Aakash 2 launched

Four Aakash 2 tablets were handed over to principals of engineering colleges VJTI-Mumbai,College of Engineering-Pune,KJ Somaiya College of Engineering-Mumbai and MES Pillai’s College of Engineering-New Panvel.

The project was given to IIT Bombay after it ran into rough weather with IIT Jodhpur. The mandate given to IIT Bombay was to develop a tablet that will aid and empower teachers and students of engineering colleges across India. By December 2012,one lakh tablets are expected to roll out. Besides this project with engineering students,the government plans to procure five million more tablets to make it available to school and college students.

The processor has been upgraded from 366 Mhz to 800 Mhz and battery life increased from less than two hours to three hours (on average usage). Further,the previous version had a resistive touchscreen,which works good with a stylus but is not conducive when fingers are used. Aakash 2 has a capacitive touchscreen comfortable for hand usage and easier to navigate.

“Our mandate was to procure one lakh tablets and do a thorough testing for empowering engineering colleges. My proposal for doing a pilot deployment for school teachers has also been approved. Since the project was transferred to IIT Bombay in April,we negotiated upgraded specifications. We have negotiated a lower price of Rs 2,263,down from Rs 2,276. We received the first 100 samples of Aakash 2 in May/June. Over 150 people,including faculty,students and project engineers worked on development and porting of applications and contents on the new device,” said IIT Bombay Prof and project head,D B Phatak. One lakh tablets are being funded by MHRD.

The IIT-B team has incorporated key functions through these applications and students can now use video lectures in an interactive fashion. One can give online quizzes in class and submit assignments,besides conducting experiments and developing systems for engineering control applications. “We have succeeded in making available a programming environment,enabling students to write and run programs in C,C++,and Python. The open source package ‘Scilab’ has been ported on Aakash. The effort emphasises that Aakash is not just an access device anymore,but can also be used as a regular computer for learning programming,” said Phatak. Deployment will start at colleges by August 2012 for field testing through actual users. IIT Bombay aims to carry out largescale development of applications and content for use across schools and colleges in future.