211 - Will Aakash 4 tablet deliver the goods? - Live Mint

Will Aakash 4 tablet deliver the goods?

Many experts are not convinced if the govt will be able to persuade buyers to purchase the tablet in large numbers

Leslie D’Monte  |  Gopal Sathe 

   

First Published: Sun, Jul 07 2013. 11 34 PM IST

70% of the tablets sold in India now retail below Rs.10,000, compared with just 10% when Aakash was commercially made available in October 2011. 

Photo: Mint

If Aakash, the low-cost computer tablet aggressively promoted by the government to bridge India’s digital device, fails to live up to its promise, it won’t be for lack of trying.

After faltering on quality issues when it was launched in July 2010, the human resource ministry has again asked for vendor comments on the proposed fourth iteration of Aakash with strengthened specifications, which is expected to cost around Rs.3,000.

But the world has moved on since then and 70% of the tablets sold in India now retail below Rs.10,000, compared with just 10% when Aakash was commercially made available in October 2011. Many experts are not convinced if the government will be able to persuade buyers to purchase the tablet in large enough numbers.

“The specifications of Aakash 4 appear good on paper, but given the past experience, can the government ensure that good components are procured at the prices specified for Aakash 4 so that users can have a good experience?” asked Jayanth Kolla, founder and partner of research firm Convergence Catalyst.

Manasi Yadav, senior market analyst, mobile phones and tablets, at IDC Centre for Consultancy and Research, held a similar view.

“The specifications for Aakash 4 look good on paper, but we still have to wait and watch as to what the pricing will be,” Yadav said. “Most of these low-end tablets suffer on the quality and specifications owing to the price barriers that come into play.”

The minimum requirement for the latest version of Aakash, according to the official specifications list, includes 1 GB DDR3 SDRAM, 4GB or more integrated flash storage, slot for micro SD card 2.0, support for USB mouse, keyboard, cards, 3.5 mm jack, a seven-inch LCD screen, wi-fi connectivity, bluetooth and camera. It, however, makes no mention about the minimum processor speed.

India’s tablet market is dominated by low-cost devices, with about 74% of the volume coming from the sub-$200 category, according to Yadav. “Most of the local brands and Chinese vendors operate in this space,” she said.

Convergence Catalyst estimates that there were 1-1.2 million tablets in the Indian market in 2012, and expects the number to touch 3-3.5 million in 2013. “Of this, 65-70% are tablets that are priced below Rs.10,000,” Kolla said.

The cheapest tablet in India right now is a heavily discounted Wishtel Ira Thing 2. Available for Rs.2,999, Thing 2 has less RAM than Aakash 4, but in most other specs, it appears identical.

However, the best option in the low-cost category is the Lava E-tab Xtron+. Costing almost Rs.7,000, it is much more expensive than Aakash or Thing 2, but the user experience is smoother, according to a Mint review of the gadgets.

In contrast, the first two versions of Aakash were poorly made, poorly assembled and cumbersome to use, testing a user’s patience. There was no Aakash 3 because the next upgrade was called UbiSlate 7C+.

The Aakash 4’s proposed specifications suggest a device that is more user friendly, and the minimum qualification of being able to play high-definition video from the web sounds good.

Compared with the first Aakash, the second iteration was fairly responsive, and much more suited to its role as a students’ companion; reading e-books and checking email were smooth experiences.

The screen though was terrible. Unless the user perfectly aligned her eyes with it, the screen was unreadable. The touch screen was patchy, missing taps or turning them into swipes erratically.

There were also significant delays in the delivery of the upgraded version of Aakash 2, called UbiSlate 7C+.

Suneet Singh Tuli, chief executive officer of UK-based DataWind Ltd, said that “over 90% of what we’ve sold is the UbiSlate 7C+, and we’ve seen less than a 0.5% fault rate on that. This is better than industry norms”.

DataWind, which manufactured the earlier versions of Aakash, plans to bid for Aakash 4 too. Tuli expects the government “to put out the tender in August, award it by September and hopefully have devices in production by October”.

The government, Tuli said, intends to divide the estimated 5.7 million units amongst five bidders.

“The intent from the original 100,000 unit tender was also to divide it across four bidders,” he said by email. “Unfortunately, none of the other bidders were able to match our price.”

Tuli expressed surprise that Aakash 4 does not require embedded mobile-phone connectivity. He acknowledged that providing mobile connectivity with external dongles was impractical and “will add at least 50% extra to the cost of the product”.

Tuli reacted sharply to criticisms that cheap Chinese components were used in the Aakash devices. “It would help to define which of Apple or Micromax’s components are not Chinese,” he said. “And it would help to identify which of our components is cheap and not lasting.”

It has not been a smooth ride for the government’s dream tablet and there’s nothing to say that the situation will improve significantly.

Such low-cost initiatives, tied as they are to education, have thus far run out of steam due to lack of adequate supporting infrastructure, including content, unlimited data plans and applications, besides a robust distribution network, analysts, manufacturers and industry experts say.

Before Aakash was unveiled in 2011, there were attempts to produce a cheap, disruptive device that would break down the technological divide and transform education, and other areas of public and private life.

The Simputer, which stood for a simple, inexpensive and multilingual people’s computer, is a case in point. The handheld low-cost computing device was introduced in 2002 by the Simputer Trust, a non-profit organization formed by seven Indian scientists and engineers. It was touted as a device that would change the low-cost computing ecosystem in the country.

By 2011, when the Aakash was made commercially available with similar lofty aims, the Simputer had faded from public memory.

Globally, low-cost computing hasn’t managed to hold to price targets. The XO from Nicholas Negroponte , founder of the One Laptop per Child project, was initially priced at around $100. The laptops, which now sell in 40 countries including India, are priced in excess of $200.

122 - THIS INNOVATION HAS LED NOWHERE - OPED

THIS INNOVATION HAS LED NOWHERE

Tuesday, 09 April 2013 | Satish Jha | in Oped

India can make a cheap tablet provided it sets up a programme to do so, creates a $250 million research and development budget, and gets on board a global team with a proven track record of creating products for the future

Aakash, India’s low cost computer for education, is back in the news again. The new Union Minister for Human Resource Development revaluating it and the former Ministers continuing to swear by it, has added a new dimension to India’s ambition to claim a turf that has eluded it for over a decade. Going by the tale of Aakash being spun during all of UPA2, there seems to be little interest in understanding the real issues around it, whether by the Union Government, academics or the media.

From Simputer to Mobilis to Saakshat to Aakash, India’s pursuit of a low-cost device has cost it dear, with little learning. India has been claiming since 2006 that it will make the  world’s lowest priced computer. The first attempt was to make a $10 laptop that led to showcasing a pen drive 125 times larger than normal 1cm x 2.5cm, and the world laughed at us into its oblivion. That was when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had promised to deliver an affordable and rugged laptop for the poor in villages for $100. As it became clear that the MIT’s laptop would cost Rs15,000 in India, going by the principle of producing it at a 10th of the cost of the MIT product, the Union Human Resource Development Ministry declared that they would produce a Rs1,500 laptop in three months.

That was in 2009. The rupee was strong then and Rs1,500 translated into $35. Deadline after deadline, announcement following announcement, it took the Ministry over a year to showcase a tablet, not a laptop, that was named Saakshat. It was on every television screen, on the front pages around the world. Yet again, several deadlines were missed, and 27 months after the initial promise, the Ministry showcased the second computer. Its specifications were diluted way beyond the promise to the extent that it had to be renamed. The new name was Aakash.

The din continued, and the parallel noise that it was a dud became so loud that the Union Human Resource Development Ministry had little choice other than to announce Aakash2. Now, it’s been another 12 months since that was announced, and India has not managed to put 1,00,000 Aakash tablets in the hands of students.

In Aakash, India’s aspirations to prove its technological prowess have hit the reality on the ground that India has neither a technological ecosystem capable of designing and manufacturing a laptop that is cheaper than what is offered by the rest of the world, nor an ability to create new technologies that can bring the cost of the product down.

The IITs are teaching institutions but they have no track record of creating cutting-edge technologies or products. So, when established IITs declined to toe the Human Resource Development Ministry line, the Ministry decided to create a new IIT with the most important purpose of producing the low-cost computers. It’s a bit like laying the foundation of the kitchen when the guests have arrived for dinner.

When the new IIT could not deliver, the Ministry managed to rope in older IITs that had wised up a bit by now and wanted to take a shot at the project. They were the same folks who had realised the limitations and could not produce even the right specifications in several years. No matter what they did, a workable computing power could not be packed into a tablet for $35.

Governments are experts in doling out subsidies. So it was decided that they could buy what worked at a higher price of $50 from China, and distribute with a subsidy at Rs1,500. The numbers looked different every time since the planning never took into account foreign exchange fluctuations. The vendor cannot offer anything because the Ministry’s specifications will not work and, in any case, will cost more. The Ministry is inflexible on price, and even China cannot produce a cheaper device for India to claim its own.

Why is it that India does not realise that it has made a laughing stock of itself among those who understand these things? It has little to do with what can be done. There are things that are possible, and there are things we can aspire for and even achieve — like putting man on the moon. Just that the man on the moon project was backed by the technological prowess, a resolve and the resources required to make it happen.

India can make a cheap tablet provided it sets up a programme to do so, creates a $250 million research & development budget, imagines and understands how education can be delivered over the next decade, gets a global team with a proven track record of creating products for the future — regardless of the team’s nationality, and learns what product creation process is all about. Perhaps then — and perhaps only then — will the next decade see the country create something that the world may find acceptable.

115 - Aakash: Cheapest tablet far from real - Live Mint

28th March 2012

Aakash: Cheapest tablet far from real

If there is any nation that deserves the credit for making the cheapest computer, in more sense than one, that is China

Satish Jha 

First Published: Thu, Mar 28 2013. 12 58 PM IST

A file photo of Union human resource development minister Kapil Sibal during the launch of Aakash. Photo: Satish Kaushik/Mint

Updated: Thu, Mar 28 2013. 01 15 PM IST

Vivek Wadhwa (Mint, 26 March) and some others have been eulogizing India’s low-cost computing project regardless of its merits.

Aakash is an example of how the government of India is not only far from equipped to make technology choices or policy, it’s refusing to even learn the lessons that stare it in the face.

The government can implement the only way it knows. It has never managed to do any project of mass significance on time with any acceptable quality or within budget and it’s unlikely to do it now in the case of Aakash.

Because there is no project there at all. It is a mirage where the government is neither designing a technology or product nor is it manufacturing the device. It has failed to even write the specs of a product that has become so commonplace that small-time vendors can think of assembling it.

Assembly follows only when there are workable specs and components that help meet the product goals. And in almost seven years of its drive to produce a low-cost computer for education, the government of India failed to create a workable specification for a price that will meet any good product criteria.

Though he has hogged all the limelight, Kapil Sibal did not originate the idea. The low-cost computer was imagined in 2006 and Sibal joined the ministry of human resource development (MHRD) in 2009.

The government did not know how to start on that journey. It imagined that the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) or even the next tier engineering institutions could create a low-cost computer in no time. Little did it realize that India had no track record of either technology or product creation. So what the government began doing was something a high school senior in the US would not be proud of submitting as a product. Even they are supposed to imagine something that extends the knowledge frontier, in howsoever small a way.

The premise of the low-cost computer named Sakshat, and we must not forget that to keep things in perspective, was that what Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) can do at a certain cost, India can do at one-tenth of that. 

And that IIT students could design such products without having to go through a learning curve. No one knew that the product-creation cycle is a serious business and takes a huge amount of investment, learning and time to perfect even for the best of global product creators such as Sony, IBM, H-P, etc.

So, rather than learning from the world how to create a product, India wanted to teach the world that it could wave a magic wand and there will be a product that America could not imagine or design and China could not manufacture. A bit like a high-school student’s claim to go beyond the knowledge of a Nobel laureate who created the discipline that was not yet taught outside of graduate schools.

So, rather than creating technologies or products, the government thought if it told the world it will buy 100,000 computers, the cost will dramatically come down and vendors will line up to produce a laptop to its specification.

Alas, no one came forward for a couple of years. Then it had no choice but to encourage those who had little experience of making any product whatsoever. In the process, a small company from overseas felt that it could procure the components from China and assemble it in India and may be the government will be willing to subsidize it to meet its targets.

There was no question of technology or product creation. The government wanted to have someone simply slap together a processor and a few applications in a plastic shell that could look like a cheap tablet.

That proved difficult for there was little experience for doing even that. In fact, any product creation cycle does take 12-18 months to get to the beta stage the first time around. That is when there is an ecosystem available. India had none of that and there was no one to help move up the learning curve.

Transforming education was a far cry and, while it may have been a by-product, was not even on the agenda other than as a talking point.

Sibal leveraged the credibility of India’s software success story to convince the world that the project was doable and unveiled the prototype of a $35 hand-held, touch-screen computer in July 2010 and the world took notice, though mostly with disbelief.

Comparing it with the iPad was a bit like comparing the Tata Nano in 1999 with the Tesla of 2012 at one-hundredth of the price.

India has been failing at developing cheap computers for a long time. Some may recall the hype around the Simputer all over the world more than a decade ago, without any product in sight. Then there was an effort to make Mobilis that got India blacklisted in Brazil. Sakshat was such a disaster that the ministry had to change the project overnight to Aakash. And Aakash 1 was such a dud that within months the government announced Aakash 2 and a dozen years of work have not managed to provide 100,000 laptops or tablets as yet.

Anyone with any sense of what a tablet for poor students must look like would know that they need something robust that works regardless, is rugged and runs applications intuitively in ways that learning becomes easier and affordable.

An ideal Aakash may do so. But that would require people with great deal of experience to come together to ask the right questions and leverage their experience to address them the right way.

Anyone who saw and tested Aakash, unless driven by a jaundiced view, simply found it wanting as a product. It was not even a good beta because the government wanted to package too much for too little without investing a rupee in research and development. The vendor was right in responding to the specs. But the specs would not work if the spec writers had no idea about how to create, rather than simply buy, a product.

That is not the way technologies are created. Ask any company that does it, even Indian companies that did it, and they will laugh at the suggestion of making products that way. I went to every major electronics manufacturing company in India and they were surprised at the foolishness of anyone who was advising ministry to drive it.

Having tested Aakash 2, I can certify that the gap between that and an iPad is what you will find between an Ambassador Mark 1 and a Honda Accord. But the Ambassador worked for India well after its original manufacturers had moved seven generations forward. When product life cycles become shorter and people have choices, that model is unlikely to work.

Aakash is an embarrassment that India did not have to go through but for want of expertise in developing public policies that may help the poor leapfrog to join the times we live in.

Sibal has made India a laughing stock and virtually every policy pronouncement made by him suggests he may be a great court room warrior but that does not translate into a reasonable public policymaker.

The reason for this failure is the same education system that such patchy approaches are supposed to fix and transform. A rote learning model is unlikely to produce people who can imagine in step with the frontline visionaries and creators of the future. It’s a bit like a school dropout claiming to be able to perform perfect brain surgery after watching a surgeon a couple of times, something I was horrified to hear from my domestic help once.

The fact is there is no Aakash project at all. There is a purchase decision for a product that does not exist and for which, let alone designing a product, the government did not manage to show specification writing expertise either. All that IIT-Bombay professors tried doing was crowdsource specifications. That underlined the gaps in India’s product-creation experience and they appeared like huge, disconnected holes.

Aakash is not a price-setter. It’s simply purchasing a Chinese product, labelling it “made in India” and selling it at a small margin. Clearly, if there is any nation that deserves the credit for making the cheapest computer, in more sense than one, that is China. All that India is trying to do is hog the limelight and mislead the world that it has the capacity to imagine, design and manufacture something that it actually bought from the rejects of the Chinese market.

Aakash did not lower the price of the tablet. It costs more than the price at which it is purchased in China. China lowered that without asking the government of India about it.

India has already leapfrogged the PC generation—just that only 5% of its people have done so while 95% remain in the pre-PC era. Sorry, more than two-thirds of India remains in the pre-Gutenberg era. The task at hand is to transform that. By losing a dozen years in running after the mirage of a cheap computer, India may have done its poor a great disservice just as it has shown that it has not yet learnt to learn from its mistakes either.

Satish Jha is chief mentor, Indian Centre for CSR, and chairman, OLPC India Foundation.

   

First Published: Thu, Mar 28 2013. 12 58 PM IST

66 - Why low-cost tablets have failed to take off in India - Live Mint

1st May 2012

Why low-cost tablets have failed to take off in India

Leslie D’Monte & Surabhi Agarwal

First Published: Tue, May 01 2012. 07 20 PM IST

Market potential: Students checking out Aakash tablets. Widespread adoption of tablets in the country’s schools and colleges could be a game changer for the devices. Photo: Hindustan Times

Updated: Tue, May 01 2012. 07 20 PM IST

Mumbai/New Delhi: Who said this? “This marks India’s leap into the future of PC technology.” Answer: Kapil Sibal? Correct. What was he talking about? Answer: The Aakash tablet, promoted by the government? Wrong. He was speaking as minister for science and technology in 2005 about the Mobilis, a Linux-based mobile computer with a 7.4-inch liquid crystal display touch screen and a roll-up keyboard that cost Rs 10,000.

Even before Aakash was unveiled in 2011, there were attempts to produce a cheap, disruptive device that would break down the divide between the digital haves and the have-nots and transform education, among other areas of public and private life in the country.

Before the Mobilis, there was the Simputer, which stood for a simple, inexpensive and multilingual people’s computer. The hand-held low-cost computing device was introduced in 2002 by the Simputer Trust, a non-profit organization formed by seven Indian scientists and engineers. It was touted as a device that would change the low-cost computing ecosystem in the country.

Manufactured by domestic firm Encore Software Ltd, only 4,000 units of a targeted 50,000 were sold and they were primarily used by the governments of Karnataka and Chhattisgarh to automate the process of land records and for online education. Encore was also the manufacturer of the Mobilis.

By 2011, both the Simputer and the Mobilis had faded from public memory, when Sibal unveiled Aakash with a pronouncement similar to the one he made six years ago. This time round, the government was putting its considerable might behind the $45 device.

The government’s model for technological acceptance is the way in which the mobile phone has been embraced across the nation of 1.2 billion people. India, where the mobile phone made its entry in 1995, has become the second fastest growing wireless market in the world, after China, with 231 million handsets expected to be sold this year. Of these, 8% (around 18.5 million) will be smartphones, according to research firm Gartner Inc. (which doesn’t give numbers for tablets sold in India).

Thanks to the runaway success of Apple’s iPad, tablets have gained currency and credibility—that was the backdrop to the introduction of Aakash. But tablets haven’t become as widely adopted in India as the high level of interest in them might imply. About 250,000 tablets were sold in the country last year, of which 70% were accounted for by iPads, Samsung devices and Research in Motion Ltd’s BlackBerry PlayBook, according to IDC Centre for Consultancy and Research.

In mature markets, tablets have eroded the sales of personal computers (PCs) and notebooks. Tablet sales this year are forecast at 118.9 million units, a 98% increase from last year, according to Gartner. Apple’s iOS is projected to account for 61.4% of these sales, followed by Google’s Android operating system that’s used in tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

A large number of cheaper tablets made in Taiwan or elsewhere and running Google Inc.’s Android system can be found in Delhi’s Palika Bazaar or online, but buyers don’t seem to be too enthused by them. Even an avowedly price-conscious market like India is particular about what is considered acceptable quality, especially in relation to the benchmark set by the iPad.

“Aakash surely created the buzz, but the market for tablets in the country is still not there. Tablets are a very nascent market in India. Yes, there is much hype and hoopla. But many vendors have realized that they have to offer value, and budget tablets can’t offer that value even for schools and colleges,” said G. Rajeev, senior market analyst (mobile devices and tablets) at IDC Centre for Consultancy and Research.

With mostly young consumers and college-going students experimenting with the device, a push from telecom service providers for better connectivity and content availability “will decide their fate”, he said.

IDC estimates tablet sales will double in 2012 to 500,000 units, but that’s still a small number compared with the figures for mobile phones.

What could be a game changer is the widespread adoption of tablets in the country’s schools and colleges.

“If the use of tablets picks up in the education sector, the market will see a sea change,” said Vishal Tripathi, principal research analyst with Gartner.

But the Aakash type of low-cost initiatives, tied as they are to education, have thus far run out of steam for lack of adequate supporting infrastructure, which includes content, unlimited data plans and applications, besides a robust distribution network, according to analysts, manufacturers and industry experts. In addition to this, the user experience with the first iteration of Aakash was disappointing, given its resistive touch screen, and the aforementioned lack of apps, content and a good data plan.

Meanwhile, there are significant delays in the delivery of the upgraded version of Aakash, the $60 device, termed as UbiSlate 7+ with optional 3G connectivity, which the manufacturer Canada’s DataWind Ltd ascribes to a spat with its former assembly partner, Hyderabad’s Quad Electronics Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

“Aakash was a really noble idea, which wanted to equip every college-going student with a computing device, but the specifications were not really supportive and the required content also was not adequate in the version launched,” said Naveen Mishra, lead telecom analyst with CyberMedia Research, a research and consulting firm.

The success of any initiative such as Aakash will depend on whether the device meets expectations, said professor S. Sadagopan, director of the International Institute of Information?Technology,?Bangalore.

“For a device like Aakash to be successful, it has to deliver a great consumer experience. Apple has raised the benchmark for tablets and Indians will not settle for anything less. They will want 3G-like speeds and unlimited bandwidth. Other than these factors, manufacturers who get into this game will also have to focus on logistics, distribution—in short, the entire computing ecosystem,” he added. That may prompt most manufacturers to steer clear.

Ajai Chowdhry, chairman of hardware and services company HCL Infosystems Ltd, had said in February that the Aakash project was “good as a concept, but manufacturers like us face the challenge of delivering a good quality product at this specified price point”.

Chowdhry said he believes that the government did create an ecosystem around Aakash. For example, there was broadband for engineering colleges, content through the Indian Institutes of Technology, “but the tablet PC it finally got, as we understand from media reports, fell short of expectations. Tablet PCs for engineering applications require much more processing power, which could not be met with the earlier specifications”, he added.

“With Aakash II (the upgraded version), we would like to see the bids first and then participate. If we can’t meet the requirements at those price points, we’d rather stay away,” Chowdhry said.

A senior executive at a large overseas company said, on condition of anonymity, that big manufacturers would hesitate to take on the project, given the “negative publicity around it. When the government first released the specifications, not many companies bid for it because the price was not feasible at all.” He likened the Aakash project to “an attempt to launch cars even before the roads are built”.

Globally, low-cost computing hasn’t managed to hold to price targets. The XO from Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop per Child project, was initially priced at around $100. The laptops, which now sell in 40 countries including India, are priced in excess of $200. Other low-cost computing initiatives include Intel Inc.’s Classmate PC priced at Rs 18,000.

Meanwhile, Tamil Nadu is taking a different course. Chief minister J. Jayalalithaa’s administration is giving away 6.8 million laptops over its five-year term to students of government-aided higher secondary schools and colleges as part of a pre-election pledge.

In Uttar Pradesh as well, where the Samajwadi Party won the assembly elections recently, the party had promised a free laptop each to all students who graduate from high school (class XII) and a free tablet computer to anyone who clears class X. According to data from the ministry of human resource development, 4.5 million students enrolled for classes X and XII in 2007-08.

leslie.d@livemint.com

First Published: Tue, May 01 2012. 07 20 PM IST