13th Jan 2012
The inefficiency of ‘economy’
The inefficiency of ‘economy’
First Published: Fri, Jan 13 2012. 08 20 PM IST
Out of touch: The Aakash tablet is let down most by a near-unusable touch screen, worsening the problems of weak hardware.
Updated: Fri, Jan 13 2012. 08 20 PM IST
India, home of the Tata Nano and the Bajaj RE60, recently added another name to the checklist of the inexpensive: the Aakash (or UbiSlate 7) tablet from DataWind, developer of wireless Web access products and services. The Aakash is, at Rs 3,500, the cheapest tablet available today, being a quarter of the price of most “economy” devices available in the market.
The Aakash was developed as an initiative of the human resource development (HRD) ministry. When HRD minister Kapil Sibal unveiled the tablet last year, he described it as breakthrough innovation, thanks to which every student in every corner of the country would have access to technology that defines the 21st century.
Out of touch: The Aakash tablet is let down most by a near-unusable touch screen, worsening the problems of weak hardware.
The shockingly cheap 7-inch tablet was something that shouldn’t have been possible at its price, and to have it developed entirely indigenously, instead of sourcing parts from Taiwan or Korea, was a point of pride.
It was a foregone conclusion that the device would not have great specs. The 256 MB RAM it comes with seems practically luxurious compared to the 366 MHz processor. Resistive screens might be hard to use but are far more practical than their expensive capacitive counterparts. So it was with suitably lowered expectations that I pledged my money towards a pre-order, knowing full well that I was likely to get a slow and unwieldy device, and that I wasn’t the target user for it.
The Aakash, however, falls short even of this. Its design and construction fail to impress. The on-screen keyboard is a painful experience, and the charger and microSD don’t fit well with the device. These lead to quite a few problems: Media playback from the storage is affected, and getting the tablet to charge is hard.
These problems, while annoying, are not disastrous. If the Aakash functioned as a reasonably reliable Web browser and e-Reader, then at its price it would be fulfilling expectations—providing students with a tool they could actually use, and get tangible benefits from. So, a viewable screen and a working Web interface would have been enough to impress. Coupled with purpose-built apps for education, which eschew heavy graphics for simple, easy-to-read information, the Aakash could have been perfect for schoolchildren.
But the Aakash doesn’t deliver. The touch screen seems possessed. The screen registers swipes only when tapped, and that too, two out of five times. For the rest of the time, the device functions as a 7-inch plastic panel you can practise percussion skills on.
New hope: OLPC’s new XO-3 is what the Aakash should have been.
New hope: OLPC’s new XO-3 is what the Aakash should have been.
Is this because of the weak processor? Or because the Android code has not been optimized to make use of the available resources? Or because the developers had severe budget restrictions and so used the cheapest screen they could find? Whatever the reason, the Aakash is not a tablet suitable for a student. The patience that visiting just the Wikipedia URL demanded made that clear.
The tablet also falls short of Google’s minimum requirements for the Android market, so users will have to manually load any applications they can find that run on it. This, of course, presupposes that the user has access to a computer to download the applications. While the Aakash is clearly not meant as an entertainment device, the lack of custom-made educational applications that can be updated and replaced with new content regularly is a missed opportunity.
Having the screen freeze routinely is a jarring experience, particularly when you’re just trying to scroll a Web page. This isn’t a case of the screen not registering your tap either—after some time it lurches back to life and zooms around the page madly, taking all inputs on board at once.
Entering a password and not seeing it on screen? Either the screen didn’t register your tap, in which case you need to press it again, or it’s trying to figure out what to do next, in which case you need to wait. Which one do you do? There’s no way of knowing.
Price is only one part of the value of a device, and the Aakash fails to deliver actual usability, particularly over the long term. You can’t use free online software because of the device’s limitations, and a battery that dies out in 5 hours makes it hard to imagine people getting much use out of the tablet.
That the Aakash has garnered 1.4 million sales (according to an announcement from DataWind) since it became available in December shows that a lot of people had high hopes of it.
But those who had pinned their hopes on the Aakash but didn’t actually buy it might be better off.
For at the Consumer Electronics Show that took place in Las Vegas, US, this week, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative unveiled its XO-3 tablet. OLPC plans to sell these tablets exclusively to governments and aid organizations, and hopes that the device will be available before the end of the year.
The XO-3 tablet prototype looks a lot more promising than the Aakash. The 8-inch tablet will come with a 1 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM and a PixelQi display that barely uses any of the system’s battery.
If it does run low on charge, then you can peel back the cover to reveal a solar panel for charging without having to rely on the power grid. The tablet can be configured with either a Linux or Android operating system and will be sold exclusively to governments and aid organizations. The price is expected to be around Rs 5,400.
gopal.s@livemint.com
