The Aakash 2 (also sold as the Ubislate 7Ci) is an Android-based

tablet computer A tablet computer, commonly shortened to tablet, is a mobile device, typically with a mobile operating system and touchscreen display processing circuitry, and a rechargeable battery in a single, thin and flat package. Tablets, being comput ...

produced by British company

DataWind Jeotex, Inc., known as Datawind, Inc until 2019 . and founded in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, is a developer and manufacturer of low-cost tablet computers and smartphones. Datawind manufactures low cost tablets and sells these primarily in India, N ...

. In an announcement in March 2012, the Telecom Minister, Mr. Kapil Sibal, who was also in charge of Ministry of Human Resources and Development had announced that DoT (Department of Telecom) had cleared the proposal to distribute 50 lakh (5 million) units of tablet PCs to students. It is the follow up to the

Aakash Akasha or Akash (Sanskrit ' ) means space or sky or æther in traditional Indian cosmology, depending on the religion. The term has also been adopted in Western occultism and spiritualism in the late 19th century. In many modern Indo-Aryan l ...

tablet. The Minister had also announced that C-DA

and IIT-Mumbai would together be responsible for the specification, quality, and testing of Aakash 2. An updated version was launched on November 11, 2012. Retail(start) price of Datawind UbiSlate 7Ci as of the end of 2013, is about 30 GBP in UK(

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

), about 150 PLN.

Subsidised by the Indian government

It was made available to students in India at roughly a quarter of its full price, in a scheme subsidized by the Indian government. Many school textbooks were made available accessible in PDF form from the respective education board websites. Android applications are sold via the rupee-priced

Google Play Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store and formerly the Android Market, is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certified devices running on the Android (operating sys ...

app store.

Hardware

The hardware is fixed, and the product has been described as a stable and usable commercial product. The 7” screen is capacitive

multi-touch In computing, multi-touch is technology that enables a surface (a touchpad or touchscreen) to recognize the presence of more than one somatosensory system, point of contact with the surface at the same time. The origins of multitouch began at CER ...

(800x480), with pinch and zoom support. The tablet's boot-up time is 46 seconds. Battery life is up to 3 hours on the 3000 mAh battery.

Ubislate 7C+

Ubislate 7C+ (also regarded as Aakash 3) was released in November 2012 with SIM functionality, providing

GPRS General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a packet oriented mobile data standard on the 2G and 3G cellular communication network's global system for mobile communications (GSM). GPRS was established by European Telecommunications Standards Insti ...

and

EDGE Edge or EDGE may refer to: Technology Computing * Edge computing, a network load-balancing system * Edge device, an entry point to a computer network * Adobe Edge, a graphical development application * Microsoft Edge, a web browser developed by ...

service, along with

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wave ...

. It runs on Android OS 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich and has a front-facing VGA Camera. It has a 512 MB RAM and ARM Cortex A8 processor, clocked at 1.5 GHz.

Made in China controversies

Newspapers have accused DataWind of reselling a product which was designed and manufactured in China, purchased off-the-shelf and then sold in India. DataWind in its response to the accusation, said that they sourced the kits from China and assembled and programmed them in India at its facilities in Amritsar, Punjab, and Delhi, and then supplied the same to the Indian Government HRD. Chinese manufacturers have said that they sold "ready-to-use" tablets to Datawind.

References

External links

* {{Android tablets Tablet computers Touchscreen portable media players Tablet computers introduced in 2012 Android (operating system) devices