Aakash 4: 7 inch Android Tablet Coming Soon Under Rs 1,200

Recently, the Indian government has put across a few points regarding the upgradation of the Aakash tablets which is solely targeted towards catering the needs of the Indian students. Initiated by Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, Aakash tablet was developed as part of the country's aim to link 25,000 colleges and 400 universities in an e-learning program. Thus, the cost of the basic version for a student was set to only Rs.1500.

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After officially launching the first Aakash tablet in New Delhi on 5 October 2011, the Ministry in April 2012 upgraded it soon by coming up with a second-generation model called Aakash 2. Now it seems the government is very much interested to bring the new version of Aakash named as Aakash 4.

Hence, Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) have posted the desired specs of the Aakash 4 on deity.gov.in for those who are involved in the production of the slab. Although, U.K. manufacturer Datawind had built the first two Aakash tablets, Indian Government this time has not decided to handover the contract to produce the newest version of the slate to them. Thus, the ministry must have been looking for a company who would be interested in the mass production of the Aakash 4 tablet.

The original generation Aakash had a poor resistive touchscreen but the second one had relatively received a better reviews due to the capacitive display incorporated in it. However, according to the posted PDF proposal, this time, the Indian government wants the Aakash 4 tablet to have a 7 inch display. They have also stated the desired dimension of the tablet to be thinner than three-quarters of an inch and not more than 500g. Aakash 4 should come with 1GB of DDR3 SDRAM, along with at least 4GB of native storage. Furthermore, the tablet should feature a microSD slot that should accept 32GB cards and the battery should be capable of giving more than 5 hours of web browsing and 3 hours of video playbook in 720p resolution. Not only that the proposal also states saying that the device should accept the latest "stable" version of Android. It should be dual bootable and loaded with the latest version of Ubuntu. The browser needs to support HTML5.

Lastly, according to the requirements, the tablet's default language must be English although it also must support certain Indian languages such as Hindi, Tamil and Punjabi. The 7 inch tablet will be sold at an astonishing price of less than Rs. 1,200.

However, the tablet priced so low is very much likely to have low specs and not only that, the question is, will the students buy Aakash 4 or think about taking a walk for a while in a lavish tablet market before buying it?