We covered the arrival of the $45 Aakash tablet computer a while ago and were pleasantly surprised at the ingenuity and desire of UK based Datawind to bring computing to the masses in rural India as well as in more populated areas.

Two weeks in and talk of new factories being needed:

Amazingly at only two weeks into selling the tablet online, Datawind have said that demand for the tablet is in the region of 100,000 per day, and they have a pre-order totalling some 400,000, to keep up with demand they are looking to create three new factories, and will also be looking to release a new model in mid January. This will be a slightly more powerful 700Mhz processor and will have a SIM card slot and the ability to access GPRS and 2G connections.

Aakash Ubislate 7:

The new tablet will be named the Aakash Ubislate 7 and cost around 3000 Rupee compared to the Aakash’s price tag of 2500 Rupee, and the new device is quite simply a natural progression in terms of specification on offer from the company who are there to help the Indian population move forward in the mobile technology sector that is so prevalent in many other countries.

And with India being only second to China in terms of population, each person may not have the largest amount of disposable income but the market is so huge that this reduced level of value per person still offers rich gains for those who can go in at a lower price and offer the same kind of services that more developed countries come to expect.

Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO of Datawind, says:

“We never expected such a high response from both corporate and individual buyers. We plan to supply 70,000-75,000 units per day once the factories are in place by April,”

Emergency on day one of selling online:

Indeed the demand for India’s cut price tablet is that huge that on the first day of selling the tablet online they were informed by India’s computer emergency response team that the site was probably under a cyber attack, such was the high traffic shitting the site due to the demand for the new tablet.

With the iPad costing around 30,000 rupees it is easy to see why many people in India can not afford this high end model, and Datawind have obviously found a decent price level that will satisfy a large proportion of the people in the rural and city areas.

Who owns this tablet and can you please tell us your thoughts if you do, we would love to hear about it from the source so to speak.

We all know that the new Motorola Razr is already on sale in the US and UK but is it soon to appear on the Indian market?

The much awaited smartphone, the Droid RAZR (XT910) should be hitting Indian phone store shelves in the next few days, the Razr XT910 is the thinnest of the smartphones that are currently available, and has some particularly powerful features.

Hardware Specifications:

Processor: 1.2 GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU
Rear Camera/Front Camera: 8 MP, 3264×2448 pixels, autofocus, LED flash/1.3 MP
Display: Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors, 540 x 960 pixels, 4.3 inches
Memory: 16 GB storage expandable up to 32GB, 1GB RAM
OS: Android OS, v2.3.5 (Gingerbread)
Other features: Gorilla Glass display, Multi-touch input method, Accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate, Proximity sensor for auto turn-off
Connectivity: GPRS, EDGE, 3G, WLAN, Bluetooth 4.0 compliant

Motorola playing catch up?

With a lovely bright 4.3 inch Super AMOLED screen with 540x960px resolution the device is a really rather sweet looking, in a rugged manly way.

Better battery life

It is reported that the RAZR will deliver 9 hours and 20 minutes of talktime, which beats most of its class.

Totally waterproof:

Now watch some guys pour water on it and panic when it goes a bit mad:

Yes the phone looks pretty cool, yes it is thin, but does it stand up to a Samsung S2, or iPhone 4S?

Let us know your thoughts if you have bought one in the US, UK or Europe, we would love to hear your views.

With a drive to help people still living in rural areas in India, the government with the aid of an Indian manufacturing team called Datawind, have developed a cut price tablet that should be available to people in rural areas at a subsidised 100,000 Rupees or $45 each.

India starting to become kings of cut price:

With such a huge population to tap into and a growing knowledge base to utilise, India are the less discussed China in many ways.

What India do perhaps slightly differently though is to try to improve on a commercial basis the lives for its many inhabitants by way of low cost goods such as cars (the Nano), water purifiers and other services that the west take for granted, and usually pay high prices for.

India is making a real effort to try to improve the quality of its own inhabitants with domestic products such as these tablet computers.

Aakash Tablet:

The tablet will be named Aakash or “Sky” in Hindi, the developer behind the product is called Datawind who sell to the Indian government for $45 and then the tablet gets subsidised for students and teachers to around $35.

Datawind claim to be able to produce around 100,000 tablets per month currently which will not be enough to meet current demand or of India’s dream of providing its 220 million children with access to the internet.

Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal said this about the achievements.

“This is not just for us. This is for all of you who are dis-empowered,” he said. “This is for all those who live on the fringes of society.”

India still faces huge education issues

With the amount of people achieving basic literacy improving from around 12% under British rule to around 78% in current times, the fact remains that India still has a largely uneducated workforce and population as a whole.

This landmark technological breakthrough and empowerment aims to get one step closer to two main goals for the Indian government.

1 – Focusing on higher education with a goal of 30 percent enrolment by the year 2020.

2 – To ensure that as many children gain access sot the Internet as soon as possible.

3 – To start a tablet price war for the benefit of consumers worldwide.

Ministry official N.K. Sinha said.

“People laughed, people called us lunatics, they said we are taking the nation for a ride.”

With a $10 target not reached the Aakash still provides features such as word processing, video conferencing and Web browsing. 7-inch touch screen, Wi-fi, 3G, with 2 USB ports and 256 megabytes of RAM. Unsurprisingly the tablet is not solar powered as many would have hoped, considering India’s power issues in rural areas and beyond, but for India in 2011 this is a start and a pretty big one.

Datawind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli said of the $10 target,

“let’s dream and go in that direction. Let’s start with that target and see what happens,” he said.

Current limitations:

The tablet is nigh in useless for teaching most children currently with pre designed lectures, IIT Guwahati director Gautam Barua told The Indian Telegraph.

“There is hardly any e-content for school students. The biggest challenge will be to develop e-content for school students in vernacular. Once we develop such courses, the device can be utilised properly,”

Though I see potential in simply getting Indian children online as this is how many young people globally now learn, and what they learn is down to what they can get their hands on and what interests them….

Cyber Threat Imminent?

Shashank Kumar, 21, a computer engineering student from Jodhpur, Bihar, said,

“A person learns quite fast when they have a computer at home, in just a few years people can even become hackers.”

It appears that the world is slowly but surely getting connected to the WWW….We Wonder What lies ahead!