their counterparts from other countries discussed an ongoing investigation into hacking incidents. |
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Researchers from Germany and Taiwan have created a write-once-read-many-times memory device made by embedding silver nanoparticles in a biopolymer film of salmon DNA. When UV light is shone on the biopolymer, the silver atoms group into particles, on which the researchers were able to encode data. |
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Researchers in Germany and Japan have developed relatively cheap chips that could lead to scanners that see through a person’s clothing and chemically identify concealed objects from a distance. |
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