Aakash 4 Tablet will be launched in January 2014: says Kapil Sibal

The 4th version of much controversial Aakash tablet, to be named as Aakash 4 , will be available in January next year, according to Communication and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal.
Considering three previous versions of Aakash were not that successful, Sibal said, "I am battling for success of Aakash. It has been my dream to make Aakash a success story". Sibal said, "Yesterday we had meeting on the Aakash. The generation 4 Aakash is ready, all the specifications are frozen," while addressing at the Telecom Summit in New Dellhi.

Aakash is first in a series of Android-based tablet computers promoted by Government of India as part of an initiative to link 25,000 colleges and 400 universities in an e-learning program. Three versions of Aakash have so far been made but none of them have achieved much success despite the hype generated in the masses due to their low price tag.

The first Aakash tablet was launched in December 2011 but its manufacturer, Datawind, failed to meet the tablets' demand. Last November, two versions of the tablet - Aakash 2 which is also known as UbiSlate 7Ci and Aakash 3 aka UbiSlate 7C+ - were launched but did not meet much success as equally cheap tablets were launched by other manufacturers in the market to compete with it.

Actual specifications of the next version low price Aakash tablet have not been revealed till date.

• As per the standards of the earlier version of the Aakash tablet, it is supposed that the next version would be able to support 4G services, Bluetooth connectivity, USB, mouse, keyboard, calling features and 4GB internal storage capacity.
• Battery capacity should be enough for at least three hours of 720p video playback and five hours of web browsing.
• The government wants to stick with “the latest Android stable version” but said the tablet needs to be dual bootable through an external SD card to also offer the latest version of Ubuntu.
• Browser-wise it needs HTML5 support and the default language of the device will be set to English, although support for multiple Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil and Punjabi is a must.

Government sourced the previous version Aakash tablet price at Rs. 2,276, so this time around, since the tablet is supposed to come with better specs, Aakash 4 tablet is to come a bit highly prices than the earlier version.