Earlier this week India Government revealed the proposed technical specifications of Aakash IV tablet, an low-cost tablet produced by an initiative of Ministry of Human Resource Development. With the proposal Govt specifies the minimum hardware requirements, minimum software requirements, mechanical and environmental specifications, safety and other standards compliance, maintenance and serviceability, other features, contents of tablet package and testing criteria for the fourth generation Aakash tablet.
According to the proposal the tablet will spot a 7 inch LCD display with minimum 800 x 480 resolution and with a minimum capability of five point touch, which seems to be a norm with most of the tablets under Rs 5000 price range. One of the most interesting proposal is the Dual OS boot capability, Aakash IV will be able to dual-boot Android and Linux, probably Ubuntu through an external SD card. It will run on latest Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean version mobile OS.
On the hardware side the tablet will come a minimum with 1GB of DDR3 SDRAM along with 4GB internal flash storage and up to 32GB microSD card support. On the connectivity side Aakash 4 tablet is proposed to have WiFi IEEE 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 or higher, USB on-the-go port and should support all major 2G/3G/4G Phone/Data connectivity dongles in India. In addition the tablet will also support USB to Ethernet adapters, USB Printer,USB Storage Device, Keyboard and Mouse, SD Card interface which is compatible with NFC based SD card and 3.5 mm jack. It also spots a minimum of 0.3 mega pixel front facing VGA camera.
On the powering side, the fourth generation Aakash tablet battery should allow minimum 3 hours of online 720p video playback, minimum 4 hours for offline video playback or 6 hours on e-reader support. Govt needs tablet to get charged from 10% to 80% of battery capacity within 2 hours.
While checking on most of the tablet available in the market under price range of Rs 5000, they have lower hardware specification than the proposed the fourth generation Aakash tablet. We can except Government to build a standard quality tablet with a decent hardware specification for the tech savvy students in out Indian schools and colleges.