What a day for the emerging new India. The prestigious Indian government project to take the digital technology to poor, Aakash Tablet, received an overwhelming response on the very first day of its online booking. We saw many moments where the website http://www.akashtablet.com becoming unavailable due to heavy traffic. The device is now available for purchase online for everyone including students if you are willing to fork out Rs. 2,500. One of my friends joked that this is even cheaper than some medical tablets.
The Canadian company DataWind, who manufactured the Akash tablet, said that the online booking is available for students version and the pre-booking is for UbiSlate 7, the upgraded version for all.
The commercial version of Akash Tablet, UbiSlate 7 is priced at Rs 2,999.
This will have Android 2.3 and will have a resistive touchscreen and Cortex A8-700 MHz processor and. It is also powered with graphics accelerator HD video processor, 256 MB of RAM and 2 GB of internal memory. However, payment mode for both versions is cash on delivery.
What change this can bring to the young and emerging India? Am trying to find this out.
Students
For students, this will be like dreams come true. This will be their first step towards the modern age. Now people may think of the options of gifting an Akash tablet to students. As we know the young generation will explore any device more than any adult counterpart. So once they get the feal of computing power, internet, social media and all, they will definitely continue to use it in one way or other.
Businesses
For businesses other than the manufacturer DataWind the results will come in a long time. As the today's young generation gets a feel of internet and computer, tomorrows businesses are going to cash all these in. Tremendous internal demand will come for e-commerce, hardware, software, local information etc.
Software developers
Software developers or company's inside the Android app development space can concentrate on writing good apps suitable for these tablets. Even though the subscription for paid apps is low, the volume of revenue from advertisements should be big.
Only time can tell the real impact of Akash in the emerging new India. Let's wait and see.